Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  The manner in which the image of Krishna in his manifestation as the divine lover was sanitized provides an excellent illustration of this phenomenon. In Hindu mythology, Krishna is regarded as the purna avatara, the complete incarnation, because he incorporates within himself all the sixteen attributes of human refinement, including the erotic—the sringara rasa. His role as the divine lover is in sync with the four highest purusharthas or goals of life enjoined in the Hindu world view: dharma (right conduct), artha (the pursuit of material well-being), kama (the pursuit of desire) and moksha (salvation). If Krishna’s romantic dalliance as a boy with Radha and the gopis of Vrindavan is a validation of kama, his conduct as the Pandavas’ adviser in the Mahabharata is a validation of artha; and in the Gitaupadesha—his sermon to Arjuna on selfless duty—he is the personification of dharma. The sringara rasa, therefore, is only one aspect of a many-splendoured personality that exemplifies the ideal life. Those who view the Kamasutra as only a compilation of impossible sexual postures forget that its first chapter is an extraordinary dialogue between Vatsyayana and an imaginary interlocutor who questions him on the need for such a text. Vatsyayana’s reply is that since desire is also a manifestation of the divine, it is incumbent upon human beings to strive to be accomplished lovers, so that they can derive maximum pleasure from this gift; however, he adds, the key is to maintain the right balance between dharma, artha and kama, for if each is pursued in proportion and none in exclusion, an individual will ultimately achieve moksha. The concept of Krishna as lover was part of such an integrated, pragmatic and balanced world view, linking the sacred and the profane in a joyous celebration of life. It was certainly not evidence of some primitive hedonism or mindless carnality.

  The British, however, viewed the entire lore of Krishna the lover with either ridicule or disgust. By the mid-nineteenth century the British, weaned on the evangelical fervour of Charles Grant and William Wilberforce and the utilitarian credo of the Mills brothers, were emphatic in their assessment of India as the dark land of heathens wallowing in immorality and evil. Considerable attention was devoted to juxtaposing the Christian ethic and value system with the ‘depraved’ moral fibre of the native. The Hindus, to them, were ‘tied to hateful, horrible beliefs and customs—unmentionable thoughts’. Their world of darkness was filled with ‘lust’ and their culture had no ‘moral codes—tolerating both polyandry and polygamy and countenancing the greatest sensuousness’. Their form of worship was ‘to a very large extent disgusting and even immoral’, and the Hindu himself suffered from ‘unparalleled sexual degradation’. In the eyes of the Christian Literary Society of Madras, Krishna, quite simply, was an adulterer and fornicator. In fact, in 1862, Sir Mathew Sausse, a British judge of the Bombay High Court, pronounced a judgement in which he saw the enactment of Krishna’s dance with the gopis—the raasleela—as only a means of encouraging adultery: ‘All songs connected with the worship of Krishna which were brought before us, were of an amorous character … In these songs as well as stories both written and traditional, which later are treated as of a religious character, the subject of sexual intercourse is most prominent. Adultery is made familiar to the minds of all; it is nowhere discouraged or denounced, but on the contrary, in some stories, those persons who have committed that great moral and social offence are commended.’12

  The Hindu revivalist movements of the nineteenth century, of which the most important were the Brahmo Samaj (founded by Raja Rammohan Roy in 1830) and the Arya Samaj (founded by Dayanand Saraswati in 1875), were motivated by noble intentions: to cleanse India’s social and religious legacy of the many distortions that had crept into it over centuries. But in doing so, they sought also to gain ‘respectability’ in the eyes of the British and ‘raise’ themselves to better absorb the new ideas of science and liberalism represented by the colonizer. Hence, the thrust of their reforming endeavours was to jettison from their collective religious heritage any and all elements that were likely to invite criticism from an Anglo-Christian perspective. The entire tradition of Krishna as the lover became a victim of such a perception. His legacy had to be sanitized of all erotic connotations. Sringara rasa had to be interpreted as an aberration. The enlightened acceptance of kama as an aspect of the divine was looked upon as a misguided deviation. The fig leaf of glib spirituality had to be quickly put in place to cover centuries of ‘moral turpitude’. Thus Krishna did not enact the raas-leela with the gopis in the groves of Vrindavan; the rasa was merely symbolic of the search of the Atma for the Brahman. Radha’s passion was nothing other than the intense longing of the soul for union with the Absolute. Of course, Krishna’s lore allows also for such allegorical interpretations. But the oversimplification occurred because such an interpretation was postulated as the only valid one. In the process, the carefully evolved balance that recognized the divine in all aspects of human existence, including in the pursuit of desire and pleasure, was clumsily distorted. In one of the more ironic instances of trans-cultural transplants, Victorian morality was made the touchstone for interpreting the divine romance and passion of Radha and Krishna. (It is interesting to speculate whether the extremely puritanical streak in Mahatma Gandhi’s approach to sex was a result of this Victorian critique.)

  Even those imbued with a fierce nationalistic spirit often found it difficult to escape the connection between patriotism, the colonial experience and the need to exorcise some aspect of the past. The British consistently derided their Indian subjects for being too effeminate. The historian Robert Orme proclaimed, soon after the East India Company arrived in India, that the Hindu is ‘the most effeminate inhabitant of the globe’. The dhoti worn by Bengali men was dismissed as a woman’s dress; Indian men were described as completely lacking ‘manly self-control’ (their diet, of which rice was a major part, was considered one possible reason for this affliction). Baden-Powell, who founded the Scout Movement in 1908, and who is uncritically valorized by many military-minded Indian men to this day, was convinced that Indian boys needed a strong muscular infusion, for they were ‘singularly without character by nature’, and bereft of any notion of self-discipline or honour. A classic example showing how this critique was internalized even by individuals who were otherwise the proponents of a virile nationalism can be seen in the reaction of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–96) to the lyrical genius of Jayadeva’s Sanskrit classic Gitagovinda: ‘From the beginning to the end,’ Bankim lamented, ‘it does not contain a single expression of manly feeling—of womanly feelings there is a great deal … I do not deny his high poetical merits in a certain sense of exquisite imagery … but that does not make him less the poet of an effeminate and sensual race.’13

  Chatterjee’s reaction was understandable given his direct proximity to the colonial experience. But the stereotypes created out of such an interaction live on long after the formal ending of colonial rule, both among the rulers and the ruled. That the notion of a sinister sensuality underpinning Indian society was the leitmotif of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, published in 1924, is not surprising, but it is also central to the pivotal opening incident in Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown, published in 1966. And in the India of today, rightist extremists, who pride themselves on their commitment to restoring India’s glorious past, have become Victorian custodians of morality, protesting any display of public affection and denying the legacy of the Kamasutra, the Khajuraho temples and Krishna’s glorious play with the gopis on the banks of the Yamuna.

  Soon after the consolidation of British rule in the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a great demand for lifelike images of the ‘natives’ and their exotic culture for the viewing pleasure of friends and family back home. Initially this demand was met by a select group of British artists who travelled to India to paint its people, monuments and scenery. William Hodges visited India over 1780–83 and released his Select Views of India in 1787; he was followed by the uncle and nephew duo of Thomas and William Daniell, who produced the celebrated six-volume serie
s of aquatints, Oriental Scenery. Other significant landscape and portrait artists included William Simpson, Edward Lear, Emily Eden, Tilly Kettle, John Zoffany, Robert Home and George Chinnery. The works of these artists fuelled a growing curiosity in Britain, and to cope with this demand a need was felt to develop an atelier of Indian artists who could paint in the same genre and style as their masters. Indian artists were available for hire; they were in need of money because of the reduced patronage from members of the Indian royalty, who were, expectedly, more attracted to the British artists. Thus was created the Company School of Painting, wherein a great many Indian painters adjusted their own tradition and training to adopt the style and technique favoured by the British. At the behest of their colonial patrons and the occasional Indian royal, they produced, from about the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, a large body of work about themselves—their monuments, people, costumes, festivals, occupations, nautch girls, crafts et al.—but in a style that was alien and for the needs of a foreign audience.

  This was the first ‘oscillation’, a movement away from the artistic continuity that would have unfolded in normal circumstances. The Company School is not without merit, but it was an imposition, an artificial construct that was not the result of synthesis or of normal creative evolution, and, therefore, the process that it entailed needs to be analysed. When people are the subjects of their own culture, their creative expression has self-assuredness and spontaneity, so they create a unique and effective language of communication even when the grammar is imperfect. This is because the idiom is authentic. But when people become objects of a foreign culture, a huge transformation takes place. Suddenly, a creative work is judged not for its intrinsic value, or for the heritage it is sourced from and is a part of, but for the degree to which it is comprehensible and conforms to the outsider’s culture. The process is all the more mutilating if the outsider belongs to the dominant political or military power of the time, and there is necessarily prejudice, condescension and prurience in his gaze. When this happens, spontaneity reduces itself to self-conscious mediocrity; creativity seeks to qualify itself; authenticity gives way to imitation; self-assurance is replaced by denial. An entire culture attempts to reinterpret itself in terms that will somehow win the dominant outsider’s approval. The ‘objectified’ people then thrive only as exotica; their historic role becomes that of the observed; everything external about them—and nothing of intrinsic value—is collated, classified and investigated. They finally end up as caricatures, divorced from their own cultural milieu and perpetually alien—in spite of their best efforts at emulation—to that of the outsider.

  This interruption of natural artistic evolution, this ‘oscillation’, is verifiable—the imposition of British preference did not, after all, take place on a blank template. The painted pottery of the Indus Valley dates back to 3000 BC, and reveals an already developed sense of line and colour. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten coined the word ‘aesthetics’ in 1735 but as we have seen, about two thousand years earlier, the Natyashastra had analysed the structure of aesthetics and the rasa or emotions it produced. In the specific area of painting, several ancient Indian texts exist. The Vishnudharmottara, written in the second century AD, is a detailed treatise on the rules of painting, including the choice of materials, techniques and colours. The emphasis, even at this early stage, is on how the depiction needs to bring out the inner essence rather than merely a physical representation. Thus, specific colours are recommended to evoke the different moods or rasas: white for comic (hasya), dark blue for sensual (sringara), red for anger (rudra), black for fearful (bhayanaka), grey for compassion (karuna), yellowish white for heroic (vira) and yellow for marvel and awe (adbhuta). Bhittichitra, the art of making paintings on walls, was common throughout the ancient period, and the frescoes and murals of Ajanta—representing the apogee of this tradition—were made during the rule of the Guptas in the fifth and sixth centuries. Evidence that this tradition continued can be seen in the Ellora paintings of the eighth and tenth centuries, and in the medieval era murals in the palaces of Kerala and Rajputana and the Jain temples of Gujarat.

  A new element was added to this repertoire with the coming of the Mughals. In the sixteenth century Emperor Akbar set up an imperial atelier, inviting the best artists from all over India to his court. In time, this royal patronage produced a fusion of Indian and Persian art that consolidated itself under the rule of his successors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The Mughal artistic oeuvre was extensive, and included paintings of flora and fauna, landscapes, portraits and illustrated manuscripts. Some of the best works were in the miniature style, which spread from the Mughal court to the kingdoms of Rajasthan and those in the Himalayan foothills. The themes of these artists were from their own milieu and history: a great many of the works dealt with the romance of Radha and Krishna, but collections on other subjects, such as the classical ragas—the raagmala miniatures—or the changing seasons—the barahmasas—were equally significant.

  The imposition of British artistic requirements has to be seen in this context, in order to understand the exact nature of the rupture in tradition and cultural evolution. Unable, and unwilling, to consider any world view other than their own, the British could not understand that the artists who painted the murals of Ajanta were less concerned with the exact physical representation of a form than with the inner spirit animating it. Their verdict, then, was that Indians could not draw well enough and needed to be trained. There was no question of providing patronage to existing artistic skills; the exclusive focus was on replacing them with the prevalent European art traditions. When, therefore, William Dalrymple says that ‘Mughal technique, rendered with English watercolour on English paper, produced the Company School of Art’14, one is frankly mystified. His assessment casually sanitizes the colonial project, making it out to be an exchange between equals, thus adding to the current trend towards revisionism that catalogues the glories of the Empire and presents colonial policies as either enlightened intervention or imperial benevolence. India had, over centuries, absorbed myriads of external influences, but this interaction with the British was different because it was based not on dialogue but on dictate, on rejection rather than interaction, thereby obliterating the possibility of a synthesis that would enrich both cultures. As Shakti Maira, the erudite art historian, says: ‘Till British colonization, Indian art … had its phases, movements and developments. There was a reshaping by patrons, as happened in the Mughal period, with their preference for a more religiously appropriate, non-figurative, more floral or more Persian art, yet this seems to have added to the range of art made in India. Rather than uproot or replace earlier or non-Islamic art, something was added. Temples and a wide range of art continued that showed no crisis of confidence that it was inferior, primitive, unskilled, un-progressive or banal. All this happened with the British, and the contemporary art scene has still not completely recovered from the lack of self-worth that came from what happened to India at that time.’15

  If the Company School wrenched artists away from their themes and techniques to create an entire generation of ‘visual clerks’, the formal art schools set up in Bombay and Calcutta in the mid-nineteenth century set out to train Indian artists in the ‘Royal Academy’ style of painting. The J.J. School of Art, named after the first Indian to be conferred a Baronetcy, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy, who provided the school an initial grant of Rs 1,00,000, was founded in March 1857. Lockwood Kipling was its first principal, and his son, the writer Rudyard Kipling, was born on the campus. The Government School of Art in Calcutta was founded in 1864, with H.H. Locke as its first principal. A generation of painters graduated from these schools, having learnt from British academicians about the superior principles of European art. The evangelical purpose of ‘upgrading’ Indian artists so that they could conform to and be inspired by European standards was never in doubt. The J.J. School in its first annual report spoke of the tendency of Indian artists ‘to repeat traditional composi
tions which have come down to them from a distant age without refreshing or even glancing at real life. Hence they degenerate instead of improving. The grotesque images with the shapes of men and animals in all parts of the Hindu temple are irredeemably bad. Their sculptured foliage is purely abstract in character. It seems that the safest way of attempting to regenerate this defective and artificial manner of design without destroying what it has inherited from European schools of art is to set the student to copy faithfully the objects of nature, men and women.’ And then comes the classic, supremely arrogant statement of the benevolence of Empire: ‘Thus a school of design would in time arise, native in the best sense, owing its sense of accuracy, truth, and natural beauty to European inspiration but moulding its material into purely Indian types.’

  The Bengal School of the late nineteenth century was born as a reaction to this manifest colonial bias in art, and marked the second ‘oscillation’, this time in the opposite direction, towards pre-colonial artistic traditions. The movement began under the patronage of E.B. Havell, the principal of the Calcutta Art College from 1896 to 1905. Havell, as we have discussed earlier, was convinced about the need for Indians to go back to their own tradition. With Abanindranath Tagore, a cousin of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he had appointed as the vice principal, he set about clearing the college of its copies of mediocre European pictures and plaster casts of Greek models. The revivalist ideology of the Bengal School was greatly influenced by the philosophy and heritage of India’s past, and drew inspiration from the Hindu epics, the Ajanta frescoes and Mughal and Rajput miniatures. It was a conscious effort to set the clock back, and support came from unexpected quarters. A group of Japanese painters who visited Calcutta at the turn of the twentieth century, of whom the most prominent was Kakuzo Okakura, added their opposition to the mindless imitation of the west, and gave demonstrations on how to paint on silk and paper in the style of Ajanta.