One Hundred
Tamils of the 20th Century
Ananda Kentish
Coomaraswamy nominated by Sachi Sri Kantha,
Japan
"Nations are created by poets and
artists, not by merchants and politicians. In art
lie the deepest life principles." -
Coomaraswamy
From Journey Down Memory Lane To Reach 'tamiz
Izam'
Chapter 41 - R.Shanmugalingam
"Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy
was born on August 22, 1877, in Colombo. His
father, Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy, noted for his
forensic brilliance and classical scholarship, was
the first Asian to be knighted during the reign of
Queen Victoria. Sir Muthu enjoyed the esteem of
such men as Lord Palmerston, Lord Tennyson, Lord
Beaconsfield. Indeed, Lord Beaconsfield portrayed
him as his Kusinara in his last unfinished
novel.
In 1876, Sir Muthu married an
English lady of Kent named Elizabeth Clay Beeby,
and when their only child Ananda was born, he
received the middle name 'Kentish.'
Ananda, after a brilliant career at
Wycliffe and London University was appointed
Director of the Minerological Survey of Ceylon when
he was just 26 years of age. Though he received a
D.Sc. from London University for his research, his
valuable discovery of thorianite in 1904 is not
generally known. It was characteristic of
Coomaraswamy's self-effacement that he called the
new mineral "thorianite" instead of linking with
his own name.
In the course of his scientific
work, he became interested in the artistic heritage
of Ceylon and did a study of the surviving guilds
of the mediaeval Sinhalese craftsmen and their
artifacts. The results of the study are recorded in
his classic monograph "mediaeval Sinhalese Art
(1908).
Soon, he abandoned geology
altogether and devoted himself wholly to the study
of the arts and cultures of India and Ceylon.It was
at this time that he published another excellent
monograph. "The Aims of Indian Art" (1908). In this
study and in others, Coomaraswamy tried to
reconstruct and interpret the philosophy of the
national art rather than convey merely the beauties
of different art-works.
He was not a romantic aesthetician
but the foremost academic historian of Indian art
scattered through the ages in different parts of
Asia, but also in creating a new consciousness of
Indian cultural unity.
Undoubtedly, the aesthetic
philosophy of Indian nationalism found its most
articulate exponent in Coomaraswamy during the
first decade of the twentieth century. In "Essays
in National Idealism" he wrote: "We want our India
for ourselves because we believe each nation has
its own part to play in the long tale of human
progress and nations which are not free to develop
their individuality and character are also unable
to make the contribution to the sum of human
culture which the world has a right to expect of
them." In other words, he argued that every nation
ought to make its own contribution to what Mazzini
acclaimed as the "concert of mankind, the orchestra
of human genius."
To him the word 'nationalism'
denoted the cultural expression of a nation. When
India had attained independence, his message was
"Be Yourself." It placed the accent on aesthetic
authenticity and not on the political content of
freedom. "Nations" observed Coomaraswamy, "are
created by poets and artists, not by merchants and
politicians. In art lie the deepest life
principles."
In his famous oration delivered
before the Phi Beta Koppa Society in 1837, Emerson
had castigated American writers for their
subservience to the artists of Europe and called
them to create an indigenous literature. His
oration has been justly hailed as "America's
declaration of spiritual independence." Similarly,
to Coomaraswamy Indian nationalism was a quest for
self-realization, a declaration of spiritual
independence.
We cannot perceive the full
significance of Coomaraswamy's philosophy of Indian
nationalism without perceiving the aesthetic impact
of the theory of "dhvani" on his philosophy of
Indian art. The word 'dhvani" literally means
"suggestion in an aesthetic sense' and was
developed into an elaborate theory by
Anandavardhana, the celebrated Indian literary
critic of the ninth century AD while the
"Dhvanyaloka" of Anandavardhana the "locus
classicus" in Indian literary criticism, deals with
the aesthetic significance of words and their
subtle undertones, Coomaraswamy reflected on the
significance of art motifs and their symbolic
meanings. Thus Coomaraswamy's approach to
nationalism combined the patriotic spirit of
Mazzini, the intellectual freedom of Emerson, and
the aesthetic insight of Anandavardhana.
Coomaraswamy wrote much and he
always wrote well. A master of the aphoristic
style, in his discourse, he blended thought and
feeling, poetical fervor and lucid expression.
Between 1895, when as a young man
of 18 he published his first article "The Geology
of Doverow Hill" and 1947, his seventieth year, he
had written more than 500 publications. Their scope
is astonishing. He had written several articles on
Indian, Indonesian and Sinhalese art in the
"Encyclopedia Brittanica" and also in "The National
Encyclopaedia of America," in addition to editing
English words of Indian origin in "Webster's New
International Dictionary." The rest of his
publications range from his collection of essays
entitled "The Dance of Shiva," to such works as
"The History of Indian and Indonesian Art,"
"Hinduism and Buddhism" and "A New Approach to the
Vedas."
"The History of Indian and
Indonesian Art," which was published in 1927, is
his chief contribution to the study of Indian Art
in its historical. sociological and philosophical
contexts. Beginning with the Indo-Sumerian finds,
it gives a clear and connected account of the
entire history of Indian and Indonesian art, with
special emphasis on problems relating to the Indian
origin of the Buddha image. His profound grasp of
the various interrelated disciplines helped him to
realize the twin ideals of harmony and truth in all
Indian art. Thus, in discussing the evolution of
Indian art and culture as a joint creation of Aryan
and Dravidian genius, he was able to reveal that
the Gupta Buddhas, elephanta Maheswara, Pallava
lingams, and the later Natarajas are products of
two spiritual natures.
According to Coomaraswamy, this
situation resulted in a cultural process, which "in
a very real sense" was a "marriage of the East and
West," or of the North and South consummated, as
the donors of the image would say, "for the good of
all ancient beings; a result, not of a superficial
blending of Hellenistic and Indian technique, but
of the crossing of spiritual tendencies, racial
"samskaras" (preoccupations) that may well have
been determined before the use of metals was
known."
Looking back, we cannot doubt that
Coomaraswamy's migration to Boston was a gain; it
led to a deeper appreciation of Indian art in the
West and particularly in America. Also, his stay at
Needham widened his intellectual horizons and
deepened his ideas on mysticism. During this
period, he concerned himself especially with the
general problems of art, religion, and philosophy.
By harmonizing his manifold interest, both Eastern
and Western, he attained a unity of outlook which
invests his writings with a lasting
significance.
Coomaraswamy has argued in his
"Hindu View of Art" that the fusion of religious
ecstasy and artistic experience is not an
exclusively Hindu view; it has been expounded by
many others - such as the neoplatonists, Hsieh Ho,
Goethe, Blake, Schopenhauer, or Schiller and also
restated by Croce. In one of his flashes of
self-revelation, Coomaraswamy called himself "an
orientalist who was in fact almost as much a
platonist as a mediaevelist." And he was
continually striving to understand the creative
unity of symbolical expressions - the Brahma of
Indian philosophers, or the "Unio Mystica" of Jan
van Ruysbroeck the father of mysticism in the
Netherlands, and the "Urquelle" of the German
Meister Eckhart - and, in this way, to synthesise
the fundamental insights of the Eastern and Western
traditions of mysticism.
His culturally most significant
notion is that of the chosen people of the future -
a notion which elevates Coomaraswamy to the select
company of those choice spirits who have
effectively contributed to the continuous dialogue
between East and west. According to him, "the
chosen people of the future cannot be any nation or
race but an aristocracy of the earth uniting the
virility of European youth to the serenity of
Asiatic age." Elsewhere he wrote: "Who that has
breathed the clear mountain air of the Upanishads,
of Goutama, Sankara and Kabir of Rumi, Laotse and
Jesus can be alien to those who have sat at the
feet of Plato and Kant, Tauler Behman and
Ruysbroeck, Whitman, Nietzsche and Blake."
Coomaraswamy hoped for a more
fruitful era in 'East West Cultural Relations' and
wrote that "men like the English De Morgan and
George Boole, the American Emerson and the
contemporary Frenchmen Rene Guenon and Jacques de
Marquette were able to make a real and vital
contact with Indian metaphysic which became for
them a transforming experience."
He also stressed the desirability
of "using one tradition to illuminate the other so
as to demonstrate even more clearly that the
variety of the traditional cultures, in all of
which there subsisted until now a poor balance of
spiritual and material values, is simply that of
the dialects of what is always one and the same
language of the spirit, of that perennial
philosophy to which no one people or age lay an
exclusive claim."
It is remarkable that Coomaraswamy,
who began his career as a geologist, should have
ended it with the publication of "Time and
Eternity," an impressive contribution to
comparative aesthetics. He achieved distinction in
four different fields of intellectual and creative
endeavor, geology, political philosophy, Indian art
history, and the general philosophy of art,
literature and religion.
In his own person he symbolized a
confluence of East and West, as well as an
aesthetic symbiosis of the two cultures, scientific
and literary. Child of Ceylon and England, he
became an Indian in the same deep sense in which
Henry James transformed himself into a European and
T.S Eliott into an Englishman. While reflecting on
the life of Coomaraswamy one is irresistibly
reminded of Walt Whitman's 'marriage of continents,
climates and oceans.'
Coomaraswamy's early scientific
career can be compared to a spring originating from
some subterranean mineral source delighting
everyone by its natural freshness and sweetness.
And the later development of his mind can be
likened to the course of the stream of Indian
artistic consciousness, which, starting from its
Vedic source and flowing through India, catches the
nationalistic current at the turn of the century,
then mingles with the stream of traditional
European art and finally joins the ocean that
washes the shores of 'philosophia perennis'." (
from A Confluence of East and West - A.
Ranganathan)
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