Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Four. On Art
The National Value of Art [6]
The enormous value of Art to human evolution has been made sufficiently apparent from the analysis, incomplete in itself, which we have attempted.
We have also incidentally pointed out its value as a factor in education.
It is obvious that no nation can afford to neglect an element of such high importance to the culture of its people or the training of some of the higher intellectual, moral and aesthetic faculties in the young.
The system of education which, instead of keeping artistic training apart1 as a privilege for a few specialists, frankly introduces it as a part of culture no less necessary than literature or science, will have taken a great step forward in the perfection of national education and the general diffusion of a broad-based human culture.
It is not necessary that every man should be an artist2.
It is necessary that every man should have his artistic faculty developed, his taste trained, his sense of beauty and insight into form and colour and that which is expressed in form and colour, made habitually active, correct and sensitive.
It is necessary that those who create, whether in great things or small, whether in the unusual masterpieces of art and genius or in the small common things of use that surround a man’s daily life, should be habituated to produce and the nation habituated to expect the beautiful in preference to the ugly, the noble in preference to the vulgar, the fine in preference to the crude, the harmonious in preference to the gaudy.
A nation surrounded daily by the beautiful, noble, fine and harmonious becomes that which it is habituated to contemplate and realises3 the fullness of the expanding Spirit in itself.
In the system of National education that was inaugurated in Bengal, a beginning was made by the importance attached to drawing and clay-modelling as elements of manual training.
But the absence of an artistic ideal, the misconception of the true 
aim of manual training, the imperative financial needs of these struggling institutions making for a predominant commercial aim in the education given, the mastery of English ideas4, English methods and English predilections in the so-called national education rendered nugatory the initial advantage.
The students had faculty, but the teaching given them would waste and misuse the faculty.
The nation and the individual can gain nothing by turning out figures in clay which faithfully copy the vulgarity and ugliness of English commercial production or by multiplying mere copies of men or things.
A free and active imaging of form and hue within oneself, a free and self-trained hand5 reproducing with instinctive success not the form and measurement of things seen outside, for that is a smaller capacity easily mastered, but the inward vision of the relation and truth of things, an eye quick to note and distinguish, sensitive to design and to harmony in colour, these are the faculties that have to be evoked, and the formal and mechanical English method is useless for this purpose.
In India the revival of a truly national Art is already an accomplished fact and the masterpieces of the school can already challenge comparison with the best work of other countries.
Under such circumstances it is unpardonable that the crude formal teaching of English schools and the vulgar commercial aims and methods of the West should subsist in our midst.
The country has yet to evolve a system of education which shall be really national.
The taint of Occidental ideals and alien and unsuitable methods has to be purged out of our minds, and nowhere more than in the teaching which should be the foundation of intellectual and aesthetic renovation.
The spirit of old Indian Art must be revived, the inspiration and directness of vision which even now subsists among the possessors of the ancient traditions, the inborn skill and taste of the race, the dexterity of the Indian hand and the intuitive gaze of the Indian eye must be recovered and the whole nation lifted again to the high level of the ancient culture — and higher.