On Thursday, November 21, the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) organised a joint lecture on Ananda Coomaraswamy at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES). Dr. Janice Leoshko, of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Austin, Texas, and Dr. Laura Weinstein, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, spoke of the man, his life, and his work. They also reflected on the many paradoxes and contradictions underlying his views on the art, culture, and society of India and Sri Lanka.
I must confess I know too little about art history to comment with any kind of authority. Yet I know it is not an exact science. Coomaraswamy is perhaps the best example of this: he was at once an empiricist working within a scientific framework – as his work as a minerologist in early 20th century Sri Lanka demonstrates – and an indefatigable utopian – as his writings on Asian art and philosophy show. As Senake Bandaranayake correctly puts it, he was this country’s first real art historian; his magnum opus, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908), remains as authoritative as ever for scholars in the field.
Buddhist Art
If art history is not exact, then it follows that art historians are not infallible. Coomaraswamy certainly was not. This is what Dr. Leoshko has tried to address in her book on the man, Making a Canon: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Sri Lanka, and the Place of Buddhist Art (University of Chicago Press). The point Dr. Leoshko emphasised in her speech at the ICES is not whether Coomaraswamy was correct about Indian art or Sri Lankan art, but rather what perspective he adopted when making his observations on them. Once we ascertain that perspective, everything, or almost everything, becomes clear.
Like other “national-minded” intellectual figures from Ceylon, Coomaraswamy both rebelled against the colonial framework of his time and was constrained by that framework. He did not spurn all things Western, but saw Asian art as superior to anything he had witnessed in Europe. His greatest contribution, in this regard, was his valorisation of Kandyan art, at a time when it had fallen into neglect. As Bandaranayake comments, British officials focused more on places like Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa as it was in line with the colonial project: to these officials, they were hallmarks of a once great civilisation, and in devoting their energies to them, they could legitimise their power.
Kandyan art, by contrast, bore all the marks of a decadent civilisation. That decadence was the basis, if not justification, for British rule in the country: after all, had it been as strong and durable a civilisation like Anuradhapura, it would not have fallen into their hands in the first place. Thus, throughout the 19th century, neither administrators nor Western travellers focused much on the art and culture of the region. In exploring it and recording, in minute detail, its society, Coomaraswamy filled a gap.
Colonial historiographies
However, in rejecting colonial historiographies, he seems to have subscribed to them in another. He repudiated the Eurocentrism so fashionable in his time. Yet he projected an Indocentric worldview in his writings on Sri Lankan art. There is no other reason why he compared the murals of Buddhist temples in Kandy with the miniature art of Bharhut: a comparison which scholars critiqued as anachronistic.
Though he has been credited for rescuing Kandyan artisans from anonymity, Coomaraswamy saw their work as a diffusion, or a borrowing,at most. He exhibited a tendency to attribute the achievements of one society to those of another: the same colonial perspective he so heartily rejected.He “rescued” Kandyan artisans by attributing to them an individuality that the colonial project had denied it. Yet paradoxically, he denied them an agency of their own. Thus, he called Kandyan art a “folk art”, a perception that was to persist until the likes of Senake Bandaranayake (The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka) and Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda (Ridi Vihare: The Flowering of Kandyan Art) critiqued it.
To be sure, and to be fair, Coomaraswamy did not limit such perspectives to his writings on Sri Lankan art. When studying Indian art, he projected the same biases and prejudices. As Dr. Weinstein so bluntly argued in her speech, he was reluctant to consider “Muhammadan art” as indigenous to India. It was as though only Hindu art, with its celebration of many-limbed gods and monsters, could rank as “authentic” Indian art.
If Coomaraswamy saw Hindu art as the only authentic Indian art, and if he saw Kandyan art as a diffusion of Hindu art, it is only natural that, in his later years, he would try to achieve a philosophical synthesis between Hinduism and Buddhism – abandoning his earlier project of a synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophy. Not being a scholar of Buddhism, still less a devotee of the faith, I cannot comment on whether he succeeded in this, except to point to an essay by Martin Wickramasinghe (“The Spiritual Development of a Nationalist”) which praises Coomaraswamy’s efforts at reviving Sinhala culture and critiques his comparisons of Hindu and Buddhist tenets – specifically, Brahman and Nirvana.
European colonialism
When judging the man, of course, we must remind ourselves that he was both a product of his time, and, as Dr. Leoshko emphasises, a radical for his time. He eviscerated European colonialism’s impact on the societies of the East in a way no other Ceylonese intellectual had, or for that matter could. But in doing so, he fell into a morass of contradictions, both valorising Sinhalese art while denying it the agency that it needed.
Senake Bandaranayake’s critique is perhaps the most relevant: that Coomaraswamy failed to see the concrete material conditions that had made the art of his country possible. Regi Siriwardena, in the bluntest assessment of the man, contended that, unlike William Morris, he channelled his utopianism into a vigorous defence of an imagined precolonial past. Whereas Morris devoted his energies to radical ends, Coomaraswamy receded to a romantic utopianism detached from the realities of his time. Morris worked with the realisation that past was prologue. For Coomaraswamy, however, it could only be atelos.
Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at [email protected]. Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he heads U & U, an informal art and culture research collective.
