India – A Culture Steeped in Aesthetic
TODAY, in India, our aesthetic sense has gone out the window. If you drive through many parts of India, you will see half of the houses painted in all shades of acrylic paint. This is a consequence of hundreds of years of poverty. We have been an occupied nation for so long, and the last 250 years have been a systematic demolition, particularly of the textile industry, which was the main industry here apart from agriculture. The entire strategy was to destroy the industry here, take the raw material from here and pump their products back to India, because it was all about their economy.
When it comes to textile, there is no other place on the planet that has as many weaves and as many ways of dying and preparing a cloth as this culture has, though much of it has died due to neglect and intent. The British wanted to destroy the textile industry in India because they had Manchester. At one time, Coimbatore was called the “Manchester of India,” unfortunately. They should have called Manchester the “Coimbatore of UK,” because we have been growing cotton, making cloth, and exporting it for thousands of years. Indian textiles have clothed the world – you can still find evidence of that at ancient sites of Syria and Egypt, for example.
Having said that, in terms of architecture in the subcontinent, the simplicity of aesthetic was such that with the material available here – with stone, mud, and brick, what we created was phenomenal. One incredible example of this is Bhaktapur in Nepal. Unfortunately, earthquakes have taken a big toll, but I think they are going to restore it to some extent. It is a thousandyear- old living city. Almost the whole of ancient India was like that. There is aesthetic at every step. Just a water place is designed like a temple. Everywhere on the floors and walls, there is a small motif. And everything had to be done by hand. You can imagine the sense of aesthetic that must have powered them, and what it must have taken in terms of money, effort, and time, to create all this.
If you look at the Kailash temple in Ellora and the Tamil Nadu temples, they will make you proud of being human. The design and perfection of geometry, the aesthetic and the engineering are phenomenal. It is incredible that all this was done by human hands. It is important for us to see that hundreds of years ago, people were capable of creating something like this. Today, in India it is all about utility. Creating something beautiful is considered not worthwhile. If it is all about use, I have to ask you, what is the use of your life? If you think your life is useful, you are a fool. Even if you were not here, the world would still spin; everything would go on. You will realize this when you fall dead.
Everything will be perfect without you. It is not that we are useful in some way. If human beings did not exist, the planet would flourish. The question is not how useful we are but how beautifully we live. No other creature destroys the beauty of nature. As human beings, our lives and our requirements are such that we destroy so much of natural beauty. When that is the situation, it is our business that whatever we create is truly beautiful. Whether it is a building, any other structure, your body, clothing, or anything else we create, we must replace the beauty of nature to whatever extent we can.