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Passing Thoughts Volume I – Feb. 12, 1910 – No. 32 Vedantic Art
The progress a new tendency or a new movement is making can be measured by the amount of opposition it meets, and it is encouraging to note that the revival of Indian Art exciting intellectual opponents to adverse criticism. Mr. Vincent Smith, a solid and well-equipped scholar and historian but not hitherto noted as an art-critic, recently lectured on Indian Art, ancient and modern. It is not surprising that he should find little to praise in the characteristic Vedantic Art of our country and seek to limit its excellence to a few masterpieces. Neither is it surprising that he should object to the revival of the national traditions as restoring Brahminic separateness from the traditions of the rest of the world. These are arguments that are as obvious as they are superficial. But it is strange to find him basing his opinion of the inferiority of the Vedantic style on its appeal not being universal. This merely means that the Vedantic motive and conventions are new to the European mind, and the average eye, enslaved to old associations, cannot immediately welcome what is new and ill-understood. Every new step forward in artistic tradition within Europe itself has been met by the same limited comprehension and has had to get the assent first of the trained and sensitive taste and then of the average mind before it could be said to be universally recognised. The real question is whether the Vedantic style has anything in it that is true, deep and universal, whether it has a motive, a power of interpretation, a success in making Truth reveal itself in form, such as will ensure its conquest of prejudices based purely on inability to receive or welcome new impressions. The answer to that crucial question cannot be doubtful. Vedantic Art reveals spirit, essential truth, the soul in the body, the lasting type or idea in the mutable form with a power and masterly revelation of which European art is incapable. It is therefore sure to conquer Europe as steadily
Page – 396 as Indian thought and knowledge are conquering the hard and narrow materialism of the nineteenth century.
Small things are often indicative of great and far-reaching tendencies. While glancing at the Modern Review, — always the best worth perusal of our Indian monthlies, — our attention was arrested by a slight illustrated article on Railways in India and America. The writer contrasts the squalor, indigence and discomfort of railway travelling in this Paradise of the efficient Anglo-Indian with the lavish comfort and opulence of railway furnishings and appointments in the United States. The contrast is indicative of the immense gulf between the teeming wealth of America and the miserable indigence of India, once the richest country in the world. America is the land above all lands where enjoyment, Bhoga, is frankly recognised and accepted. India, many would say, is the land above all lands where Bhoga is sternly refused. That is the common view; we are not inclined to think it the correct view. The asceticism of India is a phase, a characteristic of a civilisation dominated by an unfavourable environment and driven in upon itself. The classical period when India was full of life, activity, development, abounding vigour, defending herself successfully against the impact of the outer barbarian, was a period of frank and lavish enjoyment far more intellectual, artistic, perfect than any thing Europe has ever been capable of, even at its best. In yet older literature we find the true spirit of India, a splendid capacity for Bhoga and Tyaga in their highest terms, the utter enjoyment of the householder, the utter renunciation of the Sannyasin. To take the utmost joy of life, to be capable of the utmost renunciation of life, at one and the same time, in the same mind and body, to be master of both capacities and bound by neither, — this was the secret of India, the mighty discipline of which Janaka was the traditional exemplar. "Renounce all that thou mayest enjoy all", — this is India’s characteristic message, — not Buddha’s absolute renunciation, not the European’s enslavement to his bodily, vital and intellec-
Page – 397 tual desires and appetites. Tyaga within, Bhoga without, — Ananda, the divine delight of the purified soul, embracing both.
We extract elsewhere a brief article on the above subject from the December Indian Review for which we had no space in our former issues. The ancient Indian treatment of foreign residents forms a curious contrast to the spirit of exclusion which is growing upon modern nations. We have our own doubts about that little privilege of exemption from suits for debt which Mr. Hayavadana Rau mentions with appreciation; it would obviously place the alien merchant at a disadvantage when compared with the scrupulous honesty of the Indian traders, and we are not sure that it may not have been a subtle stroke of Chanakya-like diplomacy to coddle the resident foreign middle-man out of existence while favouring the non-resident importer. The chief importance of the article is, however, the incidental light it throws on the organisation of life in ancient India. We are too apt to forget how noble, great and well-appointed a life it was. There were no railways, telegraphs or steamships, it is true, and democracy was beginning to go out of fashion in favour of a centralised bureaucratic monarchy. But in spite of these drawbacks, the ancient life of India was as splendid, as careful, as convenient, as humane, as enlightened in its organisation as that of any modern society or administration.
We are not concerned with the political issues of Mr. Risley’s great oratorical effort in connection with the Press Bill, for we have renounced politics; but Mr. Risley as a scholar falls within our province, and we can only hope our remarks on that subject will not expose us to the provision against bringing officials into contempt. Even at that risk we must take leave to say that we can only hope Mr. Risley’s ethnological science is less remarkably
Page – 398 muddled than his knowledge of Indian civilisation and literature. In his exhortation to Indian womanhood to stand fast to its ancient moorings he jumbles together Swaymvaras, the rape of the Sabines and Shacuntala in a miraculous fashion ! At no Swayamvara that we are aware of, did the women come forward as peacemakers between the abducting hero and the disappointed suitors. Mr. Risley has been misled by pitch-forking his early memories of Roman history into Indian epic and narrative. And need we say that there was neither Swayamvara, nor fighting nor peacemaking in the story of Shacuntala ? This is the first time, moreover, that a startled Indian public has been pointed to Shacuntala as the ideal Hindu woman. Sita, Draupadi, Savitri, Damayanti, — these are familiar to us as ideals, but Shacuntala is Mr. Risley’s own addition. To us she is a beautiful poetic creation, not an exemplar of feminine conduct. We observe that the Bengalee is full of admiration for Mr. Risley’s poetic rapture over Shacuntala. We do not know whom we should congratulate more, the poet of the Press Bill or his admirer.
Are we not entitled, by the way, in the interests of the English language, to protest against the misapplication of the word Anarchists to the Indian Terrorists and Anarchism to their policy ? Their methods are wild and lawless, their effort is to create anarchy; but Anarchism and Anarchist are terms which imply something very different, a thing as yet unknown either in practice or in theory to India. The Irish Fenians did the same things as the Indian Terrorists are now practising, but nobody ever called them Anarchists; to misapply this term is to bring anarchy into the modern use of language. It is doubtful whether any Indian who has not been to Europe, really knows what Anarchism is. Philosophically, it is the negation of the necessity of government; in practice, it is often the use of assassination to destroy all government irrespective of its nationality or nature. Democracy is as abhorrent to the Anarchist as Czarism, a national government as intolerable as the government of the foreigner.
Page – 399 All government is to him an interference with the liberty of the individual, and he sets out to assassinate Czar or democratic President, constitutional king or imperial Caesar with a terrible impartiality, an insane logicality. For if we ask him how liberty of any kind except the liberty of the strong to prey on the weak can exist in the absence of government, he will probably answer that by right education, right ideas and right feelings will be established and the spirit of brotherhood will prevent the abuse of liberty, and if anyone infringes this unwritten law, he must be destroyed as if he were a noxious wild beast. And by a parallel logic he seeks to destroy all the living symbols of a state of society which stands in the way of the coming of his millennium.
Mr. Risley repeats a charge we have grown familiar with, that the Gita has been misused as a gospel of Terrorism. We cannot find any basis for this accusation except the bare fact that the teaching of the Gita was part of the education given by Upendranath Banerji in the Maniktola garden. There is no evidence to show that its tenets were used to justify a gospel of Terrorism. The only doctrine of the Gita the Terrorist can pervert to his use, is the dictum that the Kshatriya must slay as a part of his duty and he can do it without sin if he puts egoism away and acts selflessly, without attachment, in and for God, as a sacrifice, as an offering of action to the Lord of action. If this teaching is in itself false, there is no moral basis for the hero, the soldier, the judge, the king, the legislature which recognises capital punishment. They must all be condemned as criminals and offenders against humanity. It is undoubtedly true that since the revival of religious thought in India the Gita has ceased to be what Mr. Risley calls it, a transcendental philosophy, and has been made a rule of life. It is undoubtedly true that selflessness, courage, a free and noble activity have been preached as the kernel of the ethics of the Gita. That teaching has in no country been condemned as ignoble, criminal or subversive of morality, nor is a philosophy of any value to any sensible being if it is only transcendental and
Page – 400 cannot be lived. We strongly protest against the brand of suspicion that has been sought to be placed in many quarters on the teaching and possession of the Gita, — our chief national heritage, our hope for the future, our great force for the purification of the moral weaknesses that stain and hamper our people.
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