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A man of our time: Ananda Coomaraswamy, the west

and Indian nationalismPartha Mitter

a

a University of Sussex ,

Published online: 27 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Partha Mitter (1984) A man of our time: Ananda Coomaraswamy, the west and Indian nationalism, Asian

Studies Association of Australia. Review, 7:3, 48-51, DOI: 10.1080/03147538408712303

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03147538408712303

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3 For example, M.C. Beach, Rajput Painting at Bundi and Kota,  Ascona,

1974;

  also, The Context of Rajput Paintin g', Ars Orientalis,

10(19 75 ,11-75.

4 Cf. B.N. Goswamy , Of Patronage and Pahari Paintin g', in Aspects of

Indian Art,  ed. P. Pal , Leiden, 1972.

5 Cf. R. Skelton, Rajasthani Temple-Hangings of the Krishna Cult,

New York, 1973.

A MAN OF OUR TIME: ANANDA CO OMARASWAMY,

THE WES T AND INDIAN NATIONALISM

Partha Mitter

University of Sussex

Many myths and misunderstandings surround the life and work of

Ananda Coomaraswamy and Roger Idpsey has pla ced us all in h is debt with

a meticulous edition of his collected work s, the series being completed

with a well-do cumente d biography of the savant, which will go a long

way towards dispelling some of the past errors . To take a small example,

he was not 'a half-B rahmin fascist' as one art historian casually dubbed

him some years ag o, but came from the respectable Mudaliyar cas te,

according to Lipsey, and was not a Brahmin . Misunderstandi ngs abou t

Coomaraswamy wer e due as much to his denigrators as his hagiogra phers,

for 'he was loved and detested; he was doubtless lovable and detestable.

He conquered by sch olarship , elegance and a completely uncompromising

set of values, but where h e failed to conquer he made enemies' (p.

 xiii).

The biography was undertaken with the object of answering 'those who

revere Coomaraswamy's wr itings and the example of his life [who] should

find much that obliges a review of their opinions, although by no means

a reverse; those who have never taken a whole view of Coomaraswamy will

[now] find it pos sibl e' (p. xiii) to do so . Lipsey' s port rait, by

plugging the gaps in our knowled ge, affords us a fuller underst anding

of both his personal ity and temperament and the complex motives behind a

nu mb er of his acts and accomplishments.

Coomaraswamy is best remembered for his dazzling defense o f

Indian art in an age when Wes tern art historians ha d, in a Social

Darwinist vein, assigned it a low rung in the ladder of artistic progress

The way was shown by E.B. Havell , art teacher and pioneer historian of

Indian art, in his spirited rejection of Eurocentric standards to judge

Indian architecture and sculpture, appealing to open-minded Westerners

to seek an understanding o f the artistic intention behind these works .

His plea not only found favour with leading anti-classical aestheticians

such as Walter Crane or C.R. Ashbee but provided cultural ammuniti on

to Western-e ducated Indian nationalis ts. While possessin g right sens i-

bility, Havell lacked the intellectual rigour to silence Birdwood and

other critics who had made fashionable the sentiment that India was only

capable of the finest quality art manufa ctures . The domain of high art

belonged , in their view, to European classical a rt, but more s pecifically

to Victorian history painting. With a bravu ra display of erudition

Coomaraswamy reversed this implicit faith in the superiority of illusioni

art.

  The naturalist ic argument was countered with a typically Platonic

answer that if art was concerned with r epresentati on, as all art must

represent  something,  it did not represent the visual world but an ideal

one beyond, or in the inner recesses of the soul.  Havell's discovery of

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of the 'spiritual

1

  character of Indian art was taken a step further by

Coomaras wamy, who made the connection between Medieval European and

Indian art, both traditional, but unlike Renaissance and post-Renaissance

art, which were wedded to progr ess. Coomaraswamy's insight enabled him

to reject the role of taste and connoisseurship as products of the

Renaissance which had perverted traditio nal art. The result of this was

twofold: Coomara swamy underlined the 'spiritual' character of Indian

art,

  as all sacred art must be. At the same time he undermined the

importance of judgement in matters of art. Coomaraswamy's contention

that we cannot ever hope to understand the quality of Hindu sculpture

until an d unless we took account of the 'inner spirit' of the arti st

that had produced it, necessarily dissolved the whole problem of style

into metaphysical generalisations . Nowhere are we told how to decide

if the artist had succeeded in transferring his inner vision into stone.

One suspects his confidence in this stemmed less from a close reading

of Sanskrit texts than from his affiliation with moder n Western attacks

on academic art, supported by the Platonic Idea. Two typical cases

were the artists , Kandinsky and Mondr ian, who had explained their

abstract paintings as representing the Platonic world beyond appearances.

In 1910 Coomaraswamy sta ted that his commitment was to

' expre ss in English how Indian ar t and cult ure appear to the Indian

mind' (p. 73 ) . If this was his intention, then he was surely misled.

Ancie nt Indian art had already been lost for generations, when European

archa eolog ists in the 19th century emb arked on its 'recovery'. Whil st

archaeological documentation was virtually complete at the turn of the

century, the actual meaning of these sacred art objects eluded both

European s and modern India ns, because very few literary sources had been

read that could illuminate them. When Coomaraswamy appeared he rightly

stressed the need to reconstruct the history of Indian art from within

Indian culture. But the actual application of this sensible precept

proved difficult and the extent of his success remains problematic. My

own position, as elaborated in my work, Much Maligned Monsters: History

of European Reactions to Indian Art,  ch. VI, is that of an 'unbeliever'.

Whilst acknowledging his importance in establishing the claims of Indian

art as a great tradition, I feel that his particular metaphysical

approach has stood in the way of appreciating the intensely human art

of ancient India. Having shown brilliant intuition in arguing the links

between art and religion in both Indian and Medieval European art , he

failed to follow up hi s apercus with ha rd concrete studies of the guild

system, for instance, or the education of the craftsman. His one

brilliant piece of detective work related to a late period of Indian

art,

 namely, his separation of Rajput painting from The Mughal, compar-

able to Friedlander's discovery of Mannerism. The disappointly meagre

engagem ent with actual art objects is revealed in an amusing anecdote

(p.

  28 4 ) . When Tomita, the keeper of the Asiatic department in Boston

Museum, complained mildly to Coomaraswamy a bout the neglect of the Indian

collecti on, the art historian's hurried mumble was , 'Perhaps one of these

days I oug ht to take a run down and have a look at the old pl ac e

1

  (p.

284)

Perhaps we are doing him an injustice, for he was more than an

art historian; h e was 'known to some as a Sanskrit and Pali scholar;

to others as an art histor ian, mythographe r, folklorist or social critic;

to still others as a metaphysician and expositor of the complexities of

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Indian thought' (p. xiii).  Variously, sage, seer, prophet and martyr ,

this last of the romantic polyma ths in the Hegelian tradition, the  uomo

universale,  graduated from being a practisi ng geologist to national ist

art historian to philosopher in his last

 days,

  offering in the process

a brillia nt synoptic view of the sacred culture of ancient India. Art

served as a 'station' in his spiritual journey, for in the eternal

scheme of things it had a central moral purpo se. Here Lipsey's close

reading of the master comes to our aid. Posing the quest ion, 'What

connexion is there between Coomaraswamy's search for eternal verities

 philosophia perennis)  and the specific art historical con cern with

style and morphology of

 art?',

 Lipsey answers with a story. On bein g

asked by Meyer Schapiro if he had read Dvorak's  Kunstgeschichte als

Geistesgeschichte, Coomarasw amy repl ied that art history was the history

of the spirit. This concern increased with ag e, and as Lipsey so

eloquently ar gues , his late metaphysi cal writings are of 'great and very

general significance' (p. x v) . This is why he increasingly sought out

the company of a Catholic thinker like Jacques Maritain or the Frenchman,

Rene Guenon. The image of Indian art he thus held up was more a mirror

to his own soul than to a tradition existing in India.

Of the events charted by Lipsey as stages in the fulfilment of

Coomaraswamy as an individual, one particular aspect has not received

the general attention it d eserv es, namely , Coomaraswamy as a nation alist ,

during a period covering the years 1905- 1917 , this being the obverse of

his opposition to modern Weste rn society. Lipsey has for his purpo ses

of biography concentrated on his nationalist activities in isolation,

laying stress on their importan ce to the Ceylone se thinker. I wou ld

like to place these activities in a wider context which will make clear

his relationship with early nationa lism in India. Coomarasw amy's

initiation into nationalist politics was in 1 905, three years after he

arrived in Ceylon with his English wife . It is difficult to establ ish

to wha t extent he was in touch with events in the subcon tinent, but the

year 1905 also saw great political upheavals after the Partition of

Bengal.  Coomaras wamy's concern with fostering Ceylonese educatio n to

replace Western educ ation, his attempts in the Ceylon Reform Society to

select the best of the West and preserve those aspects of indigenous

society worth saving, his equation of social reform with nationalist

consciousness, all these have close parallels with nationalist aspira-

tions in India itself. Coomaras wamy's celebrated 'Open Letter to the

Kandyian Chiefs' in The Ceylon Observer  in 1905 had been antic ipated in

Havells'  'Open Letter to Educated India ns' in the Bengalee  two years

before.  They had not met before 1907 and it is not clear how much

Coomara swamy knew of Havell' s work in India. Wha t seems certain is

that their similar approac hes to nationalism owe d much to their reading

of William Morris. Faced with the might of the modern, industrial West ,

economically bac kward c ountries in bot h East and West asserted that their

very backwardness constituted a virtue, for it enabled them to resist the

evils of technological progres s; thus the great Irish poet, Yeats could

declare that 'the spiritual history of the world has been the history

of the conquered race s'. Nation alists fro m Japan to Ireland ha d gained

this unique confidence from reading the great romantic critics of the

industrial age, notably Morris and his mento r, Ruskin, and their vision

of pre-industrial Medieval gemeinschaft.  The same romantic primitivism

had fired Birdwood and his idealisation of the Indian village community

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and the artisan. By the time Coomaraswamy produced his classi c,

Mediaeval Sinhalese Art,  Havell had already spent three decades trying

to revive Indian art manuf actur es. It was in Coomaraswamy that one

finds these ideas taken to their logical conclusion, as the revival of

Indian art went hand in hand wi th the renunciation of industrial

capitalism. Tradition became a keyword in his art doctrine and it was

the antithesis of prog ress . Coomaraswamy taught several generations

the importance of tradition in art, but he was not traditional; one

could hardly imagine him as either a Pandit  from Benaras or a conven-

tional Orientalist. As tradition received its clearest formulation

in the 19th century, the age when tradition itself broke down, so the

greatest defender of tradition was essentially a product of the

modern age. When he spoke on traditional art in Britain he was listened

to with respect by the members of the Arts and Crafts Movement; their

attempts to revive the guild system were rendered precious by the fact

that the pre-industria l soci ety had disappeared for ever in the Wes t,

whereas traditional crafts in Ceylon and India still breathed (though

with some difficulty).  In his logical opposition to the mach ine,

Coomaraswamy joined a radical group of Utopian socialists during the

War years (1914-18) who were engaged in formulating principles for

a post-indus trial society. Coomaraswamy may even have coined the word,

'post-industrial'; the word itself has gained a new richness in the 1980s

and his uncompromising, anti-modern stance which had previou sly seemed

anachronistic may now be seen in a new light.

To return to India and close the discussion, I want to consider

briefly Coomaraswamy's natio nalism during the years 1 905-19 11, when he

was closely associated with the  swadeshi  movement in Benga l. The

Ceylonese  erudit  advocated what may be called 'cultural nationalism',

a form of political expression which often preceded active resistance

against imperial power. Wheth er in India or in Ireland, the leaders

of cultural renaissance were frequently 'marginal figures' who came

into conflict with activists because of their opposition to vi olent

overthrow of foreign government. In Ireland, the leaders of the Irish

Literary Movement were the Anglo-Irish Protestant intellectuals, Yeats

and George Russell  (A.E.); in India, in the forefront of cultural

regeneration were individuals like Annie Besant, Sister Nivedita and

Havell , all of whom advocated indigenous education and indigenous art.

The last three had developed their elective affinity with India early on.

They formed an important bridg e betw een East and West with their form of

cultural nationalism and their defense of Indian values. Among these,

Coomaraswamy was m ost suited for his role as the mediator between two

cultures. He was born of an upper class Westernised Tamil father who

was a personal friend of Disraeli and of an English mother who came from

a cultivated family. His earl y care er shows his abilit y to move from

Indian society to European with ea se, and he was listened to with re-

spect by both societi es. Not only to Coomaraswamy, but to Have ll,

Besant and Nivedita as well,  Hindu nationalism meant constructing an

alternative lifestyle that rejected Western values, rather than a direct

confrontation with the British r aj . I do not think Coomaraswam y's cul-

tural nationalism was motivated by self-interest; he beca me, in fact,

a conscientious objec tor during the First World War because of hi s

refusal to support the imper ial war effort, for which he was forced out

of Britain. It is indeed a tribute to this nationalist that his ideal

was given political e xpression in Mahatma Gandhi's  satyagraha  movement.

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