Originary Concepts of Classical Indian Art Part I

Originary Concepts of Classical Indian Art Part I: Rupartha –Form and Content

A. Srinivas Rao

30^th May 2012

“Rupam rupam pratirupam bhavati” Rig Veda 6.47.18

“Every form is an image of an original form”.

Head of Buddha, 4th -5th CE Gandhara

Most writing on Indian art tends to gloss over the substantial conceptual basis to its aesthetic foundation, which though not systematic is yet insightful. However Indian aesthetic ideas often spill from literary to performing to plastic art forms and gives rise to what maybe considered synesthetic of a mixture of media and having what some have called an oneiric or dreamlike quality. It is a story that needs to be told with care as it is sometimes dismissed as less intellectually robust than “Western” art. Aesthetics takes as its subject matter beauty and is studied by non artists (as humorously suggested) and as the gag goes “Aesthetics is to artists what ornithology is to birds”. Aesthetics, the content of this subject in India takes its roots from grammar, dramaturgy and literature spilling over into sculpture, architecture and painting and finally into music and dance. Its axial conception is the spectator centric aesthetic experience also called “Rasa” whose translation is loosely “sapience”.  We shall in this essay explore the elements of “Form and Content” or “Rupa-artha”, and reserve the complex idea of “Rasa” for another essay.

Revelation and Reason Part III

Sabda –Revelation and the Brahmin Orthodoxy

A. Srinivas Rao

11^th May 2011

In the last of the series on the contest between revelation and reason is the small but significant tale that took place in ancient India. The reason I like to tell this tale is of course that it was in India but also that it entirely captured the debate within a branch of philosophy called epistemology or the theory of knowledge. The tale is sophisticated and also raises issues that deal with aesthetics, hermeneutics and linguistics.

It was the period 800-200 BCE. It was the age of the greatest of the titans of human thought. It was the age that forever lit the ways of thought as never before and made a divinity of being human. It was called the Axial Age. The great Zarathushtra had just died near Persia, reclusive thinkers in Indian forests were challenging the stranglehold of Brahmin orthodoxy and one of the ford makers Parshwanath had just passed away. The very heavens refused to let the grand old man Lao Tzu into their midst pleading with him to go back and be human again and show man the Way, the Tao. In China Confucius was holding forth his Analects on the good human being and a great bureaucrat. Soon Socrates would walk absentmindedly in the agoras of Athens questioning people, dutifully followed by Plato, showered with a bucketful of water by his wife, in frustration. It seemed that the very gods wanted to send Prometheus back to man, this time with the heavenly fire of Reason and it seemed around the globe several unearthly suns made a simultaneous dawn flooding the earth with a light that would never diminish.