Long after ViftMk Ghatak's lonely death, thesignificance of his work is finally bursting out ofits obscurity. His films arefextremely difficult

P^see in India, and he is yet unknown !o,;th,e ; '?.'.larger Indian audience. But the f i lm*; i; ^

themselves, brilliant and abrasive, are gradually

revolutionary achievements in conterftfKOfafy;'!;i:f'.,..,

criticism of Ghatak's work in, English, examinesit within the modern1 Indian tradition.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha (25) is a journaU^has been a regular contributor to yatfit>

journal's on the 1 rt)i:'||tt! art see ne.

"*-&:

.*

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Ashish Rajadhyaksha

RITWIK GHATAKA RETURN TO THE EPIC

Screen Unit

First printed in Bombay, 1982, by Screen Unit H-156 Mohan Nagar,off Datta Mandir Road, Dahanukar Wadi, Kandivili (W), Bombay400067

No part of this manuscript may be reproduced or used in translation,without prior consent of Screen Unit

ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDPrinted by Arun Naik at Akshar Pratiroop Pvt Ltd 42 Ambekar Marg,Bombay 400 031.Cover: Milon MukherjeeDesign :Raza ModakLayout: Yeshwant Sawant,

Yeshwant Pandit

Price : Rs 45Overseas : $ 9

For my mother

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book could not have been written without the help of Arun Khopkar.Apart from his encouragement and suggestions which have been of vital use, Iam particularly grateful for his painstaking translation of parts of Eisenstein'sNon-Indifferent Nature from the Russian and French specifically for thepurposes of this study.

I am also grateful to Ceeta Kapur for her extended comments, and KumarShahani for his help which was curtailed by the fact that he himself features soprominently in the book. I would like to in fact use this opportunity toacknowledge a deep personal debt to Kumar for his encouragement andpatience.

With Chatak's films still so difficult to see, I am grateful to the National FilmArchive of India for having extended to me their facilities of seeing films andtaking stills, and to Prakash Yadav of Kiran Arts for his fine and expeditiouswork.

I would like to thank Shanta Gokhale for her painstaking editing of mymanuscript, Amrit Cangarof Screen Unit for atl his help, and HaimantiBannerjee who made available her own analysis of Meghe Dhaka Tara to me. Imust particularly acknowledge the tremendous help given to me by my fatherin every possible way.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

CONTENTS

Introduction 9

The BackdropPartition 13

Chapter 1The Dominant Tradition 16

Chapter 2The Freedom Of The Archetype 33

Chapter 3Towards A Materialism of Cinema 119

Chapter 4After Ghatak 130

Notes 144

m

Introductio n

When we return across the barriers of time to the work of an artist nolonger with us, we have to somewhere acknowledge those barriersand state the means we have used to overcome them. If we considerfor instance the historical circumstances under which the artistworked, we must face the question of how their relevance mightextend to a changed present. Would the criticism isolate the artist? orwould it enlarge upon his work ? Where, eventually, would we placeourselves within such a historical canvas defined around the subjectof our criticism ?

Established conventions of art-criticism often demand an objectivi-ty, a mandatory distance from one's subject. I n such a form of criticismthere is often a sense of passing judgement. But if there is one thingwe shall not do here, it would be to'judge' RitwikChatak. I fan artist asenormously relevant to the present as Ghatak demands an objecti-vity, it is a radical objectivity, a statement of bias rather than a falseneutrality. The relationship of the individual to the historical process,never insignificant, here becomes of overwhelming importancebecause of Chatak's own historical consciousness. The process ofindividuation through history, important in his films, here becomes asimportant for us as we move beyond false glorification and relate theindividual to history.

Nowhere better than in Chatak's work do we realise that if in India,thirty years after ourindependence, serious art is still considered theproperty of the upper classes, the issues go deeper than the one.susually considered relevant for art and art-criticism. If the onlyresponse that the cancerous growth of our mass-arts evokes is theromantic dream of a 'better" art, it is obviously not enough to merelydisagree or to challenge this dream. We need to identify and toconfront the people who have sought to make even this dream into acommodity, the ideology that would systematically obscure, theissues at stake and concFetise an image only in its saleability.

In bourgeois society one constantly faces a divide between apeople's material level of existence and the dreams and aspirationsthat preoccupy them. One comes to a strange fragmentation of thehuman sensibility as their daily existence turns increasingly unrealand the only sensuous reality they feel is that of the dream-worldwhich is provided by the mass-arts. The complete absence of anidentity to people outside of the one conferred upon them by thedominant social tradition leaves them without an alternative but thefew offered by the bourgeoisie, the few limited options that providethe system with a facade of democracy.

It is a part of our fragmentation that the struggle of the artist forsignificant expression is often not seen as part of the larger struggle fora cultural unity. We repeatedly see how, despite an overall accep-tance of a correct ideology, many of those who enter the struggle viewthe role of the artist as that of a mere propagandist Such a position,taken by those who mean well but who have yet to digest the lessonsof socialist-realism, at times goes dangerously close to the position ofthe dominant class itself.

Central to the present study on Ritwik Chatak is the concept ofmyth. At various points in the book differing shades of the concepthave been used, with the idea that, hopefully over its length adefinition of the term would emerge. One could begin with a simpleidea of the myth as an encrustment of a particular configuration ofideas never challenged, a particular set of images that have come toachieve total acceptability within a culture-specific society. How ismyth to be confronted ? It can only be broken if it is displaced, shownto be false in a context different from the one it brings with itself. Sucha displacement, and the consequent openingout of the myth, we mayterm signification.

The process of signification begins with, to use Brecht's-phrase, the'showing up (of) the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of thedominators'. Since the very basis of a myth is its unchallengeability, italso carries within it the ideology of the dominant class, the'dominantviewpoint'. And since myth communicates predominantly on thesensuous, all significant form also has to work sensuously if it is todispalce its basic content into conscious cognition.

Mythic belief gets perpetuated in society through the dominantmass-media. And here in India one comes to the enormously vital roleof the commercial film industry as the most potent carrier of myths.Nowhere else does the cinema appear to play the role it does in India drawing at once from the ancient epics and the modern pop

10

A Return to the Epic

culture, creating a culture for the urban lumpen while mounting anattack on all other cultural traditions. Cinema is at once the maincause, and the most obvious of reflection, of the kind of changes thathave taken place in our society in the last thirty years. It's forms ofsubjugation themselves reflect the history of colonialism in ourcountry and the various ways in which it manifests itself today.

We can see how the process of taking on myths becomes a larger andlarger battle as the antagonistic forces become stronger. If the processbegins here, as subterranean forms of exploitation are dragged intothe light of consciousness, it culminates intheepic. Onemightdefinethe epic in slightly wider context than the Brechtian and see the formhistorically as the rallying point of a class or, as it has been in the past,of even civilisation. Both myth and epic, forms which are in constanttension with the one closed, the other open-ended, are directlyrelated to history. Both forms are comprehensible in terms of thetradition which they evoke. The difference is that myth seals off aconfiguration of images from-their material base, while the epicachieves a synthesis of form, a unity of perception that is the first steptowards the overcoming of the fragmentation of our social sensibility.

The attempt here has been to extend class-struggle to its wider,more all-encompassing form of a conflict of tradition. The width ofcanvas that will be obvious with the first chapter itself has been aninevitable consequence, as has been the attempt to extend theChatak tradition to other filmmakers in stating a larger positionoutside of the dominant one. The emphasis on tradition becomesinevitable with Ghatak not only because his films work in a tradition,but also because of the man himself. We can recall the final scene in juktiTakko Ar Gappo where Neelkantha encounters the Naxalite youths.The way traditions move on over generations, the inevitable destruc-tion of the past while building upon it, the violence of the dialecticalposition itself, all this somehow comes out in the last scene ofGhatak's own final film. Chatak's own terrible, and in a way almostheroic, end and his insistence that that too be expressed in his work, isa violent denial of the neat segregation of private and public seen inthe lifestyle of most of our artists.

It therefore becomes as important to recognise the context toGhatak's work as to analyse its inner structures. As we recognise thesignificance of his form, we have to also see the way it emerged,against the barriers that our conformist intelligentsia force upon theindependent-minded, as part of the struggle for freedom thatGhatakwaged all his life.

11

Ritwik Ghatak

The Backdrop : Partitio n

What the fil m reall y demand s is externa l actio n and not introspectiv epsychology . Capitalis m operate s in thi s way by takin g given needs on amassiv e scale , exorcisin g them , organisin g them and mechanisin gthem so as to revolutionis e everything . Great areas of ideolog y aredestroye d when capitalis m concentrate s on externa l action , dissolve severythin g int o processes , abandon s the hero as the vehicl e foreverythin g and mankin d as the measure , and thereb y smashe s theintrospectiv e psycholog y of the bourgeoi s novel . The externa lviewpoin t suit s the fil m and gives it importance.Berfo/ f Brecht (TheFilm, The Novel and The Epic Theatre)

J

In 1947, the long-drawn nationalist movement finally won for itself thefreedom of the country. For millions of Indians however, the climax ofan essentially controversial movement was not the "Tryst WithDestiny" that 15 August 1947 claimed to be, but the ensuingfragmentation of the country into three parts the tragedy ofPartition and its terrible aftermath.

Partition, and the communal warfare that accompanied it, wereclearly a consequence of the disruptive forces inherent in thenationalist movement now gone out of hand. That it was essentially aresult of the factionalism within the Indian ruling-class over thedistribution of power, as it was transferred from British to Indian hands,seems obvious today. But for those who actually experienced therapid escalation of petty political infighting into the splintering ofsocio-cultural bindings hundreds of years old, this appears far toosimplistic an explanation of its causes. For the historian, the questionof whether Partition was an expression of contradictions deep withinthe Indian social fabric, or whether it was forced upon an unwillingpeople by the nationalist movement and if the latter, how it couldbe done with such ease has to be faced. The sole event of Partitionthus questions the very nature of modern Indian society, the complextensions that tend to bind and to splinter it.

The aftermath of the split saw the Terrifying spectacle of millions ofrefugees on either side of the new border uprooted overnight fromtheir land of birth. One of these refugees was Ritwik Ghatak. Withthousands of others from the East, he too made his way to Calcutta toseek his future. The raw experience of the event, particularly theoverwhelming sense of loss on seeing his motherland suddenly turnpolitically alien, was etched deeply into his emotions; it is anobsession expressed repeatedly in his films as for instance byBhrigu in Komal Gandhar: "I refuse to accept that land across

12

Ritwik Chatak

the river as a foreign country. I was born there, it's my land, I will gohac k there."

The e x perie nee more orless shaped his entire oeuvre. It became forhim so significant an event that he pla> ed ail his themes in itsbackdrop. Chatak remained convinced that Partition had not beenhistorically inevitable but forced upon the people by the nationalistbourgeoisie. In this he believed that they found active support fromamidst the Bengali lower-middle classes, who in factacted as catalystsof the split. This class, which had been the one to suffer the brunt ofthe war and later the ravages of the freedom struggle had, within itsnarrow enconomism and petty-bourgeois value-system, developed avicious instinct for survival. In all his films except Ajantrik, Chatak'scharacters are drawn from this class economically deprived, butwith definite bourgeois aspirations. He shows how this class sufferedas much as any other in the trauma of Partition, but how even after thisthey refused to abandon their earlier values and aspirations. Asympathetic portrayal does not prevent a searing indictment of thisclass in his films.

Partition was clear evidence of the extent to which the-dominanttradition held the country together. This tradition, now in nationalistcolours, represented the ideology of the new classes coming to thefore in the wake of industrialisation and urbanisation. The nationalistideology was turning increasingly vocal, not only in politics, but in thearts and, more importantly, in the evolution of the new swadeshiculture that was rapidly replacing the old colonial one. The fact thateven the division of the country failed to shake the hold of thistradition really indicates the nature and extent of its dominance.

In Ghatak's films, the all-consuming bourgeois aspirations of eventhe economically deprived class achieve major significance whenplayed out to the grim backdrop of Partition and its memories. Theseare Chatak's refugees, the men who truly lack homes. The state ofrefugeehood was for him no different from the alienation of a classfrom its own traditions.

For Chatak therefore, cultural rootlessness took on, not its usualethnic or regionalist .character, but a class-character. The initialquestion of the split of Bengal was to become for him a larger quest an attempt at portraying the relationships between the new classesformed by the process of urbanisation and the machine-revolution,and their old traditions. It led him to take a look at the whole issue of

14

A Return to the [pic

Refugees : Jukti Takko Ar Cappo

rootlessness afresh the search of the refugee for a new identity. Forhim this identity had links directly with the past, the centuries-oldcultural heritage of our ancient societies wherein lay the unifyingforces of the present. What within the present was a recognition of thematerial level of struggle, extended into the past to a recognition ofthe material traditions that once held the people together, traditionsthat had been destroyed over the centuries. These traditions wereinitially strongly Bengali as he wrote, " Bengal for the past seven oreight-hundred years has produced something that was essentially-Bengal" and elsewhere, "As I tried to master the tradition of the wholeof Bengal, I felt sure that the union of the two Bengals is inevitable. Iam not here to judge the political implications of this, but the culturalimpact of this is of great value to me."

But as Ghatak's work grew, the traditions it reflected grew too. As hesought the roots of the present in those traditions, he went directlycounter to the ethnicity that many other artists, seemingly closer tothe Indian 'essence', attempted to capture. Ghatak moved from theparticular, using the significant in it, to a complex general, a near-international sensibility in his search. This is the dialectic that extendsto make his work at once extremely rooted to his time and milieu andyet reflect a true internationalism of sensibility.

15

CHAPTER ONE

The Dominan t Traditio n

A Return to the Epic

"Whateve r the accidents , the compromises , the concession sand the politica l adventures , whateve r the technical , economi cor even socia l change s whic h histor y bring s us, our societ y is stil la bourgeoi s society.. . Several types of bourgeoisi e have suc-ceeded one anothe r in power ; but the same statu s a certai nregim e of ownership , a certai n order , a certai n ideolog y remain s a4 a deeper level . As an economi c fact , the bourgeoisi e isnamed without difficulty ; capitalis m is openl y professed.. . As anideologica l fact it completel y disappears ; the bourgeoisi e hasobliterate d its name in passin g fro m realit y to representation ,fro m economi c man to menta l man. It comes to an agreemen twit h the facts , but does not compromis e abou t values : the bour -geoisi e is define d as the social class that does not want to benamed." Roland Bartbes.

With the coming of independence to India, one of the most typicalnationalist movements of this century reached its goal as power wastransferred from a colonial to a national ruling-class. At the time whenChatak came to cinema, the ideology that prevailed was predomi-nantly nationalist, devoted to the process of'de-naming of the socialclass', and to the establishment of the naturalness and inevitability ofnationalist rule. By the early fifties, the definition of progressivism thatthe movement had brought with it had pretty well been accepted atall levels.

This was the heyday of the Mixed Economy, when the.pressure was to'fit India into the nuclear age and do it quickly (but)... while learningfrom other countries, we should also remember that our country isconditioned by its past. All the factors that have conditioned Indiahave to be remembered".1 Conservatism here constituted a refusal torecognise what in Nehru's words was the fact that "We are on theeve of something at least as great as the Industrial Revolution,perhaps something bigger" The ambition that dominated the newprogressives was that, following the success of Gandhism during themovement, India might introduce to the world its most advancedmode of production yet

16

*

The visualisation of selective absorption of the best of capitalismand socialism which is usually seen as the essence of the MixedEconomy was not an attempt at a synthesis in the dialectical sense,but one towards peaceful co-existence in the traditions of demo-cracy. These traditions of truly participatory democracy were presentin the very essence of India, the nationalists believed, and wouldsurface as soon as alien repression on all that was.truly Indian wouldbe removed. They hoped that the modern present, with its materialadvancement, would be integrated into the uniquely Indian characterof its ancient social systems to show the way to the future. At theeconomic level thus, the programme was for an indigenous economybased on simplicity and austerity key virtues of those ancientmodes of production, today symbolised by the charkha and thebullock-cart.complemented by a simultaneous drive for the'nuclearage'.

What was this ambitious dream based on ? It was in fact the onlypossible manner in which the pre-lndependence nationalist pro-mises, and the historical role that the nationalists believed them-selves to be playing, could be integrated into a developmental progra-mme for the country. Nationalism had come to India at a time whencapitalist relations between colonies and imperialist powers wasundergoing a major change the time when, in Lenin's words, the"old colonial power becomes the 'rentier' state or usurer state" and"cartels become one of the foundations of the whole of economiclife"2. Colonial exploitation had escalated to the more sophisticatedfinance-capitalist exploitation with the entry of the non-colonialistsuperpowers like Germany and Japan into the world market; now inthe colonies, the local bourgeoisie could be entrusted with the keycapitalist function of expanding the vast, as-yet-untapped semi-urbanand rural markets. Since there was on this score little ideologicaldisagreement between the earlier and later ruling classes, it washeightened with often the help of imaginary issues.

The basic need of the nationalist movement was one of evolving aunifying identity to the present distinct from the one given to it by theBritish. This led, in its earlier stages, to a significant rise in revivalistthinking. Historian Bipan Chandra, writing about the glorification ofIndia's past by the nationalists, says,3 "Obviously its mainspring was aneed for national identity and pride. What was unfortunate from thenational point-of-view was that the past chosen for glorification was

17

Ritwik Chatak

the ancient past This was partially true because of the fact that theperiod of Mughal rule was still fresh in the memory of the people andcould not therefore be easily glamourised. On the other hand, theancient past was remote, and known only through official or near-official texts..."

According to Chandra, there were three main myths that themovement perpetuated:

First of these myths is the belief that Indian society and culture Indian civilisation reached a high watermark, the GoldenAge, in ancient India, from which high watermark it graduallyslided downwards during the medieval period branded theperiod of decay and 'foreign rule' and continued to slidedown till the revivalist movement made partial recovery butthat the real task of reviving the past glory and civilisation stillremains..."

"The second mvtti arose out of the necessity to Drove thatIndia of the ancient past the Golden Age had made thehighest achievement in human civilisation. But this was obvi-ously not true in material civilisation... Therefore the myth thatIndian genius lay in spiritualism, in which respect it was superiorto the 'materialistic' West..

The third was the Aryan myth, which was a copy of the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic myths, andwhich was the Indian responseto the White racialist doctrines. This was the myth that theIndian people were'Aryans' and that the'pure' Indian cultureand society were those of the Aryan, Vedic period.

Many of these myths had in fact been brought into direct political useby the British to demonstrate the unfitness of the Indians to managethe more mundane affairs of statecraft It had fitted very well withtheir earlier liberalism in trade, and that which accompanied theirsubsequent colonial takeover. By the time of the nationalist move-ment itself, in tune with the transition that took place within Britishcapital, their liberalism also underwent a transformation. In the newposition, justification for large capital investment revolved around theissues of poverty and overpopulation. And these myths, since theywere directly instrumental in affecting the large Indian markets,found, as they still do, a synonymity of view with the Indian bourgeois

18

A Return to the Epic

class, that has ever since continued to make inroads into the ruralareas on the grounds of redressing natural resource imbalances.

It must be mentioned here that a myth seldom answers to thequestion of whether it is basically true or not It's main quality is that itfunctions as a closed system of belief; as it relates in ever-decliningmeasure to history its content itself gets blurred, it begins to losemeaning.

By the end of the War, the new classes within the country thatsought to replace the old colonial domination of the vast Indianmarkets with their own produce, were increasingly influencing nationa-list programmes. This local class had tasted huge profits during thewar and the years of Depression; now, with Independence in sight,militant nationalism was giving way to a more moderate phase, andthe old myths were also being given a more practicable re-inter-pretation. Capital investment had to be de-linked from its Westernstigma since that had earlier come under much criticism from thenationalists themselves; overall, there was a need among the new classesfora tradition that was in some way'lndian'. This was to a large extentthe origin of the last of the nationalist myths the glorified Indianvillage. The village suddenly came to symbolise an independent unitthat had somehow retained all the great traditions of India's past rightthrough the colonial experience. Suddenly everything with 'folk'origins became a key towards a rediscovery of our nationalroots. The very primitivity of its production modes was linked to the

.non-materialist alternative that India was supposed to offer thespirkually impoverished West. The very poverty of these villages wasglorified as an essential ingredient of asceticism.

As with the earlier myths, this one too had been introduced intopolitical rhetoric by the British before the Indians took it over; tnepicture of an Indian village where, for the poverty-ridden peasant" lifewas too near the edge of death, and his main concern was with thestruggle to stay alive"4 had been created by the British to denigratethe predominantly urban-based nationalist movement Now it servedthe new rulers, who were able to use this myth, with a fewembellishments, to congeal the urban-rurai imbalance of colonialtimes behind a welter of distorted values while simultaneouslypushing their.way into the rural markets.

19

Ritwik Chjtak

We can now get a perspective to Partition, and the terriblecommunal war that accompanied it Bipan Chandra points out how the19th century social reformist movement was accompanied by asignificant increase in popular literature of the adventures of the greatregionalist heroes of the past Shivaji, Rana Pratapand Guru CobindSingh. This possibly gives us our first insight into the nature of heroiccharacterisation in popular art, in which myth is imposed uponcharacter to create the larger-than-life 'heroic' figures that lead tofascist domination of sensibility of the audience. The nationalistconflict was often characterised as an epk battle, and politicalleaders as possessing many of the archetypal qualities of leadershipand heroism of popular mythology. Consequently when the politicalschism occurred over the division of the country, it was possible togive it a communalist overtone by recourse to the same myths, withnow the Muslims included along with the British as having jointlybeen responsible for the country's downfall from its Golden Age. Thiswas countered by a Muslim revivalism as well, and with these falsepositions linked to the middle-class value-system, a communal war waseasily whipped up.

Since the myths themselves were never challenged, linked as theywere to firmly entrenched middle-class values, communalism wasitself explained away by yet newer myths, in which it was seen ashaving a centuries-old history, or by each community recognising atradition of barbarism in the opposite one. The communal war wasthus obscured behind a myriad of ethnic and regionalist issues, andPartition given an air of historical inevitability.

The dominant tradition is thus evident as fundamentally based onahistoricism, and embedded within a class-position. Myth piles uponalready existing myth as historical events are dislocated from theirhistorical perspective. The entire economic and state machinery ofthe present can thus b~e obscured from its actual function.

It is possible to see how an event such as Partition can seeminsurmountable, take on the shape of the major neurosis of an entireera As the events of May 1 968 in Paris and the Vietnam War obessedJean-Luc Godard, so Partition obsessed Ghatak.

We see in Ghatak's work how, when just one event such as Partitionis sought to be explained, it yields a mythic complex as undefinedlaws of' nature' open out to the historical process. Often the myths areso large that they rival the epic itself in scale. Opening out such mythsis often so far-reaching an act that to open them out is to.put humancivilisation itself to the test

20

A Return to the Epic

II

A major obstacle to the statement of a tradition outside of thedominant one is the weakness of our conservative tradition itself. It isa measure of its weakness that to overcome this tradition one has tofirst define it.

Moving from dominant mythic belief to the traditions of mythic portra-yal, it is important to identify its fundamentally romantic character.Whether it be the instinctivism that is used to explain away theacquisitive urge for commodities, or the particular regionalism thathas been the usual expression of a return to one's roots, or morespecifically the total dissociation, the schizophrenic rift often seenbetween the livingand working conditions of people, and the dreamsand aspirations that dominate their value-system, such romanticismhas been the means of explaining away the 'covert' materialism ofhuman activity. This is romantic ahistoricism taken to its final extreme. Butas Arnold Hauser points out, it is part of the romantic position itself:

The characteristic feature of the romantic movement was notthat it stood for a revolutionary or anti-revolutionary, a pro-gressive or a reactionary ideology, but that it reached bothpositions by a fanciful, irrational and undialectical route. It's -evolutionary enthusiasm was based just as much on ignoranceof the ways of the world as its conservatism... just as remote fromthe appreciation of the real motives behind historical issues, as itsfrenzied devotion to the Church and the Crown, to Chivalryand feudalism.5

Such a wide view of romanticism becomes necessary for us becausethe most significant artists of even the dominant romantic tradition inthe country echo its associations beyond its specifically Indiancontext If this tradition, in which the dominant mythic system findsits clearest expression, were to be split into two streamsthe firstbeing the actual portrayal of ancient myth, the second the morerecent realist tradition taken from the West we see in Ananda Cooma-raswamy and, in cinema, in Satyajit Ray the tradition in all its widerramifications. If we were to examine their work in slightly greaterdetail, we might also see the reason why romanticism was soimportant a phenomenon in the way It affected Ghatak's work.

The influence of Ananda Coomaraswamy on the specifically

21

Ritwik Chatak

Indian traditions of portrayal is hard to exaggerate; but it is alsodeceptive. This is possibly because, coming to the scene when thenational situation was in complete flux, Coomaraswamy's two majortargetsthe Western academic system, and to a lesser extent ourown brahminical tradition that had encrusted the past into-meaning-less ritualwere both ripe for a larger attack. Whatever the reason,Coomaraswamy has since been almost completely absorbed into theideology that has sought to detach our mythic tradition from thematerial conditions that first gave it expression. Coomaraswamy,perhaps unaware of its repercussions, was the first major theoreticianof a position that has grown today to beinga major problematic for anyIndian artist who would attempt to draw forms from the past

Coomaraswamy's work comes as an attempt to rescue the magni-ficence of oriental art, and its entire mythic system, from those whowould render it mystical or criticise it for its non-realism. Westernacademic art-criticism, which has always missed the significance of atradition by concentrating on its conventions, is entirely representa-tive of the capitalist milieu from which it emerges where the'worth' ofa work of art defines its innate qualities. Both come under scathing cri-ticism from him.

In a series of devastating essays, he is capable of showing upEuropean developmentalism for what it was in the coloniesin itseducational policies, its attempts to 'civilise' a backward but notnecessarily uncultured peoples by imposing upon them a foreignliteracy and cultureand the destruction of all ideals of a once-dignified civilisation by a 'murderous machine with no conscienceand no ideals' that is contemporary Western civilisation.

The destruction of a people's art is the destruction of thei r life ,by which they are reduced to the proletarian status of hewers ofwood and drawers of water, in the interests of the foreign traderwhose is the profit,..We are irresponsible, in a way that theOrientals are not yet, for the most part, irresponsible.6

This context becomes important in the light of Coomaraswamy's realattempt to outline as an alternative to capitalism a way of life he drawsfrom the ancient oriental past In its concept of responsibility, of 'th ecosmic pattern of good form unanimously accepted' and mainl y in itsrecognition of attainment in the work of the anonymous artisan , theseancient oriental systems offered the most significant alternative , hefelt, to the present

22

A Return to the Epic

At the very centre of Coomaraswamy's vision of the oriental societyis the anonymous artisan. It is through him, through the art he createsin his anonymity, that we see the fusion of what forms an almostunbridgeable gap in capitalism: that of labour with art. Part of thisvision comes through his recognition of the distance between use andbeauty in modern, machine-produced goods. But in main his advo-cacy of the return to the artisanal mode of production is because it isonly in that, in a skill born out of a function higher than paid labour,that the truth in art is perceivedthe achievement and truth in the'well and truly made object'.

The substantiative strength that Coormaraswamy draws from th(ancient traditions to make these statements comes from its myths.Along with his recognition of their sensuous power, both symbols andritual-patterns in his work move beyond their brahminical context,and achieve a strength that parallels that of the myths themselves. Atypically forceful interpretation of a powerful myth is as follows:

Shjva is a destroyerand loves the burning ground But what doesHe destroy? Not merely the heavens and earth at the close of aworld-cycle, but the fetters that bind each separate soul. Whereand what is the burning ground? It is not the place where ourearthl y bodies are cremated, but the hearts of His lovers, laidwaste and desolate. The place where the ego is destroyedsignifie s the state where illusion and deeds are burnt away: thatis the crematorium, the burning ground where Shri Natarajadances , and whence he is named... Dancer of the Burning-Ground . In thi s simile we recognise the historical connectionbetwee n Shiva' s gracious dance as Nataraja, and His wild danceas the demon of the cemetery.7

It is through such insights and descriptions that Coomaraswamyrevalidate s the form s of the ancient myths , rescuing them from boththe Wester n skeptics and the brahminical class. As earlier, here too hearrives at what seems an almost materialist recognition of their vitalitythroug h his interpretation of the symbols of creation and destructionexpresse d there.

But again the last step is never taken; the very expression of.suchpowerful symbols becomes pure creation as Coomaraswamy wondersat the kin d of artisans that must have given birth to such images:

Ritwik Chatak

How amazing the range of such thought and sympathy of thoserishi-artists who first conceived such a type as this, affording animage of reality, a key to the complex tissue of life, a theory ofnature, not merely satisfactory to a single clique or race, noracceptable to the thinkers of one cen'tury only, but universalappeal to the philosopher, the lover and the artist of all agesand all countries.8

History for Coomaraswamy was contemplation of the past detachedfrom its specifically historical perspective. He always accepted theprivileged position of the present in observing the past, but did notconsider the present as different in any way from the mythic past.One sees this in the way he never sought substantiation fromspecifically historical sources. Myth became the absolute centre ofhis universe, for if to him opening it outinto history was to miss out onits true significance as myth, likewise extending its inner structuresinto a programme for the present was something that would naturallyoccur, but only when the myth was comprehended.

The job of leading to such comprehension is specifically thatof art Art is "both an aid to, and a means for spiritual progress", andconsequently all art that does not reduce itself before larger attain-ment, upon which intrudes the artisf s personality, is suspect, faultyart

Such a world-view is one very close to a large number of Indianscholars and thinkers. Many of these represent the very best of theIndian critical tradition in the arts, for Coomaraswamy's tremendousconcern for the manner in which the myths and symbols of India'spast were losing their vitality to mere ritualism, has later led to othersin his tradition breaking away from the decadent classicism of many ofour art-forms into a recognition of its folk origins.

It is in fact a very simple job to be critical of Coomaraswamy for hehimself offers us the toolshis justification of the caste system, of sati,his advocation of a return to feudalism; or the other orientalist E. B.Havell glorifying the poverty-ridden Indian peasant in iust the tonesthat bourgeois nostalgia has used since Independence are positions easilycondemned. But that would beto criticise the individual by lettingthetradition go. We have to see the consequences of this tradition uponmythic portrayal itself.

In her study of Coomaraswamy,9 Geeta Kapur introduces theanalogy of Thomas Mann. Mann, an almost exact contemporary of

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A Return to the Epic

Coomaraswamy, is one of the few modern artists the latter refers to,when he quotes him at the conclusion of his essay'A Figure Of Speechor a Figure of Thought: "I like to thinkyes, I feel surethat a future iscoming in which we shall condemn as black magic, as the brainless,irresponsible product of instinct, all art which is not controlled byintellect"

She points out that Mann in fact achieved the very thing Cooma-raswamy soughtan integration of the mythic past into the modernsensibility.

Assimilating Freud, Mann follows up in a succession of hisworks, the relationship between disease and creativity andthereon, tier upon tier, he discloses the wizardry of the uncon-scious; the contrivings of the soul in its attempt to seize theworld; the irony, comedy and transcendence drawn from theroots of the soulits mythic past And this passage to mythologydoes not in any way deny the psychological.

Such a passage to mythology led Mann not to orthodoxy or to anyspecific tradition, but towards being a 'visionary modernist'whichCoomaraswamy cannot be said to be.

One may extend the analogy by seeing how an artist from therealist tradition, the tradition that Coomaraswamy rejected in hisdiscovery of a new oriental aesthetic, used the myths and archetypesof the past towards a portrayal of the present In a sense the crisis ofthe bourgeoisie, Mann's'search for bourgeois man' in Lukacs' words,is the same as that of Coomaraswamythat is if we extend thedistance between use and beauty to also express the ever-wideninggap between a people's existence and the images of modern societythat dominate modern consciousness. This, for Mann, is the frag-mented sensibility, against which he soughta unified vision. In DoctorFaustus, to begin with, the attempt is to develop this purely throughthe narrative structure. Then, as the character grows, this too extendsto the man-nature relationshipthe growth of the rationalist and hisstruggle against the 'daemonic'. If the struggle to express a collectiveunconscious does come, it begins as an entirely individual attempt toreconcile the idealism of the pre-war German tradition with theincreasing crisis it faced after the war.

To see how Coomaraswamy was unable to universatise, we wouldneed to determine the terms of this universal isation. And here it is that

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Ritwik Chatak A Return to the Epic

Mann's solution is extraordinarily revealing. The attempt to relate theprotagonist as an individual in an environment gives way in his laterwork to the reader directly experiencing the vital relationship withnature. But even this is not allhis universalisation comes when hisnarrative develops realist and mythic counterpoints, as in The BlackSwan, or moves to mythology proper as in The Transposed Heads orThe Holy Sinner. In the latter, with Freudian knowledge of the truesignificance of myth, pure narration is itself enough to open out themyth.

As we counter Coomaraswamy's use of mythic forms to creafe aclosed system with Mann's attempts to open them out, we are at thepoint of actually defining the means by which archetypal formsachieve freedom from their ritualistic bindings. Such a freeing ofarchetypal energy we might describe as the process of politicisation,or to use Mann's word 'secularisation' of the archetype. One could,perhaps somewhat simplistically, outline it.thus: there is, to beginwith the crisis that challenges the dominant illusion thatall communi-cation takes places purely on the conscious level. Coomaraswamy'scrisis would be the distance between the religious icon and the usefulobject; Mann's the one following the Freudian onslaught upon theconscious.

As the dominant sensibility suffers fragmentation, the new sensibi-lity seeks to bring forth its own synthesis with the past, and to createnew images of the archetype. It is here that the term'secularisation' isimportant, for in many ways these new images have been attempts totake the archetypes out of their feudal context. Perhaps it wasCoomaraswamy's basically feudalist position that prevented himfrom doing what Mann, or in our own context Ghatak, did.

And finally, as the new images seek to intervene in the materialprocess of social functioning, as people discover in them an expres-sion of their own struggle, it is then that they take on a revolutionaryquality.

Coomaraswamy's own idealism, his propagation of the nationalistcause in his rejection of the modern and his own response to thecrisis that dominated his timeof a rejection of capitalism withoutseeing a significant alternative to it all possibly explain his obsessionwith myth as myth. While such an aberration might appear to havebeen caused by his overstatement of his case, it is in fact not that. It isfundamental to his ideological content, as it is to that of the dominantclasses of his time in the country.

It is almost solely a consequence of such a position that a neo-