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Asian Studies Association of Australia. Review

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A man of our time: Ananda Coomaraswamy, the west

and Indian nationalism
Partha Mitter

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 Painting', Ars Orientalis,
10(19 75) ,11-75.
4 Cf. B.N. Goswamy, "Of Patronage and Pahari Painting', 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 COOMARASWAMY,
THE WEST AND INDIAN NATIONALISM

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Partha Mitter
University of Sussex
Many myths and misunderstandings surround the life and work of
Ananda Coomaraswamy and Roger Idpsey has placed us all in his debt with
a meticulous edition of his collected works, the series being completed
with a well-documented 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-Brahmin fascist' as one art historian casually dubbed
him some years ago, but came from the respectable Mudaliyar caste,
according to Lipsey, and was not a Brahmin. Misunderstandings about
Coomaraswamy were due as much to his denigrators as his hagiographers,
for 'he was loved and detested; he was doubtless lovable and detestable.
He conquered by scholarship, elegance and a completely uncompromising
set of values, but where he failed to conquer he made enemies' (p. xiii).
The biography was undertaken with the object of answering 'those who
revere Coomaraswamy's writings 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 possible' (p. xiii) to do so. Lipsey's portrait, by
plugging the gaps in our knowledge, affords us a fuller understanding
of both his personality and temperament and the complex motives behind a
number of his acts and accomplishments.
Coomaraswamy is best remembered for his dazzling defense of
Indian art in an age when Western art historians had, 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 of 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 ammunition
to Western-educated Indian nationalists. While possessing right sensibility, 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 manufactures. The domain of high art
belonged, in their view, to European classical art, but more specifically
to Victorian history painting. With a bravura display of erudition
Coomaraswamy reversed this implicit faith in the superiority of illusionist
art. The naturalistic argument was countered with a typically Platonic
answer that if art was concerned with representation, 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 'spiritual1 character of Indian art was taken a step further by

Coomaraswamy, who made the connection between Medieval European and
Indian art, both traditional, but unlike Renaissance and post-Renaissance
art, which were wedded to progress. Coomaraswamy's insight enabled him
to reject the role of taste and connoisseurship as products of the
Renaissance which had perverted traditional art. The result of this was
twofold: Coomaraswamy 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 and unless we took account of the 'inner spirit' of the artist
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 modern Western attacks
on academic art, supported by the Platonic Idea. Two typical cases
were the artists, Kandinsky and Mondrian, who had explained their
abstract paintings as representing the Platonic world beyond appearances.
In 1910 Coomaraswamy stated that his commitment was to
' express in English how Indian art and culture appear to the Indian
mind' (p. 73). If this was his intention, then he was surely misled.
Ancient Indian art had already been lost for generations, when European
archaeologists in the 19th century embarked on its 'recovery'. Whilst
archaeological documentation was virtually complete at the turn of the
century, the actual meaning of these sacred art objects eluded both
Europeans and modern Indians, 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 his apercus with hard 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, comparable to Friedlander's discovery of Mannerism. The disappointly meagre
engagement with actual art objects is revealed in an amusing anecdote
(p. 284). When Tomita, the keeper of the Asiatic department in Boston
Museum, complained mildly to Coomaraswamy about the neglect of the Indian
collection, the art historian's hurried mumble was, 'Perhaps one of these
days I ought to take a run down and have a look at the old place 1 (p.
284) .
Perhaps we are doing him an injustice, for he was more than an
art historian; he was 'known to some as a Sanskrit and Pali scholar;
to others as an art historian, mythographer, 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 polymaths in the Hegelian tradition, the uomo
universale, graduated from being a practising geologist to nationalist
art historian to philosopher in his last days, offering in the process
a brilliant 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 purpose. Here Lipsey's close
reading of the master comes to our aid. Posing the question, 'What
connexion is there between Coomaraswamy's search for eternal verities
(philosophia perennis) and the specific art historical concern with
style and morphology of art?', Lipsey answers with a story. On being
asked by Meyer Schapiro if he had read Dvorak's Kunstgeschichte als
Geistesgeschichte, Coomaraswamy replied that art history was the history
of the spirit. This concern increased with age, and as Lipsey so
eloquently argues, his late metaphysical 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 deserves, namely, Coomaraswamy as a nationalist,
during a period covering the years 1905-1917, this being the obverse of
his opposition to modern Western society. Lipsey has for his purposes
of biography concentrated on his nationalist activities in isolation,
laying stress on their importance to the Ceylonese thinker. I would
like to place these activities in a wider context which will make clear
his relationship with early nationalism in India. Coomaraswamy's
initiation into nationalist politics was in 1905, three years after he
arrived in Ceylon with his English wife. It is difficult to establish
to what extent he was in touch with events in the subcontinent, but the
year 1905 also saw great political upheavals after the Partition of
Bengal. Coomaraswamy's concern with fostering Ceylonese education to
replace Western education, 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 aspirations in India itself. Coomaraswamy's celebrated 'Open Letter to the
Kandyian Chiefs' in The Ceylon Observer in 1905 had been anticipated in
Havells' 'Open Letter to Educated Indians' in the Bengalee two years
before. They had not met before 1907 and it is not clear how much
Coomaraswamy knew of Havell's work in India. What seems certain is
that their similar approaches to nationalism owed much to their reading
of William Morris. Faced with the might of the modern, industrial West,
economically backward countries in both East and West asserted that their
very backwardness constituted a virtue, for it enabled them to resist the
evils of technological progress; thus the great Irish poet, Yeats could
declare that 'the spiritual history of the world has been the history
of the conquered races'. Nationalists from Japan to Ireland had gained
this unique confidence from reading the great romantic critics of the
industrial age, notably Morris and his mentor, 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 classic,

Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, Havell had already spent three decades trying
to revive Indian art manufactures. It was in Coomaraswamy that one
finds these ideas taken to their logical conclusion, as the revival of
Indian art went hand in hand with the renunciation of industrial
capitalism. Tradition became a keyword in his art doctrine and it was
the antithesis of progress. 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 conventional 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-industrial society had disappeared for ever in the West,
whereas traditional crafts in Ceylon and India still breathed (though
with some difficulty). In his logical opposition to the machine,
Coomaraswamy joined a radical group of Utopian socialists during the
War years (1914-18) who were engaged in formulating principles for
a post-industrial 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 previously 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 nationalism during the years 1905-1911, when he
was closely associated with the swadeshi movement in Bengal. The
Ceylonese erudit advocated what may be called 'cultural nationalism',
a form of political expression which often preceded active resistance
against imperial power. Whether 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 violent
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 bridge between East and West with their form of
cultural nationalism and their defense of Indian values. Among these,
Coomaraswamy was most 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 early career shows his ability to move from
Indian society to European with ease, and he was listened to with respect by both societies. Not only to Coomaraswamy, but to Havell,
Besant and Nivedita as well, Hindu nationalism meant constructing an
alternative lifestyle that rejected Western values, rather than a direct
confrontation with the British raj. I do not think Coomaraswamy's cultural nationalism was motivated by self-interest; he became, in fact,
a conscientious objector during the First World War because of his
refusal to support the imperial war effort, for which he was forced out
of Britain. It is indeed a tribute to this nationalist that his ideal
was given political expression in Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha movement.
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