Conservatives can co-opt the new Indian aesthetic

In The Indian Conservative, the author’s bold objective is to explore the philosophical underpinnings of modern Indian conservatism. With this vision, he has analysed the influence and predominance of conservative thought and practices in the political, economic, social, cultural, and aesthetic and educational spheres, often with interesting results. Here is an excerpt:

It all started with orientalism. Let me state the basic orientalist premises. Indian sculpture lacked classical simplicity. It was too ornate, confused and bordering on the grotesque. The only partially sophisticated Indian sculpture was on account of Greek influence on the Gandhara school. Indian painting lacked an understanding of perspective and was therefore childish. Indian music lacked harmony and therefore could not be considered an evolved art. There was nothing in Indian drama comparable to the Periclean or the Elizabethan stages. Because it was sculptural in its tone, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain architecture was unimpressive. The only Indian architecture worth talking about was the Islamic school. There, too, ornate schools like the Gujarati Muslim school of architecture needed to be at a discount. Indian literature was almost exclusively focused on religion and myths. It was as if it had never come of age. India lacked any sound aesthetic theory. Art remained at best at the folk level. Indian crafts, as distinct from art, in the form of its textiles, brass, bronzes, carpets and furniture had a childlike and primitive charm. But none of these could stand up to solid aesthetic standards.

In fairness, side by side with this hypercritical orientalism, there was a school of British thinkers led by William Jones, and which included James Prinsep, Alexander Cunningham, Robert Sewell, G.V. Pope and Edwin Arnold, that oscillated between a balanced, sober affection for Indian culture and occasionally an enthusiasm which was a tad excessive.

Over the years, the extreme condescending orientalist positions have been pretty much demolished. A tradition of aesthetic scholarship going back to the legendary Bharata Muni, to Sarangadeva, to Abhinavagupta, to Appayya Dikshita, to Jagannatha Pandita and many others existed in our country. The Navarasa theory, which posits that the aesthetic experience emanates from the rise and fall of nine emotive states, has retained its originality and its relevance, and today seems to fit in with some of the insights of neuroscience. The texts of the Natya Shastra and Shilpa Shastra traditions continue to be mined for insights that are timeless and refreshing.

And while conquests and destruction did lead to some discontinuities, there remained a flowing stream within the tradition. For example, even as there was what our erstwhile rulers liked to call pre-British anarchy in the land, Tanjore maintained and enhanced artistic traditions right from the Chola period of the tentheleventh centuries through the Nayaka and Maratha periods from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. And isolated Himalayan kingdoms, such as in Ladakh, Kashmir, Chamba and Spiti, produced astonishingly important and beautiful art from the tenth century onward right through till the early twentieth century.

Another kind of subterranean continuity also operated. Kakanakote, by Maasti, the great twentieth-century Kannada writer, can be seen as deriving its inspiration from Kalidasa's classic Abhijnanashakuntalam. They both deal with the theme of an urban sophisticate marrying a nature nymph, represented by a maiden from the forests.

For that matter, when in the seventeenth century a Nayaka king wrote a dance drama depicting the divine wedding of Senkamala Nachiar to Rajagopalaswamy, he was deriving his content and his technique from another monarch, the sixteenth-century Vijayanagara emperor Krishna Deva Raya, who wrote the graceful Amukta Malyada. The tradition of kings writing plays and composing music that their subjects admired goes back to Mahendra Varma Pallava in the seventh century and comes down all the way to Wajid Ali Shah in the nineteenth century, whose compositions and choreographies around Lord Krishna were loved by his subjects.

Despite the attempts at suffocation on the part of orientalist British administrators and puritanical Christian missionaries, Indian art of all kinds — the classical, the folk, the pan-Indian and the regional — not only did not die, but it demonstrated an astonishing vitality. In fact, British rule and colonial disdain might have given us an added incentive to light the fires of our creativity. At least until now we have not had to face the poignant pain of Roger Scruton and his friends, as English church music seems to be disappearing.

We have produced scholars of aesthetics. Vishnu Narayan Bhatkande, Ananda Coomaraswamy and the extraordinary multifaceted genius Rabindranath Tagore stand out as signifi cant art historians and philosophical minds. Fortunately, not all foreign scholars were of the patronizing variety. Stella Kramrisch and Heinrich Zimmer made significant positive contributions to the study of Indian art.

With the coming of Independence, the country found a new pride and new energy in its art scene. It was not just painting, sculpture, music, dance and drama that flourished. Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy and as a close cousin of political philosophy also got its fair share of attention. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, B.N. Goswami, Sivaramamurti, K.K. Nair who wrote under the pseudonym of Krishna Chaitanya and others were joined by brilliant and sympathetic foreigners like Anna Dallapiccola, David Shulman, George Michell and Richard Blurton in this endeavour.

Conservatives have every reason to be happy about the current state of both highbrow and popular art in India. We have not abandoned traditions and sought refuge in sterile modernism or that abomination, postmodernism. If anything, declining folk and other traditions have been revived and the disdain for so-called folk art has disappeared. It has become fashionable to talk of India's soft power. If such a thing exists, it is because despite all the glitzy influences of technology, we have kept faith in our unique artistic traditions, our diversities and our connections with the sacred.