Significance of art in individual and national life and approach to art criticism

Sri Aurobindo‘s stature as an art critic is perhaps not adequately highlighted, may be it is eclipsed or overshadowed by sheer glory and radiance of his other identities. Nevertheless, whatever little that could be gathered to understand his role as an original and brilliant art critic, is sufficient to get dazzled. Apart from his essays in ‘The Foundations of Indian Culture’ (now CWSA Vol. 20 The Renaissance in India: A Defence of Indian Culture) especially chapters like ‘Is India Civilised’, ‘A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture’ and a series of essays on ‘Indian Arts I,II,III,IV,’ his insight is amply seen even in his other works like a series of essays named ‘The National Value of Art,’ or inferences which we can draw from some of his writings in ‘The Secret of the Vedas’ and his writings on The Upanishads, or even in his early cultural writings like ‘The Strength of the Hidden Spirit’ (in The ideal of a Karmayogin). They are testimony of how well he imbibed, realised, and explained the innate soul of Indian art and how eloquently he emphasized the crucial role the artists as well as art lovers and critics of Indian art have to play in understanding as well as fulfilling India’s role as a world teacher in the age of evolutionary crisis which we all are passing through. Sri Aurobindo emphasized that “The aesthetic side of a people’s culture is of the highest importance and demands almost as much scrutiny and carefulness of appreciation as the philosophy, religion and central formative ideas.” He showed that the fundamental difference in the eastern and western mind, their philosophy and life view is reflected in the arts of the east and the west. A hostile and unsympathetic critic cannot understand this and has neither patience to know it nor a substratum of rich cultural heritage to make the process smoother. The imitation of nature has never been the final goal of Indian art and imagination he says was never a nauch girl in the courts of rich and powerful. Indian Art was in fact an expression of her spiritual soul, forms being woven to suit those rhythms which were emanated from the soul, and any abrupt destruction or change in form can break the rhythm and hamper the soul, he emphasized. This was happening with an unsympathetic rational critic who was not ready to see the deeper meaning of external forms of Indian images. Unfortunately, the same is still happening when the European apes with colonised minds of modern India try to look at and analyse Indian arts. The pinnacle of expressions in Indian arts belong to the era when utility was not given higher value than beauty, when sacred was not separated from secular and when acute analysis was not devoid of alluring aesthetics. This was because they were harmonized at a higher level of consciousness which was reached in meditative moments. With his or her intense tapas, the artist, the mantrin and the yogi (many times all three would be the same person) would visualise a thing in those heightened stage of consciousness and then effortlessly bring it out through his/her well trained craftsmanship. Without such education, one was not qualified to be an Indian sculptor, architect or a painter. Sri Aurobindo was emphatic to declare that – ‘all art reposes on some unity and all its details, whether few and sparing or lavish and crowded and full, must go back to that unity and help its significance; otherwise it is not art.’ Sri Aurobindo emphasized on the spiritual, educational and national value of art. Art is a beautiful means to elevate oneself through the aesthetic experience : rasa anubhuti, or rasa-bhava-ananda and by Chittashuddhi or cleansing of mind, and as a precursor and ladder for the luminous ascent to the Infinite. It is much needed now to give that sap, rasa to hopelessly arid life which the mechanistic and utilitarian paradigm has globalized now. He explained that the judgement and imagination needs to be brought together through arts to create an ideation. Such is the need of the whole brain all level development of human beings and that is the deeper sense of any art creation, appreciation, education and of critical study of any piece of Indian art.