India Discovered

by John Keay

  Few things are more impressive than one of these halls at Ajanta seen towards the close of a winter’s afternoon. All day long it has lain in shadow, but about four o’clock the sun comes round the shoulder of the hill opposite, and slowly the figures emerge from the gloom, one by one taking definition of form and feature and kindling colour after colour under the touch of the warm and glowing sunlight. Unlike the frescoes in the Sistine chapel, the Ajanta paintings are not the work of a single artist, nor are they homogeneous in design. They have been executed by many hands and at different times — the gifts of donors who gave according to their means&. Yet in spite of their diversity of size and their varying age and excellence, there is remarkable unity in their general effect; for all the artists of Ajanta followed the same traditional methods in their drawing, and observed the same restraint and reticence in their colouring and tones&. In these paintings there was no affectation, no striving after meretricious effects. Centuries of experience had taught the artists that in line and silhouette lay the true secret of mural painting, and they brought their drawing to a pitch of excellence that has seldom been equalled.

  But the sudden popularity of Ajanta art was not simply the result of new restoration techniques and of publicity. Something much more fundamental had happened: during the first decade of the twentieth century, Indian art as a whole had at last achieved recognition. The role of the outspoken art master, Ernest Havell, in the aesthetic evaluation of Indian sculpture has already been mentioned; and it was Havell who also inspired and initiated the appreciation of Indian painting.

  But first he had virtually to resurrect the subject. Back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Indian painting meant miniatures, brightly coloured, highly stylized and delicately executed illustrations of court life, birds and animals, hunting scenes and flowers. It was particularly associated with the Moghul emperors and was clearly an off-shoot of the Persian miniature school. Many of the artists had been Persians attracted to India by Moghul patronage and, though the techniques had since been adopted by Indians, the inspiration was still Persian and Islamic. By the time the British arrived in upper India, Moghul patronage was in decline and with it Moghul art. The newcomers, schooled on Gainsborough and Constable, could see no great virtue in what appeared to be an obsession with detail and miniaturization. Thomas Twining much admired Moghul architecture, but found little to praise in Moghul painting.

  The merit of their drawing is almost confined to a very accurate imitation of flowers and birds. I never saw a tolerable landscape or portrait of their execution. They are very unsuccessful in the art of shading and seem to have very little knowledge of the rules of perspective.

  A contemporary of Twining’s, George Forster, also mentioned their ignorance of ‘the rules of proportion and perspective’: ‘they are just imitators and correct workmen & they possess merely the glimmerings of genius’. But if this laborious attention to detail and considerable imitative skill could hardly be rated as fine art, it had its uses: in the early 1800s many Indian artists were employed by British patrons to produce souvenir portfolios of buildings, animals, domestic servants and so forth.

  Not surprisingly, scholars like Cunningham and Fergusson totally ignored what appeared to them to be purely an applied art. Introduced by one set of outsiders, and now adapted to the requirements of another, it was of little antiquarian interest; Indian painting belonged with enamel work and batik in the arts and crafts section. Even the discovery of the Ajanta murals and similar cave paintings at Bagh (Madhya Pradesh) did not prompt a drastic rethinking. For one thing there appeared to be no possible connection between a Buddhist school of mural painting which died out in western India in the seventh century and an Islamic school of miniature painting which appeared in north India in the sixteenth century. The chasm between the two appeared unbridgeable, and Ajanta could only be explained as some freakish anomaly. To critics who ignored or disputed that its paintings spanned some 700 years, the obvious explanation was that Ajanta was the work of foreigners. The refinement of technique, the impeccable draughtsmanship and the exquisite modelling could only be the product of centuries of artistic development. Since there was no evidence of any such tradition in India, one must look abroad.

  Whoever seriously undertakes the critical study of the paintings of Ajanta and Bagh [wrote Vincent Smith in 1889] will find, I have no doubt, that the artists drew their inspiration from the West, and I think that he will also find that their style is a local development of the cosmopolitan art of the contemporary Roman empire.

  If there was Indo-Greek and Indo-Roman sculpture in Gandhara, why not Indo-Roman painting at Ajanta? One of the paintings apparently showed the reception by an Indian sovereign of envoys from Persia. This ‘proves, or goes a long way towards proving, that the Ajanta school of pictorial art was derived directly from Persia and ultimately from Greece’.

  It was the same old story; and as usual it stimulated Ernest Havell to a vigorous protest. He showed that there was plenty of literary evidence for the existence of an ancient Indian school of painting and argued, most plausibly, that in a country with a climate like India’s it was not surprising that so few actual examples survived. Smith’s suggestion, that the painting of a Persian envoy demonstrated that Persian influence was paramount, was clearly rubbish. And though north Indian Buddhism was undoubtedly somewhat cosmopolitan, the title of the Ajanta paintings to be considered Indian was ‘as valid as that of the schools of Athens to be called Greek, those of Italy to be called Italian and perhaps stronger than that of the schools of Oxford to be considered English’.

  Never one to be discouraged by a dearth of evidence, Havell sidestepped the medieval chasm in Indian painting by claiming, ingeniously and correctly, that when Buddhism spread to Central Asia and thence to China, it took the ideals and techniques of Ajanta with it. Less plausibly, he maintained that the Mongols borrowed these traditions of Indian art from the Chinese; the Moghuls, or Mongols, in India were thus repaying their ancestors’ debt to Indian culture. In fact, Moghul painting had undergone the same process as Moghul architecture. Initially encumbered with foreign – in this case Persian – ideals, it had been quickly emancipated from the sober formality of the Persians and reanimated by the spirit of Indian art.

  Havell considered all Indian miniatures as ‘Moghul’, and knew of no parallel but distinct Hindu or Rajput school. Indeed, his brand of criticism had little time for schools or styles of any kind. Unlike Fergusson, disserting India’s architecture into ‘water-tight compartments’, Havell liked to emphasize not the differences but the shared characteristics. Instead of discussing a school of painting or sculpture, he discussed individual works of art. And considering how few were available to him, his selection shows outstanding discernment: most of his examples are still regarded as classics. In the case of painting, whether it was an Ajanta fresco or a Moghul miniature, he concentrated on what was common to both and therefore distinctively Indian – the daring but faultless use of colour, the simple precision of line, the mastery of expressive gesture and pose, the ability to evoke mood and the deep understanding of nature. Of course, Moghul art was more secular and naturalistic than anything in ancient India. But it too, according to Havell, was conceptual in that no subject was drawn from life. Take the famous picture of a turkey cock commissioned by Jehangir. The artist would of course have studied the turkey and frequently referred to it. But the actual painting would have been the subject ‘recollected in tranquillity’; hence the result, which says a lot more about a turkey cock, from the precise markings of the feathers to the absurd swagger, than could any accurate painting from life. It is a turkey as one imagines a turkey; but it could never win a poultry club prize.

  Too see with the mind, not merely with the eye; to bring out an essential quality, not just the common appearance of things; to give movement and character in a figure, not only the bone and muscle; to reveal some precious quality or effect in a landscape, not merely physiographical or bo
tanical facts; and, above all, to identify himself with the inner consciousness of the Nature he portrays, and to make manifest the one harmonious law which governs Nature in all her moods — these are the thoughts which he [the oriental artist] keeps uppermost in his mind as soon as he knows how to use his tools with tolerable facility.

  Havell’s first major work, Indian Sculpture and Painting, was published in London in 1908. In spite of the author’s harsh words about the ignorance of archaeologists, Sir John Marshall hailed it as ‘a splendid protest against the drivelling nonsense on Indian art to which we are usually treated’; ‘and so far as one “archaeologist” is concerned it has his very warmest sympathy’. Among those who reviewed it was Roger Fry, the most eminent art critic of his day. Havell, according to Fry, had proved his point. His illustrations alone were a revelation and many of the sculptures ‘must appeal deeply to any unbiased and sensitive European’. The business of art could no longer be regarded as that of simply representing things as they appeared to be. ‘We can no longer hide behind the Elgin marbles and refuse to look; we have no longer any system of aesthetics which can rule out, a priori, even the most fantastic and unreal artistic forms. They must be judged in themselves and by their own standards.’

  Two years later, Havell was invited to address the Royal Society of Arts. The meeting proved a stormy one, but it marks the turning point for Indian art. In the chair was Sir George Birdwood, an authority on Indian crafts and an outspoken exponent of the traditional and dismissive attitude to Indian art. Ranged against him were Walter Crane, the artist, William Rothenstein, and a dramatic looking young man who was to become the greatest of all authorities on Indian art, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. And, of course, there was Havell. If Havell had one serious fault it was his intensely combative approach to the subject. According to The Times his teaching career had been characterized by ‘vehement and relentless opposition to every trace of European influence [and] constant denunciations of what he deemed utter ignorance on the part of his fellow countrymen of Indian art and civilization’. Seeing everything from the point of view of his Indian students, he had sought to rekindle a pride in their native art by disparaging everything non-Indian – neither the sculptors of ancient Greece nor the painters of the Italian renaissance were spared. But in London such ‘irrational exclusiveness’ tended only to antagonize his enemies and to embarrass his supporters.

  At the Royal Society of Arts, Havell’s passionate defence of Indian art brought Birdwood to his feet in a vitriolic outburst. So now India was to be credited with its own brand of ‘fine art’. In seventy-eight years Birdwood had not seen a single example to support such a ridiculous theory. India had never prized art for art’s sake and the best that it could offer was ‘ritualized and generally monstrous representations of gods’. He turned to one of Havell’s illustrations, a sculpture of the Buddha in meditation.

  My attention is drawn to the photograph, on my left, of an image of the Buddha as an example of Indian ‘fine art’&. Few of us have the faith of the new school of ‘Symbolists’ in a symbolism that outrages artistic sensibilities and proprieties by virtually regarding art as just a framework for its myths; & one might as reasonably rave over algebraical symbols as such examples of ‘fine art’. This senseless similitude [the Buddha sculpture] in its immemorial fixed pose, is nothing more than an uninspired brazen image, vacuously squinting down its nose to its thumbs, knees and toes. A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionless purity and serenity of soul.

  Several speakers took exception to the suet pudding, and the controversy spilled over into the letters and editorial columns of The Times. As a direct result, the India Society was formed, dedicated to promoting the understanding of – and publishing works on – Indian art. More significant, though, was the reaction of the young Coomaraswamy. His first book, on Sinhalese art, had already been published, but it was from about this time that he espoused the cause of Indian art as a whole. Like Rothenstein, he acknowledged that it was Havell’s work that ‘marked the beginning of a new order of things’. But it is his own works on Indian art, and especially Indian painting, which have formed the basis for all subsequent criticism.

  Coomaraswamy’s mother was English and he was educated in England, but he can in no way be identified with the British raj. His father was Sinhalese, his sympathies lay with the rising tide of Indian nationalism, and his career as an art historian was made in the United States. Although the study of Indian art was, even for Coomaraswamy, a process of exploration, he could expound it from within, not just interpret it from without. He was one of India’s cultural emissaries rather than one of the West’s cultural explorers.

  Suffice it, therefore, just to outline his main contributions to the understanding of Indian painting. In the first place, he did for art what Fergusson had done for architecture. A great collector as well as a connoisseur, he identified all the main styles and provided the criteria by which an approximate date and place of origin could be assigned to any work. Jain miniatures, Bengali (Pala) palm leaf paintings and, most important of all, the whole field of Rajput art were virtually his discoveries. But he also insisted on a continuous tradition of Indian painting, and in this respect was far more convincing than Havell. On the ceiling of the Kailasa temple at Ellora, he found traces of frescoes dating back to the eighth century. Though technically reminiscent of the Ajanta murals, their style, and particularly the long sharp noses and exaggerated eyes, clearly anticipated similar modelling in the Jain or Gujerati miniatures. The earliest of these miniatures was painted on palm leaf and dated from the twelfth or thirteenth century. But the tradition of illustrating Jain manuscripts continued right through the medieval period, and the earliest Rajput miniatures (sixteenth century) owed much to the style and lyricism of Jain art. Thus the great hiatus in Indian painting, if not exactly filled, had at least been bridged.

  As for Rajput art, it seems quite incredible that as late as Havell’s 1908 book, this vast, important and thoroughly delightful school had not so much as been identified. Rajput architecture had, of course, fared little better, and the murals in the palaces of Orchha and Datia, though noticed by Coomaraswamy, are still virtually unknown today. Coomaraswamy’s main task was to differentiate Rajput miniatures from the Moghul school. He conceded that there was much interchange between the two contemporary traditions but, whereas Moghul art was essentially secular, academic and factual, Rajput art was always religious, lyrical and poetic. Stylistic distinctions were equally relevant: Moghul tones were softer, the line drawing more precise, and shading more common.

  Coomaraswamy also established the two main schools of Rajput painting – first, that of the Rajput states of Rajasthan and Bundel-khand; second, that of the Rajput states of the Himalayan foothills (Pahari). He further broke these down into the individual principalities. Each not only had its own stylistic conventions, but also its favourite themes. Rich in allegory and symbolism, they provided Coomaraswamy with a chance to show the importance of an understanding of Hindu literature, music, dance and iconography to any appreciation of Indian painting.

  Perhaps none of this would have cut much ice with Twining and Forster. They would still have bemoaned the absence of perspective and longed for a big watery landscape. But that delightful twosome of Ralph and Captain Gresley would have lent a willing ear to what Coomaraswamy had to say about Ajanta. Their undisguised surprise and admiration had had a lot to do with the fact that the figures in the frescoes seemed to emanate sophistication and classicism. Desirable as was a Mathura yakshi, one might have found her conversation limited and her character suspect. Not so, though, the Ajanta beauties; they looked a safe bet in any company. Not only was there ‘nothing monstrous’, but in fact much grace and delicacy as well as irresistible charms.

  Coomaraswamy agreed. ‘A more conscious or sophisticated art could scarcely be imagined. Despite its invariably religious subject matter, this is an art of “great courts charming the mind by their
noble routine”.’ It was the very epitome of Gupta art and, like the literature of the period, especially the plays and poems of Kalidasa, it directly mirrored the style and etiquette of India’s most classical age.

  The specifically religious element is no longer insistent, no longer antisocial; it is manifested in life, and in an art that reveals life as an intricate ritual fitted to the consummation of every perfect experience. The Boddhisattva is born by divine right as a prince in a world luxuriously refined. The sorrow of transience no longer poisons life itself; life has become an art &

  CHAPTER TWELVE