Indian ART or what

In an interesting lecture about Anand Coomarswamy’s photography, the material intrigued me. Mr. Chanchal there compared works of modern photographer Alfred Steiglitz and those of Coomarswamy, both as artists, art promoters as significant contributors to photography as an art form. Though the lecture was fine, the material brought up numerous old questions upfront. With interesting references to his essays like Hands and feet in Indian Art, and the photographs taken of ample limbs by the two artists, the need to re-look at Coomarswamy’s works and impact on art vitalizes. Rather one would like to look back at the so referred Indian revival art of late 19th to early 20^th century.

In speaker here tried to locate relationship of oriental with the modern western art, also where the multiple limbs in Indian imagery are cited as a very motion/cubist oriented trait by Coomarswamy. Infact in some exuberant photography of Nataraja,[1] he expresses his thought better, (with an interesting applaud about the sculpture from Roger Fry and Rodin).

Although there is a dire need to interrogate the Indian revivalism[2], is it always essential to prove all with reference to western art accomplishments? Whether oriental took from west or vice versa, how does it elevate or demean any art? There are undoubted influences, borrowings, parallels in any art forms/works, but shouldn’t art history be engaging itself in finding sources of idea itself than locating what supersedes. I have no clue how would it elevate art if we are able to prove that rodin took ideas from Indian sculpture or Indians already were aware of cubist simplification.  It would be more fruitful to find roots of things where and how they exist. Here we have people trying to elevate Indian art above western while our ASI labels the monastery study halls and Viharas in Ellora as dining halls and music halls respectively, and guides narrate jatakas saying bluntly that Dr. Ambedkar is the latest bodhisattava (with all due respects to Dr. Ambedkar).

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[1] Unfortunately, I am not able to reproduce the data mentioned in this writeup here because the material for exclusive for the speaker

[2] Please keep up for more on Indian revivalism