Evolving India

Art-principles for india

The Marxist Attitude in the Balance

There was recently a burst of tanks and bombers in newspaper columns against an art-critic who ventured to challenge Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's pronouncement some months ago on the essence and aim of art. and aim of art. I do not deny that the said artcritic's statement was lacking in clearness and completeness. Bur was he absolutely off the right line? Was the core of his contention really open to fatal attack?

To understand that core we must look clearly at Nehru's own thought. Nehru seems to have had five principles in mind. First, art should not be cut off from life. Second, it should deal mainly with our own times. Third, it should spring from the life of the people at large. Fourth, it should express the social and political problems and movements of a nation. Fifth, it should be "realistic" in treatment. These principles generalizes more or less the Marxist view of art—and at their back is the idea that the individual exists only in relation to society and that his function is to be the mouthpiece and servant of the masses. What

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stuck in the gullet of the art-critic in question was this idea and the stress on the social and political aspects of a nation's life. That he is not alone in his reaction and that he may not be a total fool is easily shown by what Mr. James Agate, the eminent dramatic critic, wrote in the last number of his autobiographical series: Ego 7. "I believe," said Mr. Agate, "that great art is individualistic, and that any state of society that tends to lessen the importance of individuals tends to do away with the great artist.... Soviet Russia has not produced a composer fit to lick the boots of the Czarist lot....I prefer Tchehov's plays to dramas about communal wash-houses." Of course Mr. Agate had no desire tod efend the unpleasant features of Czarism; what he insisted on—with some unnecessary exaggeration, though—is the inadequacy in several respects of the Marxist attitude towards art.

To believe in art's individualism is not, as the Marxists might suppose, to think the artist has no connection with reality or with contemporary factors or with the general life of the nation to which he belongs. It is not tantamount to saying: "Beethoven could have sprung into existence as easily in Timbuctoo during the time of the Roman Empire as in Germany in the age of Napoleon." No doubt, a nation does feed the secret springs of an individual and the age in which he lives does colour and shape him, but he is not altogether a

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national product nor is he grooved in contemporary conditions. Beethoven's Eroica drew its inspiration from the age of Napoleon and his other compositions bear signs of the German temperament and the German scene, but most of them transcend both Germany and the Napoleonic influence and, further, the German temperament and scene in them have nothing at all to do with mass-problems or social and political purposes of his day. Beethoven in love, Beethoven responding to Nature, Beethoven in the midst of purely personal joys and despairs, Beethoven in contact with other individuals and their personal attitudes, Beethoven looking up to some spiritual ideal, Beethoven invoking some Mystery and Beatitude beyond the earth—these are what mainly constitute his sonatas and symphonies.

And just because he is so individualistic he need not be considered as cut off from life and reality. He is no dawdler over some private dream devoid of consequence—a sort of opium-eater. But he certainly is cut off to a marked extent from mass-movements, especially of a social and political type. If distance from such movements means divorce from life and reality, then Beethoven is a dweller among the dead. But, truly speaking, we should confine, as regards the content of art, the meaning of the words "life" and "reality" to a freedom from sterile escapism. Sterile escapism cannot be charged to even those who are more individualistic and esoteric than Beethoven. To be dissatisfied

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with things as they are in the mass, to follow an ideal that is rare and that is difficult for most human beings at the moment, to rise above one's fellows, —is not to be an ineffective ghost in artistic content. All leaders, pioneers, planners, progressives rise above their fellows, cultivate a difficult vision, foster a rare emotion. Not that they wholly refuse to keep in touch with common contemporary experience, but their art can be just as genuine and vital when its content strikes beyond that experience's range and only a few at the moment can avail themselves of its message. The sole proviso is: there should be depth and significance and purpose in their work.

The Marxist notion that an individual is real only in relation to society and that he should voice in his art proletarian purposes and social and political movements of the bulk of a nation, is based on an external materialistic view of what an individual and the world are. Is the individual simply a member of a social aggregate? He would be such, if the social aggregate were the only reality of any consequence. But if there is a thing called the soul distinct from the body and if that soul is a spark of a Divine Consciousness that emanates and sustains the universe, then the individual's supreme significance and reality need not be limited to society. He would be related to an Immortal In-dweller, to a Cosmic Presence and to a Transcendental Perfection. His deepest significance would lie

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in this relation. In the light of it his relation to society would be determined. His art-expression would most legitimately be derived from religious, metaphysical, mystical, spiritual sources. He would be under no obligation to restrict himself to proletarian affairs, especially of a social and political kind. And even when he turned to them he would be principally concerned with giving an outlet through them to motives and inspirations beyond their existence. They would not be all in all. And to deem them not all in all is hardly to hold a brief for art for art's sake in a narrow barren sense.

The art-critic who found fault with Nehru's doctrine and cited Tolstoy, Emerson, Ruskin and Morris on his own behalf sought to justify the artist's drawing inspiration from within himself, from his own profound emotions and personal ideals and individual heights rather than from proletarian purposes and social and political matters. The art-critic's wording was somewhat vague: he seemed to favour sterile escapism as opposed to the tackling of vital issues and concrete actualities, but it is excessive to reply to him by saying that if he knew anything about these writers at all he would scarcely try to defend his theory with the help of the greatest champions in the nineteenth century of the theory actually being put forward by Nehru! The names of Tolstoy, Emerson, Ruskin and Morris cannot be used for upholding entirely the Marxist view

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of art. Surely, these men were purposeful and had the good of society at large in mind: they were, however, not in the least materialistic, they were poles apart from believing the individual to be real only in relation to society.

Tolstoy was religious to the marrow and looked for the fountain-head of all conduct in duty to God. Emerson was a mixture of pantheist and tran-scendentalist: he held that the truest springs of action lay in the divine infinity hidden behind phenomena. Besides, he was a pugnacious individualist vis à vis average social conventions and the rating of common human collectivities as paramount. Ruskin also was surcharged with a conviction of the Infinite and the Eternal—art to him was most valuable when through natural objects it had suggestions of them, open or subtle. Morris followed Karl Marx in his general socialist opinions, yet he too had a living sense of realities beyond the human and the earthly, as had the mediaeval master-craftsmen whom he admired.

Nor exactly can Plato be enlisted on Marx's side on the strength of his socialist leanings. The highest goal of the Platonic life was oneness with the divine beauty, truth and goodness. Morality and social behaviour were closely knit in Platonism with the mystical and metaphysical intuition. Though the Platonic artist was meant to be a social-motived creature, he could never serve society with a materialistic penchant. Plato wanted all art to have a keen

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consciousness of the archetypal world he posited above the flux of phenomena.

Whether these "visionaries" are right, or the pragmatic Marxist, may seem to many modern-minded Indians an issue long-decided by science in the latter's favour. But the materialistic and mechanical reading of the universe by nineteenth-century physics is now shown to be seriously garbled, if not altogether erroneous. Although twentieth-century physics has not yet evolved a clear and consistent picture, a return to the old materialism and mechanism appears impossible. The materialism which calls itself dialectical as contrasted with mechanical and which is the official basis of the Marxist ideology is trying hard to adjust the revolutionary world of relativity and quanta and "waves" and the Law of Indeterminacy to its anti-mystical and anti-spiritual position. But the odds against it are heavy. And there has been another and severer attack from the ranks of science on the Marxist basis. Whatever the formal departures from the old mechanical materialism in regard to the process of phenomena, this basis is really no different from that of Buchner and Haeckel in that the physical is regarded as the prime reality. The inner self is still viewed as an outcome and a dependent of the outer. The psychology current in Soviet Russia is Behaviourism: it looks on all mental activity as the sum-total of the throat's muscle-movements—to think is simply to talk loudly or

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under one's breath! There is for the Marxist nothing else than phases of physical function. Philosophically, the absurdity of Behaviourism can be exposed in one minute. Tremors of the throat-muscles, if determined by purely physical factors, cannot have the power to make any kind of valid judgment about the world. A motion of the larynx or the thorax occurring solely because of physical changes in the body would not be guided by a sense or intuition of the true and the false, a criterion of rational validity, the logical implications of the object about which we are talking. So, if Behaviourism is right, then Behaviourism which is itself a theory or judgment about the world can carry no intrinsic tightness or reasonableness and is probably incorrect and no ultimate importance need be attached to it! To answer this argument by saying that the bodily changes which determine the course of our thought and our sense of rationality are themselves a "reflection" of the rational structure of the environment is to indulge in guess-work, if not to beg the whole question. Yes, philosophically the Behaviourist cuts the very branch upon which he is standing. But even scientifically the holder of any type of materialism is given no standing-ground by what has come to be known as "extra-sensory perception". Researches in extrasensory perception have been carried out under test conditions and statistical scrutiny in Cambridge and Duke University in North California. When anything

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is transmitted across physical space, the distance diminishes the strength in exact inverse ratio; but controlled and certified experiments in telepathy have found that a thought transmitted from afar is invariably as strong and definite as one from a neighboring locality. So it is proved that telepathy is not a kind of radio across physical space with a bodily part acting at either end. Much less can a bodily part be held responsible for pre-vision, for seeing correctly the future. The mathematically sifted fool-proof laboratory instances brought forward of pre-vision set at nought physical time in addition to physical space. The evidence collected by Dr. Rhine and others has given with a strict scientific procedure the coup de grace to materialistic self-sufficiency. Of course the body-formula yet holds sway over those who refuse to look at the new facts and figures about faculties present in us though seldom developed; but no honest inquirer can now help concluding that experimentation as accurate and systematic as any scientist could ask for has shown it to be wanting in finality.* Though extra-sensory perception as studied in the scientific West does not directly demonstrate the existence of God or the divine qualities of the hidden soul, it leaves the road wide open for a mystical and spiritual

* See Sixty Years of Extra-Sensory Perception by Dr. Rhine; Prof. C. D. Broad's Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research, 1936; the Journal of Parapsychology (Duke University) June, September and December, 1942.

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belief or intuition or quest and for a removal of the Marxist stress on an external view of the individual and the world.

Once that stress is gone, society at large and its mass-activities cannot dominate the stage of art. And even when the cause of the masses has prominent and "realistic" play, it would be erroneous to hold that it forms the essence of art. To support his individualism, the critic instanced the writers of Czarist Russia where there was not the so-called rule of the people to supply mass-inspiration of a "realistic" socio-political character. This argument was turned against him by showing how the best Russian writers from Pushkin and Gogol to Gorki were the most politically and socially conscious, channeled the common people's aspirations and exposed in a "realistic" manner the grotesque and gruesome tyranny of Czarism. But the turning of the argument does not affect the individualism of those writers—individualism inasmuch as they wrote under no compulsion of serving the masses, they freely chose to be what they were and if their inclinations had been otherwise they would not have hesitated to be neither "realistic" nor socially and politically conscious.

Moreover, their being what they were did not by itself make them artists. They would have been propagandist pamphleteers without the least artistic fire if they had not brought to their job a sense of beauty. Without the breath of beauty all their

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realism and social and political consciousness would have been dead things. And for beauty's breath to be present, what is required is a certain measured intensity within the individual, giving birth to perfection of form. "The strength of a nation" or any other external source is not the provider of that intensity. Out of the individual's own recesses it has got to be evoked and it has nothing to do with any particular theme, any particular national activity, any "realism" of treatment and technique. All themes, activities, "isms" of treatment and technique can be animated by it. Even "escapist" tendencies can become art through it. From the standpoint of form, art can be genuine and vital no matter how other-worldly, cloud-cuckooish, opium-eating it may be. The sole proviso here is: there should be beauty created from within and no superficial empty decorativeness.

It is not necessary to take up this extreme position in order to challenge the new art-principles. The formula of freedom from sterile escapism, joined to the formula of beauty created from within, is enough to justify as art those works which do not teem with matters of the masses and an outward realism. Nehru's phrase "the problems and realities of life" would be very poor and limited if it covered merely national movements, social revolutions, patriotic struggles, economic perplexities, mass-travails. The works of art mentioned by the challenger— the landscapes of Turner, Rembrandt's portraits

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and the Japanese sea-scapes—are indeed quite innocent of such problems and realities. Their bearing on the issue at stake cannot be confused by attributing to the challenger the notion that these works are totally cut off from life and earth. Nobody in his senses denies they have some connection with life and earth: the Japanese sea-scapes have surely something to do with the expanses of water around Japan, Turner is closely related to English sky-effects and Venetian lights, while Rembrandt is "realistically" linked with many aged and poor Netherlanders. Yet the problems and realities presented are of non-social non-political wave and wind and cloud and sunset, or of individuals with feelings and faces quite removed from political and patriotic ferments or large mass-movements. They have no propaganda value either: they cannot be used as a stick to beat Capitalism or Imperialism.

Nor can one wholly summon Aeschylus and Dante to prop up by their work this modernist thesis. Aeschylus may show us Athenian patriotism, the struggle against tyranny and the place of the individual in society in some parts of his plays, but he expresses many other things too—supernatural presences, superhuman fates, individual aspirations, personal passions. Dante did write a notable political treatise and did import politics with pungent effect into his verse, yet far greater is the poetry he wrote inspired by the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, his own religious and mystical temper,

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his love for and idealisation of Beatrice. There is neither politics nor sociology in the grand finale of Divina Comedia—the ascent to the highest circle of heaven, the plea of St. Bernard to the Virgin and the disclosure of the Beatific Vision. That outburst of poetry which stands among the top marvels of inspiration is utterly useless in the scales proposed by the modernist thesis—as useless as the frescoes of Ajanta.

Ajanta cannot be called "dead" or jeered at because of the "dreamy and oblong (and therefore fantastic) eyes" of the women on its walls nor can we justly declare that it has nothing to give us any more. We forget that when new times come and the present problems vanish and other techniques are in vogue the art now encouraged will be termed just as dead by men bound by what would then be considered modern or present-day standards. Let us by all means have "realistic" art imbued with our time-spirit and tense with our national activities and our masses' problems; but let us also remember that art cannot be circumscribed by any school and that activities and problems of a private and personal nature, a cosmic nature, a transcendental nature are equally important if the whole of reality is to be compassed by art. The frescoes of Ajanta are not at all dead and can never die, for they have wonderful depth and significance and purpose, and they have a ravishing beauty breaking from within their painters' being and not an empty decorativeness

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laid on from without. No realism is theirs, and yet a most revealing skill. They have no strictly social and political value, they have no proletarian message—but they undoubtedly are not antiquated; for the insight and fervour of soul that are in them are still among us and are fresh and radiant in those who still keep alive India's traditions of spiritual seeking, of straining towards what is beyond the human and the mortal, of aspiring after a loveliness and an ecstasy such as pervades our mighty scriptures and the lives of our prophets and yogis from Buddha to Sri Aurobindo. Many new impulses must be given outlet, many changes must be introduced even in our spiritual quest, since we cannot merely repeat the past, but the past if truly inspired cannot be lifeless or unfruitful, and a work of art cannot be judged by narrow standards of technique or those of time and clime, socio-political utility and relevance to the masses.

I might end here. But Ajanta calls for a little more. There is a special sense in which to describe its frescoes as dead would show an insufficient sensitiveness to the vibrations of vitality. For, whoever has seen those paintings cannot help thrilling to their intense joie de vivre, rich abandon and rhythmic mobility. It is not merely the line-work that is remarkable for fineness and vigour; what is more remarkable is the adventurous uninhibited élan of heart and mind which has here made even religious themes a glory of dancing and

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singing blood, a flame of fearless youth. O the energy, the zest assailing us from those caves of colour, the harmonious urge to tune our life into a perfect symphony! What should have been said is not that Ajanta is dead and that our painters ought to leave it for good, but that, as N. G. Jog has recently remarked, our artists often copy its line while leaving the life of it in the ancient vaults. To re-create the formalism of the old masters, yet miss their spirit altogether, is the deadly mistake so many of our brush-wielders commit. If this mistake had been pointed out, that would have been a salutary service. Ajanta lives and with a healthy and no feverish vitality. If "the strength of a nation", which Nehru puts forward, has anything to do with superabundant healthy vitality, then without doubt, whatever else we may welcome in order to live many-sidedly, there should never be a break with Ajanta!

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