Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Four. On Art
The Revival of Indian Art
The Main Difference
The greatness of Indian art is the greatness of all Indian thought and achievement.
It lies in the recognition of the persistent within the transient, of the domination of matter by spirit, the subordination of the insistent appearances of Prakriti to the inner reality which, in a thousand ways, the Mighty Mother veils even while she suggests.
The European artist, cabined within the narrow confines of the external, is dominated in imagination by the body of things and the claims of the phenomenon.
Western painting starts from the eye or the imagination; its master word is either beauty or reality, and, according as he is the slave of his eye or the playfellow of his imagination, the painter produces a photograph or a poem.
But, in painting, the European imagination seldom travels beyond an imaginative interpretation or variation of what the physical eye has seen.
Imitation is the key-word of creation, according to Aristotle; Shakespeare advises the artist to hold up the mirror to Nature; and the Greek scientist and the English poet reflect accurately the mind of Europe.
But the Indian artist has been taught by his philosophy and the spiritual discipline of his forefathers that the imagination is only a channel and an instrument of some source of knowledge and inspiration that is greater and higher; by meditation or by Yoga he seeks within himself that ultimate centre of knowledge where there is direct and utter vision of the thing that lies hidden in the forms of man, animal, tree, river, mountain.
It is this samyag jńāna, this sākṣād darśana, the utter, revealing and apocalyptic vision, that he seeks, and when he has found it, whether by patient receptivity or sudden inspiration, his whole aim is 
to express it utterly and revealingly in line and colour.
Form is only a means of expressing the spirit, and the one thought of the artist should be how best to render the spiritual vision.
He is not bound by the forms that compose the world of gross matter, though he takes them as a starting-point for his formal expression of the vision within him; if by modifying them or departing from them he can reveal that vision more completely, his freedom and his duty as an artist emancipate him from the obligation of the mere recorder and copyist.
The ancient Asiatic artists were not incapable of reproducing outward Nature with as perfect and vigorous an accuracy as the Europeans; but it was their ordinary method deliberately to suppress all that might hamper the expression of their spiritual vision.
Reality for its own sake, one of the most dominant notes of Art in Europe, Indian artistic theory would not have recognised; for we have always regarded the reality of the Europeans as an appearance; to us the true reality is that which is hidden; otherwise, there would be no need of the prophet, the philosopher, the poet and the artist.
It is they who see with the sūkṣma dṛṣṭi, the inner vision, and not like the ordinary man with the eye only.
Beauty for beauty’s sake, the other great note of European Art is recognised by us, but not in the higher work of the artist.
Just as in the first ideal, the tyranny of the eye is acknowledged, so in the second the1 tyranny of the aesthetic imagination.
The Indian seeks freedom, and the condition of freedom is the search for ultimate Truth.
But in this search the imagination is an unsafe and capricious guide; it misinterprets as often as it interprets.
The claim of the eye to separate satisfaction can only be answered by the response of decorative beauty; the claim of the imagination to separate satisfaction can only receive the response of fancy playing with scene and legend, form and colour, idea and dream, for pure aesthetic delight; but in the interpretation of things the eye and the imagination can assert no right to command, they are only subordinate instruments and must keep their place.
Whenever, therefore, the Indian artist put away from him his high spiritual aim, it was to seek decorative beauty informed by the play of the imagination.
Here he held decorative beauty to be his paramount aim and declined to be bound by the seen and the familiar.
If by other lines than the natural, by subtler or richer methods than those of outward Nature, our old masters could gain in decorative suggestion and beauty, they held themselves free to follow their inspiration.
Here, too, they often deliberately changed and suppressed in order to get their desired effect.
If they had been asked to deny themselves this artistic gain for the sake of satisfying the memory in the physical eye, they would have held the objector to be the bondslave of an unmeaning superstition.
We of today have been overpowered by the European tradition as interpreted by the English, the least artistic of civilised nations.
We have therefore come to make on a picture the same demand as on a photograph, — the reproduction of the thing as the eye sees it, not even as the retrospective mind or the imagination sees it, exact resemblance to the beings or objects we know, or, if anything more, then a refinement on Nature in the direction of greater picturesqueness and prettiness and the satisfaction of the lower and more external sense of beauty.
The conception that Art exists not to copy, but for the sake of a deeper truth and vision, and we must seek in it not the object but God in the object, not things but the soul of things, seems to have vanished for a while from the Indian consciousness.
Another obstacle to the appreciation of great art, to which even those Indians who are not dominated by European ideas are liable, is the exaggerated respect for the symbols and traditions which our art or literature has used at a certain stage of development.
I am accustomed for instance to a particular way of representing Shiva or Kali and I refuse to have any other.
But the artist has nothing to do with my prejudices.
He has to represent the essential truth of Shiva or Kali, that which makes their Shivahood or Kalihood, and he is under no obligation to copy the vision of others.
If he has seen another vision of Shiva or Kali, it is that vision to which he must be faithful.
The curious discussion which arose recently as to the propriety or otherwise of representing the gods without beard or moustache, is an instance of this literalism which is a survival of the enslavement 
to form and rule characteristic of the eighteenth century.
The literalist cannot see that it is not the moustache or beard or the symbol which makes the godhead, but the divine greatness, immortal strength, beauty, youth, purity or peace within.
It is that godhead which the artist must draw and paint, and in the forms he chooses he is bound only by the vision in dhyāna.
Whether his interpretation will gain an abiding place in the thought and imagination of the race, depends on its power to awake the deeper vision in the race.
All that we can demand is that it shall be a real God, a real Shiva, a real Kali, and not a freak of his imagination or an outcome of some passing saṃskāra of his education or artistic upbringing.
He must go to the fountainhead of knowledge within himself or his claim to freedom does not stand.
It has already been said that the condition of freedom is the search for truth, and the artist must not allow his imagination to take the place of the higher quality.
Indian Art demands of the artist the power of communion with the soul of things, the sense of spiritual taking precedence of the sense of material beauty, and fidelity to the deeper vision within; of the lover of art it demands the power to see the spirit in things, the openness of mind to follow a developing tradition, and the sattwic passivity, discharged of prejudgments, which opens luminously to the secret intention of the picture and is patient to wait until it attains a perfect and profound divination.