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Culture
The Challenge of
Indian Art
An Introduction to its
Possible History
by
Ashish Nangia
 What
is art? Is it a purely utilitarian object with some trappings of
decoration, or is it pure aesthetics which has absolutely no purpose
whatsoever than to appeal, rather hedonistically if you will, to the
senses?
This debate has raged
amongst art circles from the earliest documented periods of art history
: from the seminal essays of Alois Riegl to the lines and periods drawn
up by institutions and art academies of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This distinction between ‘art’ and ‘artisanship’, between the artist and
the artisan, is also coincidentally one of the chief divisions that
separate South Asian, or Indian art, from its counterpart in the West.
Indian art has often been held to be repetitive, a craft rather than a
display of true and original intent. It is only recently, when paradigms
of global histories are being tested in schools and academies across the
world, that the ‘appendage’ position occupied by South Asian art within
the ‘canon’ of art history is being seriously questioned. This in spite
of certain scholarly positions that argue for the complete hegemony, as
it were, of the Western model of writing histories of and appreciating
art. Is the history of Indian art then doomed to forever be in the
shadow of a larger, global narrative? These questions are important, for
in some ways they allude to the intellectual hegemony held by the
Western academy over forms and ways of knowing, where even emerging
powers like China and India are forced to adopt methodologies and
systems of art appreciation that have been developed in the West.
This is not to say that there have not been laudable attempts at
chronicling South Asian art. One of the earliest modern historians of
Indian art was Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. Living in Ceylon during
British colonial times, Coomaraswamy did much to inscribe meaning to
Indian art and architecture within the Western imagination. For
Coomaraswamy, there was no art, or meaning in art, unless one understood
the principles that guided its creators. Without an understanding of
these principles, Indian art became simply a collection of strange
looking gods, fanciful sculptures, and apparently misshapen forms. It
took his interpretation of Indian art as a predominantly religious and
spiritual work to make the Westerner begin to appreciate art, painting
and sculpture – especially Hindu art – on a basis comparable to that of
its Western contemporary. 1
But if making Indian art comprehensible to the Western observer
is one of the challenges that faces the writing of a South Asian art
history, what is perhaps even more serious is the way that Indian art is
often appended as a subsidiary culture to the grand narrative that is
the history of Western art. This grand sweep of history – from the
‘Pyramids to Picasso’, has a very definable center, consisting of the
Western Renaissance and its allied movements. To this center all other
movements, all other cultures must adhere and spring from. Thus a survey
course in art in Western schools, till very recently at least, ran
somewhat like the following :
Egyptian, Ancient Near Eastern, and Classical Art; Early Christian,
Byzantine and Medieval Art; The Renaissance, Baroque and 18th century
Europe; 19th and 20th century Europe; Photography and Film, Art of the
United States and Canada; Native American, Pre-Columbian and Latin
American Art; Asian Art, Islamic Art; African Art; African Diaspora; Art
Criticism and Theory. 2
It is clear from this grouping that the entire gamut of Asian Art
(Chinese, South-East Asia, South Asia and even Middle Eastern) is
clubbed under the catch-all phrase ‘Asian Art’ – a category that comes
much after ‘mainstream’ European art, and is clubbed with overtly
religious classes like ‘Islamic Art’, with a hint of primitivism like
‘Latin American and African Art’, and certainly is an offshoot of the
main branches of art history. This is the second challenge that South
Asian art faces: to evolve and emerge from being an offshoot of the art
history tree to being a unique discipline in its own right. Much like
architecture, South Asian art faces the challenge of being marginalized,
of having to answer to canons that are developed in the West. This
quasi-Darwinian legacy of Asian art also means that Asian artists are
forever struggling to make their art answer to principles of art
appreciation that have been evolved in the West, making Indian art a
branch, not a main focus of study. Indian art remains ‘Indian’, and
struggles to make the leap from its prefix to that of simply ‘art’.
 This
introduction to Indian art strives to overcome these fallacies in
different ways : by ascribing meaning and intent to Indian art, by
unearthing the purpose of the artisan and patron so as to ascribe a
meaning that can be judged on the basis of original intent rather than
Western aesthetics, and also by treating Indian art at a par with its
Western contemporaries.
This introduction will also avoid dividing Indian art into dynasties,
avoiding narrow divisions such as Gupta art, Hellenic art, Islamic art,
and so on. The reason for this is that art in the Indian subcontinent
was as much a product of traveling groups of artisans rather than
dynastic or kingly patronage. This is the reason why Hellenic art, for
example, can be found in South Asia just as much as Greece, why Persian
influences mix with the Hellenic in Kushan art, and why Rajasthani
schools of painting and Mughal schools borrow so much from each other to
create a composite picture of miniature painting.
The second facet of this introduction is its geographic sweep. Indian
art – I purposely avoid for the moment the word ‘South Asian’ also
includes within its ambit influences from, and outward impulses to,
geographies of the world as diverse as Indonesia, Thailand, China,
Japan, Persia and Central Asia. This series will attempt to bring these
diverse influences, where possible, under question and examine the truly
continental nature of ancient and medieval Indian art, as also the
global influences that modern Indian art has imbibed, as also the ways
in which a globalized, connected world has influenced the production of
art in South Asia. It is only by stressing upon the global nature of
South Asian art that we can perhaps make the jump from treating this
subject as an offshoot of the world history of art, to a synchronous
event in world history that is as connected to its global cousins as it
is indivisible from them. This approach would be proper, as it is no
longer possible for the serious student or professional of art or
cultural history to remain within a narrow confine of cultures,
continents or time periods.
References:
1. Ananda K Coomaraswamy. An Approach to Indian Art. Parnassus, Vol. 7
No 7 pp. 17-20
2. Robert S Nelson. The Map of Art History The Art Bulletin Vol 79 No. 1
pp. 28-40.
Images:
Detail from Three
Pujarins. Jamini Roy.
Detail from Portrait
of a Gentleman, Raja
Ravi Varma.
August 16, 2009
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