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The State of the Study of Indian Aesthetics: Then and Now
By Parul Dave Mukherji, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,
India
Interest in Indian aesthetics has revived in recent times since
its resurgence in the middle of 20th century. Duringmid 1950s, a
space for dialogue between Indian and western aesthetics had opened
at a time when the newlyindependent nations like India were
expected to turn to their past to reinterpret it from an unshackled
standpoint. Itis to be noted that in 1965, a special issue of the
Journal of Art and Art Criticism was devoted to Oriental
aestheticswith contributions from leading Indian thinkers and
scholars of the time ranging from K C Pandey, P J Chowdhuryand
Ramendra Kumar. Participating in this debate were Archie Bahm,
Eliot Deutsche and Thomas Munro whoseinvestment in this cross
cultural study of aesthetics was remarkable. The euphoria for
exploring new avenues andalternative models to Eurocentric
understanding of aesthetics was short-lived and in more than a
decade and ahalf, it was displaced by scholarly indifference.
One of the reasons for this failure was the kindof framework of
comparative aesthetics subscribed by the Indian scholars wasstill
conditioned by colonial notions of aesthetics. So if one of the
leadingexperts of Indian aesthetics, K C Pandey[1] asserted
equivalencebetween classical Sanskrit notions of imitation
(anukrti) and the Greek theory of mimesis, A K
Coomaraswamy,following P Masson Oursel[2], underlined the
differencebetween the two traditions. How else does one understand
the alternationbetween feverish search for Sanskritequivalents for
every western terminology- catharsis, mimesis, and tragedy andso
on, by K C Pandey and repudiation ofsuch comparativism by
Orientalists like Coomaraswamy and Masson P. Oursel ?
More recently, the time seems ripe for anascendency of
comparative aesthetics and that has got to do with our era
ofglobalization when the media and the easier modes of travel have
broughtdiverse cultures face to face. Aesthetics which had come
under censure duringthe cultural studies turn in social sciences
has also made a recent comeback inthe west. [3]Meanwhile, the study
ofIndian aesthetics has received more serious attention outside
India.[4]In a strange way, the 1950smoment is back again but with a
difference.
Perhaps in the wake of the cultural studiesturn, the discipline
of art history is again poised for a theoreticalrethinking and
experiencing exhaustion with Eurocentric art theories. For
arthistorians and aestheticians in the west, there seems to be an
urgent need toexplore an alternative space that may yield to a
different starting point forunderstanding aesthetic concepts.
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Recent Works on India Aesthetics:
At first, while exploring writings on Indian aesthetics, I
hadassumed that keeping a narrow focus on comparative aesthetics
will allow me tograsp the specificity of theoretical concerns. But
wading through tomes ofrecent writings on Indian aesthetics, I
arrived at a startling conclusion thatit was only under the rubric
of comparative aesthetics that any kind ofresearch on Indian
aesthetics was carried out. The comparativist moment was
notexclusive to 1950s following Indian Independence when a new post
colonial spacewas offered to Indian scholars to revisit their past
and throw light onpre-modern concepts of aesthetics in India. In
other words, comparativisminformed the very enterprise for studies
in Indian aesthetics that hascontinued up to the present times even
if the specific nature of the questionsasked has changed over
decades.
Before I take up more recent writings on Indian aesthetics, let
me considertwo publications during 1970s in India and abroad.
It is important to place two important books in comparison-
EdwinGerows A Glossary of Indian Figures ofSpeech[5]and G
Hanumantha Raos ComparativeAesthetics: Eastern and
Western[6].Gerows entry into Indian aesthetics is through Sanskrit
poetics and he raisessalient questions about the interrelationship
between poetics, aesthetics anddramaturgy. In place of simple
comparison between eastern and westernaesthetics, he identifies a
problematic within comparativism- the persistenceof a Crocean bias
that has led the scholars of Indian aesthetics to ignore theschool
of rhetoric or Alamkara school which was driven by formalist
concerns.
Almost re-scripting the title of K C Pandeys two volumes which
hadappeared in the 1950s, is G Hanumantha Raos work -Comparative
Aesthetics: Eastern and Western. In theIntroduction,Rao makes clear
the continuation of the enterprise of comparative aesthetics:
This comparative study of the concepts of aesthetics and art
beginswhere previous studies like those of A K Coomaraswamys
Transformation of Nature in Art and K C PandeysComparative
Aesthetics leave off. [i]
While this book offers interesting insight into comparativism,
ittends to engage largely with western aesthetic theories and
references toIndian aesthetics appear as an afterthought and almost
relegated to footnotes.Rao makes it a self-conscious project to
compare traditional Indian aesthetictheories with what he calls as
the contemporary western philosophy of art-thisby itself is a
viable enterprise but it ends up in an asymmetrical
comparisonbetween Indian and western aesthetics where the main
focus is on Hegel, Croce,Cassirer, Plato, Aristotle, I A Richards,
Freud, Langer , Ruskin and other westernaestheticians while
discussions on Abhinavagupta, Bharata, Anandavardhana,Bhamaha,
Bhavabhuti, Rajasekhara are restricted mainly to one chapter on
IndianPhilosophy of Art.
On the other hand, Eliot Deutsches Comparative Aesthetics,
charters a more nuanced terrain in the wayhe carefully steers the
middle ground between cultural specificity anduniversalism without
ascribing it to the eastern and western aestheticsrespectively.
Alert to the possibility of exoticizing Eastern aesthetics,
heposits the culturally different formulation of the rasa
aesthetics, for example, as enriching both the disciplines
ofaesthetics and philosophy. Unlike K C Pandey and Hanumatha Rao,
his primaryfocus rests upon Indian discourse-particularly as
formulated by Abhinavaguptaeven if the kind of questions he asks
draws from the tradition of westernaesthetics about subjectivity of
emotions in aesthetic experiences.
The decade of 1980s witnessed the publication of Padma Sudhis
Aesthetic Theories of India, whichrevived comparative approach
advocated by K C Pandey[7]. However, the sections on Indian
andwestern aesthetic theories remain juxtaposed and do not speak to
each other.Leaving large tracts of references from Sanskrit sources
un-translated hampersher flow of her arguments and assumes a
singular address to a native reader.
It is in the 1990s with thepublication of V K Charis
SanskritCriticism that a coherent comparativism is carried out from
the perspectiveof a literary critic. If Gerows concern was to
highlight formalist dimensionof literary poetics, Chari shifted his
focus on semantics and in the process,underlined the bearing of
philosophy, logic and linguistics on
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literary/aesthetic theories. Much more critical than his
predecessors, Charideployed comparativism that set up a
conversation between western and Indiantheories of aesthetics and
brought outcultural specificity of both. It problematized the
reception of Abhinavaguptasaesthetics which was largely assumed to
be dictated by his transcendentalism.Contesting such easy
appropriation of Indian aesthetics as theology, Chariextricated the
aesthetic strands from Abhinavaguptas contribution and arguedfor
its total autonomy from religious discourse.
But, despite the transcendentalist vocabulary, neither
Abhinavaguptanor the other exponents actually seek to subsume
aesthetics under theology orilluminist metaphysics of one brand or
another. Again, although these criticstend to describe rasa
experience in mystical terms, they never fail to seek validationfor
their theories at the logical, phenomenological level and to secure
forcriticism an objective aesthetic basis.[8]
While the critical retake on Abhinavagupta is commendable in the
waycertain stereotyping of Sanskrit aesthetics has been contested,
he continualconcentration on the rasa theory and its interpretation
offered by the 11thcentury aesthete, Abhinavagupta has led to
homogenization of Sanskritaesthetics as Indian aesthetics; it has
occluded wide ranging discourses within Sanskrit aesthetics such
asanukrtivada or theory of mimesis, for instance and a highly
sophisticated butunder-researched discourse of Tamil
aesthetics.
Recently, the most dominant discourse that informs contemporary
arttheory is that of inter-culturalism that appears to be a direct
response toglobalization. World Art Studies is a new field that has
emerged in the westwhich claims to correct traditional art historys
eurocentrism. Within World Art Studies, aesthetics emerges as
auniversalist component through which cross cultural comparisons
again becomepossible in a postmodernist era of the celebration
ofcultural difference. It is against the valourization of cultural
differences that the current ascendency of humanistuniversalism
hasto be situated.[9] Perhaps, as areaction to the last decade of
the dominance of culture studies approach thatunderlined plurality
of cultural specificities, the new trend of globalaesthetics
foregrounds commonality of sense perception that cuts
acrosscultural difference. At its extreme lies the stress on
universalism that hasled many practitioners towards the biological
given of human brain and toexplore the emerging field of
neuro-aesthetics.[10] On one hand, the World Art Studies aims
tocontain the whole world in its global sweep and yet adopt pure
empirical casestudy approach.
World Art Studies examines the phenomenon of art through a
broadercultural, global and temporal perspective, bringing together
a uniquelyexhaustive range of perspectives on art and borrowing
approaches from the studyof neuroscience, evolutionary biology,
anthropology and geography asmodels--alongside more conventional
art historical perspectives. In thatspirit, this volume goes beyond
abstract models, using case studies todemonstrate and examine
specific methods of investigation. [11]
Indian aesthetics gets subsumed under world aesthetics and
isgrouped with African, Chinese and Japanese aesthetics. In this
clubbing ofIndian aesthetics with other world aesthetics, again it
is via rasa theory and thecanonized figures of Abhinavagupta and
Anandavardhana that Indian aestheticsgets represented- pushing
other facets of Sanskrit aesthetics and particularlyTamil
aesthetics into oblivion.
Beyondthe Logic of Binarism & Synthesis
I am certainly not suggesting that finding differences between
theeast and west is more heroic than looking for homologies.
Rather, collapsingdifferences located within the cultural
specificities of any two giventraditions in the name of grand
universals like Beauty, Aesthetics and so on orerecting insuperable
boundaries of differences between the two are equallyproblematic.
It seems to be more productive to acknowledge that there isneither
a simple transcendence possible, if that is even desirable,
itselfbeing a fraught concept nor a synthesis.
The very fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence
betweenterms like naturalism, imitation or mimesis and the Sanskrit
terms, is
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itself an important conceptual pointer. Of course, the absence
of a word does not imply that the concept doesnot exist. But it
offers a significant clue as to rich problematic that needsto be
articulated and developed.
It will be too reductive to simply level a charge of
ethnocentrismagainst Masson-Oursel for his denial of naturalism or
conscious imitation ofthe visible world in Indian art but it has to
be seen as an attempt of oneculture to theorize another at a time
when India was still a British colony. Orfor that matter, Pandeys
unproblematic acceptance of the terms of western aesthetics
has to be seen against the history of Aesthetics around the
middle of 20th
century when comparative aesthetics constituted a powerful genre
of thisdiscipline. However, in the contemporary, post-colonial
present, one cannotsubscribe to the dated methods or assumptions
structuring the comparativemethod. An alternative cannot be
soughtin postulating the east as a separate entity and searching
for lost past andindigenous criteria, untouched by the western
contact, for evaluating its arttraditions. That will amount to
substituting the nationalist with the nativistdiscourse and result
in methodological insularity and ahistoricality.
The only way to break out of the double binds of the
east/westpolarization is to- a) critically historicize first the
discipline ofaesthetics as it emerged in the west and the terms
central to westernaesthetics rather than taking it as Aesthetics, a
given and ahistorical,universalistic concept; b) in a double
gesture, to not only problematized theirapplication in a
non-western context by foregrounding cultural differences andthe
rich, complicated terrain of translatability but to
anticipaterepercussions that this problematisation could have
within western aesthetics.
Works Cited
Ames, Van Meter. Aesthetic values in the East and West. Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XIX, No.1, (1960):pp.3-16.
Asad, Talal. Genealogies ofReligion: Disciplines and Reasons of
Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimoreand London: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Bahn, Archie. J. Is a Universal Science of Aesthetics
Possible?Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXXI (1972):
pp.3-7.
Braembussche, Antoon vanden (Editor), Kimmerle Heinz
(Editor),Note Nicole (Editor). Intercultural Aesthetics: A
WorldviewPerspective Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science,
Nature, Art, Human Actionand Society) Springer, 2009.
Bryson, Norman. Vision andPainting: The Logic of the Gaze. New
Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress, 1983.
Chatterjee, Partha. Ed. Texts ofPower: Emerging Disciplines in
Colonial Bengal. Calcutta: Samya, 1996.
Chaudhury, P. J. Catharsis in the light of Indian Aesthetics.
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,Supplement to the Oriental
issue XXIVNo. 1, Part 1 Fall (1965): pp.151-163.
Deutsch, Eliot. Studies in Comparative Aesthetics,University of
Hawaii Press, 1975.
[1] K.C. Pandey, ComparativeAesthetics, Indian Aesthetics &
Western Aesthetics. 2 vols. Varanasi:The Chowkhamba Sanskrit
Series, 1950, 1956.
[2], P. Masson-Oursel A Comparison between Indian Aesthetics
andPhilosophy. Trans.
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A.K.Coomaraswamy (from Review Des Arts Asiatique) Rupam 27/28
(1925): pp.91-94.
[3] Michael Kelly, Aesthetics, 4 vols., Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998
[4] Ken-i-ichi Sasaki, ed. AsianAesthetics, Japan, Kyoto
University Press, 2010.
[5] Gerow, Edwin. A Glossary ofIndian Figures of Speech. The
Hague: Mouton, 1971.
[6] G Hanumantha Rao, ComparativeAesthetics: Eastern and
Western. Mysore: Mysore Printing and PublishingHouse, 1974.
[7] Padma Sudhis AestheticTheories of India, Pune,Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute, 1983.
[8] V K Chari, Sanskrit Criticism ,New Delhi, Motilal
Banarsidass, 1993, p.11.
[9] Note the very title of an essay by Ben-Ami Scharfstein is
TheCommon Humanity Evident in European, African, Indian, Chinese
and JapaneseAesthetic Theory in World Art Studies: Exploring
Concepts andApproaches, eds Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme,
Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008, p.343.
[10] John Onians. Neuroarthistory: Making More Sense of Art in
World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts andApproaches, eds Kitty
Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008,
p.265-286.
[11] Ibid, Back cover blurb.
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