About the Book
The Dance of Shiva was a remarkable book for its
time. It discussed in depth the unique nature of the Indian ethos understood by
so few in the Western world and misinterpreted by so many. A collection of
fourteen leactures, these essays on Indian art and culture offer a lucid
representation of the opinion and attitudes held by Indian intellectuals during the
British Raj
Ranging from topics such as music during vedic times, Indian attitudes
towards family, women and love analyses of the symbolism of Nataraja and the
many armed gods of India to the Indian concept of
beauty. The dance of Shiva
is an effervescent account of
the Indian experience through the ages.
About the
Author
Ananda Coomaraswamy
(1877-1947)
was a philosopher, historian and a patron of Indian art and culture. He a patron of Indian art and culture. He introduced an
essence of ancient Indian art and its principle to the Western world through a
number of books and articles. His life’s work was dedicated to metaphysics and
symbolism, and he is regarded as one of the founders of the Perennialism
movement.
Introduction
I first encountered The Dance of Shiva in the library of the Indian.
Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla.
I was working on my PhD thesis, and thanks to my husband being a Fellow at the
Institute, I had access to the wonderful library collection there. One of my
chapters dealt with Shiva in the form of Nataraja, exemplified in the icons in
stone and bronze of the Chola period. I remember
reading with awe the description that Coomaraswamy
gave of the philosophical dimensions of Shiva's dance, thereby interpreting the
icon of Nataraja as the perfect amalgam of the mythical, philosophical and
aesthetic aspects of Indian culture. I was greatly moved by Coomaraswamy's
interpretation, and it influenced my reading of the rich iconographic material
that I was working with in the context of South
India.
One of the major arguments that Coomaraswamy
makes with regard to Shiva's dance relates to its cosmic significance,
symbolizing the creation, maintenance and destruction of the universe, and
ultimately its rejuvenation. In other words, the dance of Shiva is the
signifier of cosmic activity envisaged in five aspects (pancakritya): srishti or creation, sthiti or maintenance, samhara or destruction, tirobhava or disappearance/concealment and anugraha or grace. In fact, the pancakshara,
the five
syllables, in Shiva's name-na- ma-shi-va-ya-are
themselves seen
as representing this five-fold creative activity of the god. What Shiva creates
is both the manifest and unmanifest world; what he
destroys are the illusory bonds that fetter, not only the world at large, but
every individual soul. The symbolism of fire, a visual connect between the
earth and the sky, the perceived and the intuitive and the tangible and the
intangible, is analyzed through the association of Shiva's dance with the
burning grounds. This is then represented in the beautiful circle of fire-the tiruvasi-that encompasses the icon of Shiva as Nataraja in the
Indic imagination. The ananda or bliss of Shiva's dance,
ultimately, is to meditate upon the destruction of maya (illusion), the trampling of mala,
anava and avidya ("evil"), and the
freeing of the soul from the bonds of karma (causality/rebirth). I am
certain that no one who reads this essay on Shiva's dance can remain unmoved by it, which
explains why luminaries like Rabindranath Tagore, Fritjof Capra and Romain Rolland,
among others, have lavished praise on it.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy
was born on 22 August 1877 in Colombo, Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known).
His father was Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy,
a distinguished figure in Ceylon's political life, who became a Tamil
representative of the Legislative Council in the system of separate electorates
introduced during British colonial rule. His mother was an Englishwoman, Elizabeth
Clay Beebe. When Ananda's father died two years after
his birth, his mother returned to England with her only child. In England,
Ananda received the best of education, and was awarded a bachelor's degree in
geology and botany in 1900. Three years later, he was appointed Director of the
Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon, a position he held till 1907. He travelled
around the country extensively, a job requirement, and in the process got to
learn about the traditional arts and crafts of Sri Lanka. His first publication,
Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908), was the result of these initial efforts, and
remains one of the best catalogues of the region's craft traditions.
Perhaps his travels inspired him, or it could be the
experience of living in the colony after growing up in the centre of the
empire: Coomaraswamy came to understand the nature of
colonialism, and the significance of nationalism in the Indian subcontinent and
in Sri Lanka. And of course, one must remember that his father was a well-known
political figure. At any rate, Coomaraswamy entered
the public domain not merely as a government servant but also as a social
reformer with a political agenda. He founded the Ceylon Social Reform Society
in 1905, and published a journal, The Ceylon National
Review, from
1906 to 1911.1 The philosophy behind the society and
its activities was to retrieve and rejuvenate the traditional art and culture
of Sri Lanka, embodied in the village communities that were untouched by the
phony westernization of the educated urban population. In a rather Gandhian manner, he declared that the village, not
industrialization, could truly bring about modern progress, because the
community ensured the economic security of all its members. Despite what his
critics argued, Coomaraswamy's
romantic idealization of the illiterate villager who carried with him an
intrinsic knowledge of the unbreakable bonds between nature, life and a higher
being (he often used the term interchangeably with God) did not stem from any
parochialism. On the contrary, he often talked of two essential requisites for
social reform. First, that the basis for the
revitalization of society should be cultural pluralism, and hence all Sri
Lankans should be taught Sanskrit, Pali, Sinhala and
Tamil so that they could truly appreciate their culture. (Related to this was
his belief that the Sri Lankan heritage cannot be separated from the Indian
one.) And second, that the ideal requirement of modern times was the blending
of the superior features of Eastern civilization with the best features of the
West.
From the 1930s, Coomaraswamy
was greatly influenced by the Traditionalist Movement spearheaded by Rene! Guenon in France, particularly its evocation of the Philosophia Perennis. The
latter affirmed the creation of all religions and philosophies from one
primordial source, which explained the essential unity and truth of all great
traditions. Coomaraswamy's constant reference, when
talking of Hindu and Buddhist art, to the underlying symbolism, cultural ideas
and values that coloured every aspect of art and architectural design was the
result of his belief in the common, unchanging philosophical core of all
Eastern civilizations. When he spoke of the villager or someone rooted in the
community as someone who carried within him or her a
sense of the past, he was essentially referring to this value system. He was
convinced that no study of Indian art, or indeed of any culture, would be
complete with a clinical analysis of measurements and structure, or even with
written texts as the final authority. For him, the ordinary artisan who was
illiterate but who had learned his craft from his father, who had picked it up
from his father before him, carried this sense of what constituted the essence
of a religion, culture or symbolic universe. This was why,
he believed, no matter which part of the subcontinent you went to, you would
feel, despite the regional variations, a sense of deja vu.
These then were the concerns that informed Ananda Coomaraswamy's writings, be they academic analyses of early
Indian architecture or his more polemical essays on nationalism. Today, it is
the fashion to debunk Coomaraswamy and his philosophy
of art, and most scholars would try to distance themselves from his
interpretative frameworks. He has been roundly condemned for his exoticization and romanticizing of Indian (what he meant
actually was South Asian) culture and tradition. Some have even accused him of
over- reading the sources. His ideas are seen as bordering on obscurantism, and
he is condemned for valorizing patriarchal and other
regressive social norms. This is especially with regard to his more political
and reformist essays.
Over the past decade, teaching a course on the
history of early Indian art and architecture in JNU, I have found Coomaraswamy re-enter my frames of reference in a major
way. I find myself faced with a peculiar problem when I discuss the work of
stalwarts like Coomaraswamy and Stella Kramrisch, another legend in the field of art. Students
refuse to read them unmediated by the fasbionistas of the art history world, and
very often there is an empty echoing of the sophisticated critiques of the
apparently "traditionalist" viewpoint. Coomaraswamy
was no fool, and he vehemently denied the label of "traditionalist"
that he accused some critics of employing for the sake of convenience, and to
avoid acknowledging the core questions he and others were raising: 1) that the
appreciation of ancient art in the 19th and early 20th centuries was mired in
the cultural degeneration of contemporary Europe, and 2) that the
"manufacture" of the art object had removed it from the realm of art
to that of commerce? It may have been appropriate for him to talk of the
European colonial domination with regard to the first point. In many ways, his
critique of modern art and art sensibilities anticipated the more sophisticated
articulation by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" (1938), despite a fundamental difference in their
political ideology-Benjamin was a Marxist, and Coomaraswamy
was deeply suspicious of Marxists. On the contexts of production Benjamin says:
"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one
element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place
where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the
history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.',6 And again, "that which withers in the age of
mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic
process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize
by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from
the domain of tradition."? Clearly, Coomaraswamy
was not alone in recognizing the refashioning of taste, culture and
particularly, consumption by modernity in post-industrialized societies of the
West. But possibly what attracts the plentiful criticism that is laid at his
door is his open avowal of the philosophy of Perennialism.
To my mind, no one who has travelled the length and
breadth of India, and indeed South Asia, would dispute Coomaraswamy's
claim that the local knowledge-keepers, whom we tend to dismiss summarily,
often reveal deep insights into the history and culture of a particular site,
locality and even region. More importantly, I have read a number of scholarly
works that describe, enumerate and categorize monuments that leave me
untouched-they could be talking about anything under the sun, they are that
banal. Even worse for me is the high theoretical spiel that gets thrown at us
ever so often in the name of art appreciation, where, when I do manage to plod
through some of these, I wonder if we're talking about the same object, monument
or culture! I am not advocating an uncritical acceptance of Coomaraswamy's
ideas and writings. But I do think that by pushing his insights outside our frames of
analyses, we would be doing him and ourselves a great disservice.
The Dance of Shiva remains one of my favourite
readings, and in this collection of essays, we have an interesting mix of
scholarly wisdom, social activism and political rhetoric. This year, we have
just passed the 135th birth anniversary of Ananda Coomaraswamy,
and I am happy that, in a fitting tribute to the great thinker, Rupa is reissuing this volume. The academic and the general
reader will find this volume valuable as much for the insights it gives us into
the life and times of Ananda Coomaraswamy as for its
sheer scholarship.
Contents
Introduction |
|
What
has India Contributed to Human Welfare? |
1 |
Hindu
View of Art: HISTORICAL |
17 |
Hindu
View of Art: THEORY OF BEAUTY |
28 |
That
Beauty is a State |
35 |
Buddhist
Primitives |
43 |
The
Dance of Shiva |
52 |
Indian
Images with Many Arms |
63 |
Indian
Music |
94 |
Status
of Indian Women |
105 |
Sahaja |
127 |
Intellectual
Fraternity |
136 |
Cosmopolitan
View of Nietzsche |
140 |
Young
India |
147 |
Individuality,
Autonomy and Function |
163 |
Notes |
166 |
About the Book
The Dance of Shiva was a remarkable book for its
time. It discussed in depth the unique nature of the Indian ethos understood by
so few in the Western world and misinterpreted by so many. A collection of
fourteen leactures, these essays on Indian art and culture offer a lucid
representation of the opinion and attitudes held by Indian intellectuals during the
British Raj
Ranging from topics such as music during vedic times, Indian attitudes
towards family, women and love analyses of the symbolism of Nataraja and the
many armed gods of India to the Indian concept of
beauty. The dance of Shiva
is an effervescent account of
the Indian experience through the ages.
About the
Author
Ananda Coomaraswamy
(1877-1947)
was a philosopher, historian and a patron of Indian art and culture. He a patron of Indian art and culture. He introduced an
essence of ancient Indian art and its principle to the Western world through a
number of books and articles. His life’s work was dedicated to metaphysics and
symbolism, and he is regarded as one of the founders of the Perennialism
movement.
Introduction
I first encountered The Dance of Shiva in the library of the Indian.
Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla.
I was working on my PhD thesis, and thanks to my husband being a Fellow at the
Institute, I had access to the wonderful library collection there. One of my
chapters dealt with Shiva in the form of Nataraja, exemplified in the icons in
stone and bronze of the Chola period. I remember
reading with awe the description that Coomaraswamy
gave of the philosophical dimensions of Shiva's dance, thereby interpreting the
icon of Nataraja as the perfect amalgam of the mythical, philosophical and
aesthetic aspects of Indian culture. I was greatly moved by Coomaraswamy's
interpretation, and it influenced my reading of the rich iconographic material
that I was working with in the context of South
India.
One of the major arguments that Coomaraswamy
makes with regard to Shiva's dance relates to its cosmic significance,
symbolizing the creation, maintenance and destruction of the universe, and
ultimately its rejuvenation. In other words, the dance of Shiva is the
signifier of cosmic activity envisaged in five aspects (pancakritya): srishti or creation, sthiti or maintenance, samhara or destruction, tirobhava or disappearance/concealment and anugraha or grace. In fact, the pancakshara,
the five
syllables, in Shiva's name-na- ma-shi-va-ya-are
themselves seen
as representing this five-fold creative activity of the god. What Shiva creates
is both the manifest and unmanifest world; what he
destroys are the illusory bonds that fetter, not only the world at large, but
every individual soul. The symbolism of fire, a visual connect between the
earth and the sky, the perceived and the intuitive and the tangible and the
intangible, is analyzed through the association of Shiva's dance with the
burning grounds. This is then represented in the beautiful circle of fire-the tiruvasi-that encompasses the icon of Shiva as Nataraja in the
Indic imagination. The ananda or bliss of Shiva's dance,
ultimately, is to meditate upon the destruction of maya (illusion), the trampling of mala,
anava and avidya ("evil"), and the
freeing of the soul from the bonds of karma (causality/rebirth). I am
certain that no one who reads this essay on Shiva's dance can remain unmoved by it, which
explains why luminaries like Rabindranath Tagore, Fritjof Capra and Romain Rolland,
among others, have lavished praise on it.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy
was born on 22 August 1877 in Colombo, Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known).
His father was Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy,
a distinguished figure in Ceylon's political life, who became a Tamil
representative of the Legislative Council in the system of separate electorates
introduced during British colonial rule. His mother was an Englishwoman, Elizabeth
Clay Beebe. When Ananda's father died two years after
his birth, his mother returned to England with her only child. In England,
Ananda received the best of education, and was awarded a bachelor's degree in
geology and botany in 1900. Three years later, he was appointed Director of the
Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon, a position he held till 1907. He travelled
around the country extensively, a job requirement, and in the process got to
learn about the traditional arts and crafts of Sri Lanka. His first publication,
Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908), was the result of these initial efforts, and
remains one of the best catalogues of the region's craft traditions.
Perhaps his travels inspired him, or it could be the
experience of living in the colony after growing up in the centre of the
empire: Coomaraswamy came to understand the nature of
colonialism, and the significance of nationalism in the Indian subcontinent and
in Sri Lanka. And of course, one must remember that his father was a well-known
political figure. At any rate, Coomaraswamy entered
the public domain not merely as a government servant but also as a social
reformer with a political agenda. He founded the Ceylon Social Reform Society
in 1905, and published a journal, The Ceylon National
Review, from
1906 to 1911.1 The philosophy behind the society and
its activities was to retrieve and rejuvenate the traditional art and culture
of Sri Lanka, embodied in the village communities that were untouched by the
phony westernization of the educated urban population. In a rather Gandhian manner, he declared that the village, not
industrialization, could truly bring about modern progress, because the
community ensured the economic security of all its members. Despite what his
critics argued, Coomaraswamy's
romantic idealization of the illiterate villager who carried with him an
intrinsic knowledge of the unbreakable bonds between nature, life and a higher
being (he often used the term interchangeably with God) did not stem from any
parochialism. On the contrary, he often talked of two essential requisites for
social reform. First, that the basis for the
revitalization of society should be cultural pluralism, and hence all Sri
Lankans should be taught Sanskrit, Pali, Sinhala and
Tamil so that they could truly appreciate their culture. (Related to this was
his belief that the Sri Lankan heritage cannot be separated from the Indian
one.) And second, that the ideal requirement of modern times was the blending
of the superior features of Eastern civilization with the best features of the
West.
From the 1930s, Coomaraswamy
was greatly influenced by the Traditionalist Movement spearheaded by Rene! Guenon in France, particularly its evocation of the Philosophia Perennis. The
latter affirmed the creation of all religions and philosophies from one
primordial source, which explained the essential unity and truth of all great
traditions. Coomaraswamy's constant reference, when
talking of Hindu and Buddhist art, to the underlying symbolism, cultural ideas
and values that coloured every aspect of art and architectural design was the
result of his belief in the common, unchanging philosophical core of all
Eastern civilizations. When he spoke of the villager or someone rooted in the
community as someone who carried within him or her a
sense of the past, he was essentially referring to this value system. He was
convinced that no study of Indian art, or indeed of any culture, would be
complete with a clinical analysis of measurements and structure, or even with
written texts as the final authority. For him, the ordinary artisan who was
illiterate but who had learned his craft from his father, who had picked it up
from his father before him, carried this sense of what constituted the essence
of a religion, culture or symbolic universe. This was why,
he believed, no matter which part of the subcontinent you went to, you would
feel, despite the regional variations, a sense of deja vu.
These then were the concerns that informed Ananda Coomaraswamy's writings, be they academic analyses of early
Indian architecture or his more polemical essays on nationalism. Today, it is
the fashion to debunk Coomaraswamy and his philosophy
of art, and most scholars would try to distance themselves from his
interpretative frameworks. He has been roundly condemned for his exoticization and romanticizing of Indian (what he meant
actually was South Asian) culture and tradition. Some have even accused him of
over- reading the sources. His ideas are seen as bordering on obscurantism, and
he is condemned for valorizing patriarchal and other
regressive social norms. This is especially with regard to his more political
and reformist essays.
Over the past decade, teaching a course on the
history of early Indian art and architecture in JNU, I have found Coomaraswamy re-enter my frames of reference in a major
way. I find myself faced with a peculiar problem when I discuss the work of
stalwarts like Coomaraswamy and Stella Kramrisch, another legend in the field of art. Students
refuse to read them unmediated by the fasbionistas of the art history world, and
very often there is an empty echoing of the sophisticated critiques of the
apparently "traditionalist" viewpoint. Coomaraswamy
was no fool, and he vehemently denied the label of "traditionalist"
that he accused some critics of employing for the sake of convenience, and to
avoid acknowledging the core questions he and others were raising: 1) that the
appreciation of ancient art in the 19th and early 20th centuries was mired in
the cultural degeneration of contemporary Europe, and 2) that the
"manufacture" of the art object had removed it from the realm of art
to that of commerce? It may have been appropriate for him to talk of the
European colonial domination with regard to the first point. In many ways, his
critique of modern art and art sensibilities anticipated the more sophisticated
articulation by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" (1938), despite a fundamental difference in their
political ideology-Benjamin was a Marxist, and Coomaraswamy
was deeply suspicious of Marxists. On the contexts of production Benjamin says:
"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one
element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place
where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the
history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.',6 And again, "that which withers in the age of
mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic
process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize
by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from
the domain of tradition."? Clearly, Coomaraswamy
was not alone in recognizing the refashioning of taste, culture and
particularly, consumption by modernity in post-industrialized societies of the
West. But possibly what attracts the plentiful criticism that is laid at his
door is his open avowal of the philosophy of Perennialism.
To my mind, no one who has travelled the length and
breadth of India, and indeed South Asia, would dispute Coomaraswamy's
claim that the local knowledge-keepers, whom we tend to dismiss summarily,
often reveal deep insights into the history and culture of a particular site,
locality and even region. More importantly, I have read a number of scholarly
works that describe, enumerate and categorize monuments that leave me
untouched-they could be talking about anything under the sun, they are that
banal. Even worse for me is the high theoretical spiel that gets thrown at us
ever so often in the name of art appreciation, where, when I do manage to plod
through some of these, I wonder if we're talking about the same object, monument
or culture! I am not advocating an uncritical acceptance of Coomaraswamy's
ideas and writings. But I do think that by pushing his insights outside our frames of
analyses, we would be doing him and ourselves a great disservice.
The Dance of Shiva remains one of my favourite
readings, and in this collection of essays, we have an interesting mix of
scholarly wisdom, social activism and political rhetoric. This year, we have
just passed the 135th birth anniversary of Ananda Coomaraswamy,
and I am happy that, in a fitting tribute to the great thinker, Rupa is reissuing this volume. The academic and the general
reader will find this volume valuable as much for the insights it gives us into
the life and times of Ananda Coomaraswamy as for its
sheer scholarship.
Contents
Introduction |
|
What
has India Contributed to Human Welfare? |
1 |
Hindu
View of Art: HISTORICAL |
17 |
Hindu
View of Art: THEORY OF BEAUTY |
28 |
That
Beauty is a State |
35 |
Buddhist
Primitives |
43 |
The
Dance of Shiva |
52 |
Indian
Images with Many Arms |
63 |
Indian
Music |
94 |
Status
of Indian Women |
105 |
Sahaja |
127 |
Intellectual
Fraternity |
136 |
Cosmopolitan
View of Nietzsche |
140 |
Young
India |
147 |
Individuality,
Autonomy and Function |
163 |
Notes |
166 |