Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Four. On Art
Two Pictures
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The Modern Review and Prabasi are doing monthly a service to the country the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. The former review is at present the best conducted and the most full of valuable matter of any in India. But good as are the articles which fill the magazine from month to month, the whole sum of them is outweighed in value by the single page which gives us the reproduction of some work of art by a contemporary Indian painter. To the lover of beauty and the lover of his country every one of these delicately executed blocks is an event of importance in his life within. The reviews by bringing these masterpieces to the thousands who have no opportunity of seeing the originals are restoring the sense of beauty and artistic emotion inborn in our race but almost blotted out by the long reign in our lives of the influence of Anglo-Saxon vulgarity and crude tasteless commercialism. The pictures belong usually to the new school of Bengali art, the only living and original school now developing among us and the last issues have each contained a picture — especially important not only by the intrinsic excellence of the work but by the perfect emergence of that soul of India which we attempted to characterise in an article in our second issue.1
The picture in the July number is by Mahomed Hakim Khan, a student of the Government School of Art, Calcutta, and represents Nadir Shah ordering a general massacre.
It is not one of those pictures salient and imposing which leap at once at the eye and hold it.
A first glance only shows three figures almost conventionally Indian in poses which also seem conventional.
But as one looks again and again the soul of the picture begins suddenly to emerge, and one realises with a start of surprise that one is in the presence of a work of genius.
The reason for this lies in the extraordinary restraint and simplicity which conceals the artist’s strength and subtlety2.
The whole spirit and conception is Indian and it would be difficult to detect in the composition a single trace of foreign influence.
The grace and perfection of the design and the distinctness and vigour of form which support it are not European; it is the Saracenic sweetness and grace, the old Vedantic massiveness and power transformed by some new nameless element of harmony into something original and yet Indian.
The careful and minute detail in the minutiae of the dresses, of the armour of the warrior seated on the right, of the flickering lines of the pillar on the left are inherited from an intellectual ancestry whose daily vision was accustomed to the rich decoration of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri or to the fullness and crowded detail which informed the massive work of the old Vedantic artists and builders, Hindu, Jain and Buddhist.
Another peculiarity is the fixity and stillness which, in spite of the Titanic life and promise of motion in the figure of Nadir, pervade the picture.
A certain stiffness of design marks much of the old Hindu art, a stiffness courted by the artists perhaps in order that no insistence of material life in the figures might distract attention from the expression of the spirit within which was their main object.
By some inspiration of genius the artist has transformed this conventional stiffness into a hint of rigidity which almost suggests the lines of stone.
This stillness adds immensely to the effect of the picture.
The petrified inaction of the three human beings contrasted with the expression of the faces and the formidable suggestion in the pose of their sworded figures affects us like the silence of murder crouching for his leap.
The central figure of Nadir Shah dominates his surroundings.
It is from this centre that the suggestion of something terrible coming out of the silent group has started.
The strong, proud and regal figure is extraordinarily impressive, but it is the face and the arm that give the individuality.
That bare arm and hand grasping the rigid upright scimitar are inhuman in 
their savage force and brutality; it is the hand, the fingers, one might almost say the talons of the human wild beast.
This arm and hand have action, murder, empire in them: the whole history of Nadir is there expressed.
The grip and gesture have already commenced the coming massacre and the whole body behind consents.
The face corresponds in the hard firmness and strength of the nose, the brute cruelty of the mouth almost lost in the moustache and beard.
But the eyes are the master-touch in this figure.
They overcome us with surprise when we look at them, for these are not the eyes of the assassin, even the assassin upon the throne.
The soul that looks out of these eyes is calm, aloof and thoughtful, yet terrible.
Whatever order of massacre has issued from these lips, did not go forth from an ordinary energetic man of action moved by self-interest, rage or blood-thirst.
The eyes are the eyes of a Yogin but a terrible Yogin; such might be the look of some adept of the left-hand ways, some mighty Kapalik lifted above pity and shrinking as above violence and wrath.
Those eyes in that face, over that body, arm, hand seem to be those of one whose spirit is not affected by the actions of the body, whose natural part and organs are full of the destroying energy of Kali while the soul, the witness within, looks on at the sanguinary drama tranquil, darkly approving but hardly interested.
And then it dawns on one that this is not so much the Nadir of history; unconsciously perhaps the artist has given a quiet but effective delineation of the Scourge of God, the man who is rather a force than a human being, the Asura with a mission who has come to do God’s work of destruction and help on the evolution by carnage and ruin.
The soul within is not that of a human being.
Some powerful Yogin of a Lemurian race has incarnated in this body, one born when the simian might and strength of the vānara had evolved into the perfection of the human form and brain with the animal still uneliminated, who having by tapasya and knowledge separated his soul from his nature has elected this reward that after long beatitude, prāpya puṇyakṛtāṃ lokān uṣitvā śāśvatīḥ samāḥ, he should reincarnate as a force of nature informed by a human soul and work out in a single life the savage strength of the outward self, taking upon 
himself the foreordained burden of empire and massacre.
From Nadir the coming carnage has passed into the seated warrior and looks out from his eyes at the receiver of the order. The gaze is contemplative but not inward like Nadir’s, and it is human and indifferent envisaging massacre as part of the activities of the soldier with a matter-of-fact approval. The figure is almost a piece of sculpture, so perfect is the rigidity of arrested and expectant action. The straight strong sword over the shoulder has the same rigid preparedness. There is a certain defect in the unnatural pose and obese curve of the hand which is not justified by any similar detail or motive in the rest of the figure. We notice a similar motiveless strain in the position of Nadir’s left arm, though here something is perhaps added to the force of the attitude. A standing figure receives the sanguinary command. The folded hands and the scimitar suspended in front are full of the spirit of ready obedience and there is an expression of pleasure, almost amusement which makes even this commonplace face terrible, for the decree dooming thousands is taken as lightly as if it were order for nautch or banquet. The three mighty swords, by a masterly effect of balanced design, fill with death and menace the terrace on which the men are seated. Behind these formidable figures is a part of the palace gracious with the simple and magical lines of Indo-Saracenic architecture and in the distance on the right from behind a mass of heavy impenetrable green a slender tapering tower rises into the peaceful quiet of Delhi.
On another page of the same review we have a picture by one of the greatest Masters of European Art, Raphael’s “Vision of the Knight”.
The picture is full of that which Greece and Italy perfected as the aim of Art, beauty and such soul-expression as heightens physical beauty.
It is beauty that is expressed in the robust body and feminine3 face of the armed youth both full of an exquisite languor of sleep, in the sweet face, the voluptuous figure, the gracious pose of the temptress offering her delicate allurement of flowers, in the other’s grave, strong and benign countenance, the vigorous physique and open gesture of promise and aspiration extending a book and a fine slender sword, in the 
delicacy of the landscape behind and the tree under which the dreamer lies.
There is suggestion but it is the suggestion of more and more beauty, there is harmony and relation but it is the harmony and relation of loveliness of landscape as a background to the loveliness of the nobly-grouped figures.
There is an attempt to express spiritual meanings but it is by outward symbols only and not by making the outward expression a vehicle for something that comes from within and overpowers impalpably.
This is allegory, the other is the drawing and painting of the very self of things.
Only in the delicate spiritual face of the Knight is there some approach to the Eastern spirit.
This is one kind of art and a great art, but is the other less?
Beauty for beauty’s sake can never be the spirit of art in India, beauty we must seek and always beauty, but never lose sight of the end which India holds more important, the realisation of the Self in things.
Europeans create out of the imagination.
India has always sought to go deeper within and create out of the Power behind imagination, by passivity and plenary inspiration, in Yoga, from samadhi.
Earlier edition of this work: Sri Aurobindo Birth Century Library: Set in 30 volumes.- Volume 3.- The Harmony of Virtue: Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Asram, 1972.- 489 p.
1 See “The Awakening Soul of India”, published on pages 61 – 66 of Karmayogin: Political Writings and Speeches 1909 – 1910, volume 8 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. — Ed.
2 1972 ed.: subtility
3 1972 ed.: and the feminine