I had the unique good fortune of meeting the son of Ananda Coomaraswamy Dr Rama Coomaramaswamy and his wife at my residence in Besant Nagar on the 12 December 1990.  I had a long discussion with Dr Rama Coomaraswamy on his father’s life and work.

Front cover of the journal gifted to me by Dr Rama CoomaraswamyWe can see the writing and signature of Dr Rama Coomaraswamy

 

He gifted to me a rare and special issue of ‘JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN SOCIETY OF RIENTAL ART’, a Commemoration Volume on Ananda Coomaraswamy edited by Abanindranath Tagore and Stella Kramrisch and published in 1947 soon after the death of Ananda Coomaraswamy in USA on 9 September 1947.

Dr Rama Coomaraswamy told me that his beloved father was a great Champion of Indian economic, social and cultural (artistic and spiritual) nationalism. In this context, it was he who invited my attention to a brilliant editorial on Ananda Coomaraswamy published in The Statesman of Calcutta on 22 September 1909. This editorial was titled ‘ABOVE POLITICS’.  No newspaper in India today in English is capable of this kind of total and spiritual understanding of the soul of Mother India. Most of our newspapers are soulless advertisement collecting ‘commercial’ entities. I am presenting below excerpts from The Statesman editorial: of 22 September 1909:

‘We shall be much interested to see what reception will be given to the eloquent and forcible little volume which the distinguished Indian Art Critic Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy has just published under the title of ‘THE MESSAGE OF THE EAST’.  This scholarly thinker and lover of Art finds little to please him in the present day condition of India.  He sees the politicians in the ascendancy and most of them afflicted with the delusion, as he holds it, that if India is to be regenerated she must work out her salvation by competing with Manchester in the manufacture of cheap cotton goods or by the indigenous production of matches, soap and fountain pens.  And while the advocates of SWADESHI are engaged in this misguided effort, all that is most characteristic of India, including the Arts which made her the wonder and envy of the world, is perishing from neglect’.

‘From his point of view the whole Swadeshi Movement as at present directed, makes not for the elevation, but for the degradation of India, not for restoring national life but for destroying all that gives any ground for hoping that India will one day proclaim her message to the learning West.  ‘Go into a Swadeshi Shop’, he writes, ‘you will not find the evidences of Indian invention, the wealth of beauty which the Indian Craftsman used to lavish on the simplest articles of daily use…. You will not find these things, but you will find every kind of imitation of the productions of European Commerce, differing only from their unlovely prototypes in their slightly higher price and slightly inferior quality.’  This is plain speaking indeed’.

‘Such a grotesque ideal could not, he asserts have been conceived by men who understood and loved India.  It will amaze the Congressmen, the political organisers, and the orators of mass meetings who claim to feel the pulse of the Indian people and to be promoting their best interests to be told that they have no real and intelligent affection for their country. But eloquent art critic Ananda Coomaraswamy has no hesitation in the matter’.

Not only Ananda Coomaraswamy had the courage to speak out the harsh and bitter truth.  Even ‘The Statesman’ of Calcutta seemed to agree with him.  Do we have such independent spirited English Newspapers in the culturally dying India of today?

In his ‘The Message of the East’ Ananda Coomaraswamy concluded ‘This loss of beauty in our lives is a proof that we do not love India for India, above all nations, was beautiful not long ago.  It is the weakness of our national movement that we do not love India, we love suburban England, we love the comfortable bourgeois prosperity that is to be some day established when we have learned enough science and forgotten enough art to successfully compete with Europe in a commercial war conducted on its present lines.  IT IS NOT THUS THAT NATIONS ARE MADE’.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Britannia ruled the waves and the concept that the sun never sets on the British Empire became a global slogan. It is amazing that in such a dark and gloomy atmosphere Coomaraswamy should have become the philosopher of what he called ‘National Idealism’ and a bitter critic of British imperialism. He also became a great propagandist of Indian nationalism. G A Natesan, the incomparable pamphleteer of India’s freedom movement and internationally known editor of the journal ‘INDIAN REVIEW’ published from Madras, was the first to recognise the original creative genius and patriotism of Ananda Coomaraswamy. G A Natesan published a work of Coomaraswamy in 1915 under the title ‘Essays in National Idealism’

Ananda Coomaraswamy with Rabindranath Tagore in 1911

 

Coomaraswamy’s wanderings in India in the first decade of the 20th century brought him in touch with the nationalists and intellectuals, especially the Tagores in Bengal. With the Tagores, Abanindranath, Rabindranath and Gaganindranath, Coomaraswamy established a personal rapport instantly. Through them he came to know Nandalal Bose and others of the Tagore circle. He came in touch with Rai Krishnadasa of Benares and Mukundilal, who knew much about the painters of the Himalayan Hills and others. Through these contacts, he was able to understand the intricacies of the cultural component of Indian nationalism. At first hand he could understand the spirit of renaissance that was sweeping through India much before the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi on the Indian political scene in 1915.

In India, Coomaraswamy found throughout the length and breadth of the country, the potters and weavers, the iron smiths and goldsmiths, the basket makers and mat-weavers, while preserving their traditions and norms were in dire economic distress. Under the impact of industrialism, which the British rulers were fast introducing into the country, the millennia-old patterns were changing.

Thus, out of his personal discoveries and many influences, Coomaraswamy forged a philosophy of his own 60 years ago, which has total relevance in the India of today. At that time, the nationalists were concerned only with greater participation in running the affairs of the country and in greater concessions for the rising Indian bourgeois than in discovering the splendour ‘that was India’. The art-minded Tagores and their friends and admirers belonging as they did to Bengal and its pioneering efforts at cultural renaissance naturally entranced Coomaraswamy.

Out of the encounter with Indian nationalism came Ananda Coomaraswamy’s book ESSAYS IN INDIAN NATIONALISM published in 1911. In my view this book written 97 years ago deserves re-reading by the present day intellectuals. There is much of inspiration that could be drawn from this slender book. There were 15 essays on topics like ‘Indian Nationality’, ‘Gramophones & Why Not?’, ‘The Influence of Modern Europe on Indian Art’, ‘Memory in Education’, ‘The Christian Missions in India’ and ‘Music and Education in India’.

A few passages deserve to be quoted from this book. In his preface, Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote: ‘To a few it may appear strange that in a book devoted to the ends of Indian nationalism, so much space should be given to art and so little said of politics. It is because nations are made by artists and poets, not by traders and politicians. I do not believe in any regeneration of the Indian people, which cannot find expression in art; any awakening worth the name must so express itself. Only by thus becoming artists and poets, can we again understand our own art and poetry and thereby attain the highest ideal of nationality, the will and power to give. About 500 years hence it will matter little to humanity whether a few Indians, more or less, have held official posts in India or a few million bales of cloth have been manufactured in Bombay or Lancashire factories; but it will matter much whether the great ideals of Indian culture have been carried forward or allowed to die. It is with these ideals that Indian nationalism is essentially concerned and upon these ideals that the fate of India as a nation depends’.

Ananda Coomaraswamy clearly saw the political storm created by the Swadeshi movement that was affecting India during the period from 1905 to 1914. Leaving aside the economic and political aspects of the movement to others, he confined himself to the cultural side. He made out a powerful plea for the regeneration of Indian arts and crafts and put it in eloquent language. This is how he condemned the vulgarisation all round at that time: ‘Look around about you and the vulgarisation of modern India. Our prostitution of art to the tourist trade, our use of kerosene tins for water jars and galvanised zinc sheets for tiles for roof tops, our caricature of European dress, our homes furnished and ornamented in the style proverbial of seaside lodging houses, with cut-glass chandeliers and China dogs and artificial flowers, our devotion to the harmonium and the gramophone. These things are the outward and damaging proof of some mighty evil in our souls’.

These are all days of ISO 9001, ISO 8900 and what not. Ananda Coomaraswamy was a powerful advocate of superior quality of Indian handicrafts and handlooms. Without artistic understanding, Indian manufacture cannot be effectively restored. It is suicidal to compete with Europe on a basis of cheapness. Competition should be on the basis of quality. He was against mass production and stereotyped goods. Instead he wanted diversity, inherent beauty and innate worth.

In the India of 1910 we were under British Rule and culturally we were the slaves of England and the West. In the India of 2008, though we may be politically free, yet we continue to be culturally the slaves of the West. The 1911 warning given by Coomaraswamy is as relevant in these days of globalisation as it was in the days of British India and Western Imperialism.

(To be contd...)
(The writer is a retired IAS officer)
e-mail the writer at
vsundaram@newstodaynet.com