Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Four. On Art
Indian Art and an Old Classic
We have before us a new edition of Krittibas’s1 Ramayan2, edited and published by that indefatigable literary and patriotic worker, Sj. Ramananda Chatterji. Ramananda Babu is well known to the Bengali public as a clear-minded, sober and fearless political speaker and writer; as editor of the Modern Review and the Prabasi he has raised the status and quality of Indian periodical literature to an extraordinary extent, and has recently been doing a yet more valuable and lasting service to his country by introducing the masterpieces of the new school of Art to his readers. His present venture is not in itself an ambitious one, as it purports only to provide a well-printed and beautifully illustrated edition of Krittibas for family reading. With this object the editor has taken the Battala prints of the Ramayan3 as his text and reproduced them with the necessary corrections and the omission of a few passages which offend modern ideas of decorum. Besides, the book is liberally illustrated with reproductions of recent pictures by artists of Bombay and Calcutta on subjects chosen from the Ramayan4.
The place of Krittibas in our literature is well established.
He is one of the most considerable of our old classics and one of the writers who most helped to create the Bengali language as a literary instrument.
The sweetness, simplicity, lucidity, melody of the old language is present in every line that Krittibas wrote, but, in this recension at least, we miss the racy vigour and nervous vernacular force which was a gift of the early writers.
Our impression is that the modern editions do not faithfully reproduce the old classic and that copyists of more learning and puristic taste than critical imagination or poetical sympathy have polished away much that was best in the Bengali Ramayan5.
The old copies, we believe, reveal a style much more irregular 
in diction and metre, but more full of humanity, strength and the rough and natural touch of the soil.
In no case can our Ramayan6 compare with the great epic of Tulsidas, that mine of poetry, strong and beautiful thought and description and deep spiritual force and sweetness.
But it must have been greater in its original form than in its modern dress.
The great value of the edition lies however in the illustrations.
All the pictures are not excellent; indeed we must say quite frankly that some of them are an offence to the artistic perceptions and an affliction to the eye and the soul.
Others are masterpieces of the first rank.
But in this collection of pictures, most of them now well-known, we have a sort of handy record of the progress of Art in India in recent times.
Turning over the pages we are struck first by the numerous reproductions of Ravivarma’s pictures which were only recently so prominent in Indian houses and, even now, are painfully common, and we recall with wonder the time when we could gaze upon these crude failures without an immediate revolt of all that was artistic within us.
Could anything be more gross, earthy, un-Indian and addressed purely to the eye than his “Descent of Ganges”, or more vulgar and unbeautiful than the figure of Aja in the “Death of Indumati”, or more soulless and commonplace than the “Ahalya”, a picture on a level with the ruck of the most ordinary European paintings for the market by obscure hands?
Some of these efforts are absolutely laughable in the crudeness of their conception and the inefficiency of their execution; take for instance the fight between Ravan and Jatayu.
Raja Rukmangad’s “Ekadashi” is one of the few successes, but spirited as the work undoubtedly is, it is so wholly an imitation of European workmanship that it establishes no claim to real artistic faculty.
All that can be said for this painter is that he turned the Indian mind to our own mythology and history for the subject of art, and that he manifests a certain struggling towards outward beauty and charm which is occasionally successful in his women and children.
But he had neither the power to develop original conceptions, nor the skill to reproduce finely that which he tried to learn from Europe.
He represents in Art that dark period when, 
in subjection to foreign teaching and ideals, we did everything badly because we did everything slavishly.
It is fortunate that the representative of this period was a man without genius: otherwise he might have done infinitely more permanent harm to our taste than he has done.
The art of Sj. M.V. Durandhar shows a great advance. The basis is European but we see something Indian and characteristic struggling to express itself in this foreign mould. Unlike Ravivarma Sj. Durandhar has always a worthy and often poetic conception, even when he fails to express it in line and colour. In the stillness and thoughtfulness of the figures in the second illustration of the book there is a hint of the divine presence which is suggested, and Indian richness, massiveness and dignity support this great suggestion. There is augustness and beauty in the picture of Rama and Sita about to enter Guhyaka’s boat. Others of his pictures are less successful. Another intermediate worker in the field who is very largely represented, is Sj. Upendra Kishore Ray. This artist has an essentially imitative genius whose proper field lies in reproduction. There are attempts here to succeed in the European style and others which seek to capture the secret of the new school, especially where it is original, strange and remote in its greatness; but these are secrets of original genius which do not yield themselves to imitation and the attempt, though it reproduces some of the mannerisms of the school, often ends merely in grotesqueness of line and conception.
We have not left ourselves the space to do justice to the really great art represented in the book, the wonderful suggestions of the landscape7 in Sj. Abanindranath Tagore’s “Slaying of the Enchanted Deer”, the decorative beauty of the “Last Days of Dasarath”, and the epic grandeur and grace and strange romantic mystery of “Mahadev receiving the Descent of the Ganges”.
We would only suggest to the readers whose artistic perceptions are awakened but in need of training, to use the comparative method for which Sj. Ramananda Chatterji has supplied plentiful materials in this book; for instance, the three illustrations of the Kaikayi and Manthara incident which are given one after the other, — Sj. Nandalal Bose’s original and 
suggestive though not entirely successful picture, Sj. Durandhar’s vigorous and character-revealing but too imitatively European work, and Sj. U. Ray’s attempt to master the new style with its striking evidence of a great reproductive faculty but small success where originality is the aim.
Finally, let him look at the few examples of old art in the book, then at the work of the new school, especially the two pictures against page 22, and last at Raja Ravivarma’s failures.
He will realise the strange hiatus in the history of Indian Art brought about by the enslavement of our minds to the West and recognise that the artists of the new school are merely recovering our ancestral heritage with a new development of spiritual depth, power and originality, which is prophetic of the future.
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 1972 ed.: Krittibas’
2 1972 ed.: Ramayana
3 1972 ed.: Ramayana
4 1972 ed.: Ramayana
5 1972 ed.: Ramayana
6 1972 ed.: Ramayana
7 1972 ed.: of landscape