Our Oriental Heritage

  In India the artist had not yet been separated from the artisan, making art artificial and work a drudgery; as in our Middle Ages, so, in the India that died at Plassey, every mature workman was a craftsman, giving form and personality to the product of his skill and taste. Even today, when factories replace handicrafts, and craftsmen degenerate into “hands,” the stalls and shops of every Hindu town show squatting artisans beating metal, moulding jewelry, drawing designs, weaving delicate shawls and embroideries, or carving ivory and wood. Probably no other nation known to us has ever had so exuberant a variety of arts.3

  Strange to say, pottery failed to rise from an industry to an art in India; caste rules put so many limitations upon the repeated use of the same dish* that there was small incentive to adorn with beauty the frail and transient earthenware that came so rapidly from the potter’s hand.4 If the vessel was to be made of some precious metal, then artistry could spend itself upon it without stint; witness the Tanjore silver vase in the Victoria Institute at Madras, or the gold Betel Dish of Kandy.5 Brass was hammered into an endless variety of lamps, bowls and containers; a black alloy (bidri) of zinc was often used for boxes, basins and trays; and one metal was inlaid or overlaid upon another, or encrusted with silver or gold.6 Wood was carved with a profusion of plant and animal forms. Ivory was cut into everything from deities to dice; doors and other objects of wood were inlaid with it; and dainty receptacles were made of it for cosmetics and perfumes. Jewelry abounded, and was worn by rich and poor as ornament or hoard; Jaipur excelled in firing enamel colors upon a gold background; clasps, beads, pendants, knives and combs were moulded into tasteful shapes, with floral, animal, or theological, designs; one Brahman pendant harbors in its tiny space half a hundred gods.7 Textiles were woven with an artistry never since excelled; from the days of Cæsar to our own the fabrics of India have been prized by all the world,† Sometimes, by the subtlest and most painstaking of precalculated measurements, every thread of warp and woof was dyed before being placed upon the loom; the design appeared as the weaving progressed, and was identical on either side.9 From homespun khaddar to complex brocades flaming with gold, from picturesque pyjamas‡ to the invisibly-seamed shawls of Kashmir,§ every garment woven in India has a beauty that comes only of a very ancient, and now almost instinctive, art.

  II. MUSIC

  A concert in India—Music and the dance—Musicians—Scale and—forms—Themes—Music and philosophy

  An American traveler, permitted to intrude upon a concert in Madras, found an audience of some two hundred Hindus, apparently all Brahmans, seated some on benches, some on a carpeted floor, listening intently to a small ensemble beside which our orchestral mobs would have seemed designed to make themselves heard on the moon. The instruments were unfamiliar to the visitor, and to his provincial eye they looked like the strange and abnormal products of some neglected garden. There were drums of many shapes and sizes, ornate flutes and serpentine horns, and a variety of strings. Most of these pieces were wrought with minute workmanship, and some were studded with gems. One drum, the mridanga, was formed like a small barrel; both ends were covered with a parchment whose pitch was changed by tightening or loosening it with little leather thongs; one parchment head had been treated with manganese dust, boiled rice and tamarind juice in order to elicit from it a peculiar tone. The drummer used only his hands—sometimes the palm, sometimes the fingers, sometimes the merest finger-tips. Another player had a tambura, or lute, whose four long strings were sounded continuously as a deep and quiet background for the melody. One instrument, the vina, was especially sensitive and eloquent; its strings, stretched over a slender metal plate from a parchment-covered drum of wood at one end to a resounding hollow gourd at the other, were kept vibrating with a plectrum, while the player’s left hand etched in the melody with fingers moving deftly from string to string. The visitor listened humbly, and understood nothing.

  Music in India has a history of at least three thousand years. The Vedic hymns, like all Hindu poetry, were written to be sung; poetry and song, music and dance, were made one art in the ancient ritual. The Hindu dance, which, to the beam in the Occidental eye, seems as voluptuous and obscene as Western dancing seems to Hindus, has been, through the greater part of Indian history, a form of religious worship, a display of beauty in motion and rhythm for the honor and edification of the gods; only in modern times have the devadasis emerged from the temples in great number to entertain the secular and profane. To the Hindu these dances were no mere display of flesh; they were, in one aspect, an imitation of the rhythms and processes of the universe. Shiva himself was the god of the dance, and the dance of Shiva symbolized the very movement of the world.*

  Musicians, singers and dancers, like all artists in India, belonged to the lowest castes. The Brahman might like to sing in private, and accompany himself on a vina or another stringed instrument; he might teach others to play, or sing, or dance; but he would never think of playing for hire, or of putting an instrument to his mouth. Public concerts were, until recently, a rarity in India; secular music was either the spontaneous singing or thrumming of the people, or it was performed, like the chamber music of Europe, before small gatherings in aristocratic homes. Akbar, himself skilled in music, had many musicians at his court; one of his singers, Tansen, became popular and wealthy, and died of drink at the age of thirty-four.11 There were no amateurs, there were only professionals; music was not taught as a social accomplishment, and children were not beaten into Beethovens. The function of the public was not to play poorly, but to listen well.12

  For listening to music, in India, is itself an art, and requires long training of ear and soul. The words may be no more intelligible to the Westerner than the words of the operas which he feels it his class duty to enjoy; they range, as everywhere, about the two subjects of religion and love; but the words are of little moment in Hindu music, and the singer, as in our most advanced literature, often replaces them with meaningless syllables. The music is written in scales more subtle and minute than ours. To our scale of twelve tones it adds ten “microtones,” making a scale of twenty-two quarter-tones in all. Hindu music may be written in a notation composed of Sanskrit letters; usually it is neither written nor read, but is passed down “by ear” from generation to generation, or from composer to learner. It is not separated into bars, but glides in a continuous legato which frustrates a listener accustomed to regular emphases or beats. It has no chords, and does not deal in harmony; it confines itself to melody, with perhaps a background of undertones; in this sense it is much simpler and more primitive than European music, while it is more complex in scale and rhythm. The melodies are both limited and infinite: they must all derive from one or another of the thirty-six traditional modes or airs, but they may weave upon these themes an endless and seamless web of variation. Each of these themes, or ragas * consists of five, six or seven notes, to one of which the musician constantly returns. Each raga is named from the mood that it wishes to suggest—“Dawn,” “Spring,” “Evening Beauty,” “Intoxication,” etc.—and is associated with a specific time of the day or the year. Hindu legend ascribes an occult power to these ragas; so it is said that a Bengal dancing-girl ended a drought by singing, as a kind of “Rain-drop Prelude,” the Megh mallar raga, or rain-making theme.13 Their antiquity has given the ragas a sacred character; he who plays them must observe them faithfully, as forms enacted by Shiva himself. One player, Narada, having performed them carelessly, was ushered into hell by Vishnu, and was shown men and women weeping over their broken limbs; these, said the god, were the ragas and raginis distorted and torn by Narada’s reckless playing. Seeing which, we are told, Narada sought more humbly a greater perfection in his art.14

  The Indian performer is not seriously hampered by the obligation to remain faithful to the raga that he has chosen for his program, any more than the Western composer of sonatas or symphonies is hampered by adhering to his theme; in either case what is lost in liberty is gained in access to
coherence of structure and symmetry of form. The Hindu musician is like the Hindu philosopher; he starts with the finite and “sends his soul into the infinite”; he embroiders upon his theme until, through an undulating stream of rhythm and recurrence, even through a hypnotizing monotony of notes, he has created a kind of musical Yoga, a forgetfulness of will and individuality, of matter, space and time; the soul is lifted into an almost mystic union with something “deeply interfused,” some profound, immense and quiet Being, some primordial and pervasive reality that smiles upon all striving wills, all change and death.

  Probably we shall never care for Hindu music, and never comprehend it, until we have abandoned striving for being, progress for permanence, desire for acceptance, and motion for rest. This may come when Europe again is subject, and Asia again is master. But then Asia will have tired of being, permanence, acceptance and rest.

  III. PAINTING

  Prehistoric—The frescoes of Ajanta—Rajput miniatures—The Mogul school—The painters—The theorists

  A provincial is a man who judges the world in terms of his parish, and considers all unfamiliar things barbarous. It is told of the Emperor Jehangir—a man of taste and learning in the arts—that when he was shown a European painting he rejected it summarily; being “in oyle, he liked it not.”15 It is pleasant to know that even an emperor can be a provincial, and that it was as difficult for Jehangir to enjoy the oil-painting of Europe as it is for us to appreciate the minatures of India.

  It is clear, from the drawings, in red pigment, of animals and a rhinoceros hunt in the prehistoric caves of Singanpur and Mirzapur, that Indian painting has had a history of many thousands of years. Palettes with ground colors ready for use abound among the remains of neolithic India.16 Great gaps occur in the history of the art, because most of the early work was ruined by the climate, and much of the remainder was destroyed by Moslem “idol-breakers” from Mahmud to Aurangzeb.17 The Vinaya Pitaka (ca. 300 B.C.) refers to King Pasenada’s palace as containing picture galleries, and Fa-Hien and Yuan Chwang describe many buildings as famous for the excellence of their murals;18 but no trace of these structures remains. One of the oldest frescoes in Tibet shows an artist painting a portrait of Buddha;19 the later artist took it for granted that painting was an established art in Buddha’s days.

  The earliest dateable Indian painting is a group of Buddhist frescoes (ca. 100 B.C.) found on the walls of a cave in Sirguya, in the Central Provinces. From that time on the art of fresco painting—that is, painting upon freshly laid plaster before it dries—progressed step by step until on the walls of the caves at Ajanta* it reached a perfection never excelled even by Giotto or Leonardo. These temples were carved out of the rocky face of a mountain-side at various periods from the first to the seventh century A.D. For centuries they were lost to history and human memory after the decay of Buddhism; the jungle grew about them and almost buried them; bats, snakes and other beasts made their home there, and a thousand varieties of birds and insects fouled the paintings with their waste. In 1819 Europeans stumbled into the ruins, and were amazed to find on the walls frescoes that are now ranked among the masterpieces of the world’s art.20

  The temples have been called caves, for in most cases they are cut into the mountains. Cave No. XVI, for example, is an excavation sixty-five feet each way, upheld by twenty pillars; alongside the central hall are sixteen monastic cells; a porticoed veranda adorns the front, and a sanctuary hides in the back. Every wall is covered with frescoes. In 1879 sixteen of the twenty-nine temples contained paintings; by 1910 the frescoes in ten of these sixteen had been destroyed by exposure, and those in the remaining six had been mutilated by inept attempts at restoration.21 Once these frescoes were brilliant with red, green, blue and purple pigments; nothing survives of the colors now except low-toned and blackened surfaces. Some of the paintings, thus obscured by time and ignorance, seem coarse and grotesque to us, who cannot read the Buddhist legends with Buddhist hearts; others are at once powerful and graceful, a revelation of the skill of craftsmen whose names perished long before their work.

  Despite these depredations, Cave I is still rich in masterpieces. Here, on one wall, is (probably) a Bodhisattwa—a Buddhist saint entitled to Nirvana, but choosing, instead, repeated rebirths in order to minister to men. Never has the sadness of understanding been more profoundly portrayed;22 one wonders which is finer or deeper—this, or Leonardo’s kindred study of the head of Christ.* On another wall of the same temple is a study of Shiva and his wife Parvati, dressed in jewelry.23 Nearby is a painting of four deer, tender with the Buddhist sympathy for animals; and on the ceiling is a design still alive with delicately drawn flowers and fowl.24 On a wall of Cave XVII is a graceful representation, now half destroyed, of the god Vishnu, with his retinue, flying down from heaven to attend some event in the life of Buddha;25 on another wall is a schematic but colorful portrait of a princess and her maids.26 Mingled with these chef-d’æuvres are crowded frescoes of apparently poor workmanship, describing the youth, flight and temptation of Buddha.27

  But we cannot judge these works in their original form from what survives of them today; and doubtless there are clues to their appreciation that are not revealed to alien souls. Even the Occidental, however, can admire the nobility of the subject, the majestic scope of the plan, the unity of the composition, the clearness, simplicity and decisiveness of the line, and—among many details—the astonishing perfection of that bane of all artists, the hands. Imagination can picture the artist-priests† who prayed in these cells and perhaps painted these walls and ceilings with fond and pious art while Europe lay buried in her early-medieval darkness. Here at Ajanta religious devotion fused architecture, sculpture and painting into a happy unity, and produced one of the sovereign monuments of Hindu art.

  When their temples were closed or destroyed by Huns and Moslems the Hindus turned their pictorial skill to lesser forms. Among the Rajputs a school of painters arose who recorded in delicate miniatures the episodes of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and the heroic deeds of the Rajputana chieftains; often they were mere outlines, but always they were instinct with life, and perfect in design. There is, in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, a charming example of this style, symbolizing one of the ragas of music by means of graceful women, a stately tower, and a lowering sky.29 Another example, in the Art Institute of Detroit, represents with unique delicacy a scene from the Gita-Govinda.30 The human figures in these and other Hindu paintings were rarely drawn from models; the artist visualized them out of imagination and memory. He painted, usually, in brilliant tempera upon a paper surface; he used fine brushes made from the most delicate hairs that he could get from the squirrel, the camel, the goat or the mongoose;31 and he achieved a refinement of line and decoration that delight even the foreign and inexpert eye.

  Similar work was done in other parts of India, especially in the state of Kangra.32 Another variety of the same genre developed under the Moguls at Delhi. Rising out of Persian calligraphy and the art of illuminating manuscripts, this style grew into a form of aristocratic portraiture corresponding, in its refinement and exclusivesness, to the chamber music that flourished at the court. Like the Rajput school, the Mogul painters strove for delicacy of line, sometimes using a brush made from a single hair; and they, too, rivaled one another in the skilful portrayal of the hand. But they put more color into their drawings, and less mysticism; they seldom touched religion or mythology; they confined themselves to the earth, and were as realistic as caution would permit. Their subjects were living men and women of imperial position and temper, not noted for humility; one after another these dignitaries sat for their portraits, until the picture galleries of that royal dilettante, Jehangir, were filled with the likenesses of every important ruler or courtier since the coming of Akbar to the throne. Akbar was the first of his dynasty to encourage painting; at the end of his reign, if we may believe Abu-1 Fazl, there were a hundred masters in Delhi, and a thousand amateurs.33 Jehangir’s intelligent p
atronage developed the art, and widened its field from portraiture to the representation of hunting scenes and other natural backgrounds for the human figure—which still dominated the picture; one minature shows the Emperor himself almost in the claws of a lion that has clambered upon the rump of the imperial elephant and is reaching for the royal flesh, while an attendant realistically takes to his heels.34 Under Shah Jehan the art reached its height, and began to decline; as in the case of Japanese prints, the widened popularity of the form gave it at once a wider audience and a less exacting taste.35 Aurangzeb, by restoring the strict rule of Islam against images, completed the decay.

  Through the intelligent beneficence of the Mogul kings Indian painters enjoyed at Delhi a prosperity that they had not known for many centuries. The guild of painters, which had kept itself alive from Buddhist times, renewed its youth, and some of its members escaped from the anonymity with which time’s forgetfulness, and Hindu negligence of the individual, cover most Indian art. Out of seventeen artists considered preeminent in Akbar’s reign, thirteen were Hindus.36 The most favored of all the painters at the great Mogul’s court was Dasvanth, whose lowly origin as the son of a palanquin-bearer aroused no prejudice against him in the eyes of the Emperor. The youth was eccentric, and insisted on drawing pictures wherever he went, and on whatever surface he found at hand. Akbar recognized his genius, and had his own drawing-master teach him. The boy became in time the greatest master of his age; but at the height of his fame he stabbed himself to death.37

  Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done. The Hindus, whose philosophy did not exalt logic, loved logic none the less, and delighted to formulate in the strictest and most rational rules the subtle procedure of every art. So, early in our era, the Sandanga, or “Six Limbs of Indian Painting,” laid down, like a later and perhaps imitative Chinese,* six canons of excellence in pictorial art: (i) the knowledge of appearances; (2) correct perception, measure and structure; (3) the action of feelings on forms; (4) the infusion of grace, or artistic representation; (5) similitude; and (6) an artistic use of brush and colors. Later an elaborate esthetic code appeared, the Shilpa-shastra, in which the rules and traditions of each art were formulated for all time. The artist, we are told, should be learned in the Vedas, “delighting in the worship of God, faithful to his wife, avoiding strange women, and piously acquiring a knowledge of various sciences.”38