Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's works nees to be studied in comparision with the essential writings of Prof Hiriyanna and Sri Aurobindo.Alas!our university professors do not know much about these giants of aesthetics.If our univesrsity education in the areas of art history, literary concepts and philosphy want to become more native in approach, then Ananda K. Coomaraswamy should be studied in depth.I do not know whether that day will come from 7.02.2010 to 31.12.2099?
The article below is from The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
by Arvind Sharma-Dr.Harisha G.B.)
The name of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy has become synonymous
with an entire approach to art and of the civilization of which
it is an expression. Coomaraswamy’s genius lay not only in presenting
it to the modern Western world but also in demonstrating that
this civilizational art and artistic civilization was contrapuntal and
not necessarily antithetical to the modern West, as ears less gifted
than his to hearing celestial harmonies might have proposed. His
multi-splendored genius expressed itself in over a thousand published
items. One might say that Coomaraswamy wrote more than
many people read in the course of one life.
The publication of his seminal contributions in the form of the
compendium of his essential writings that you hold in your hands is
therefore to be greatly welcomed. It conveys to us the flavor of his
thought, as water collected in a small shell on the shore conveys the
flavor of the entire ocean. Of course it cannot convey a sense of the
ocean’s magnitude, but it earns our gratitude in conveying a sense
of its taste; of how the divine dialectic of the transformation of religion
into art and art into religion might hold the key to the rejuvenation
of both life and art in the modern world.
Our contemporary world is trying to rejuvenate itself not
through God but through religion, thereby creating for itself the
problem of fundamentalism, an outcome which would not have surprised
Coomaraswamy, who insisted that the modern world must
rejuvenate itself through God rather than religion, and bring its
wasteland to life by irrigating it with the waters of Tradition. This
Tradition offers perennial answers to contemporary questions
whereas modernity has only been able, if at all, to offer contemporary
(and fugitive) answers to perennial questions. It is not merely
an accident then that while that great work of the Enlightenment,
Voltaire’s Candide, ends with Dr. Pangloss cultivating his garden living
in the best of all possible worlds, Coomaraswamy, when he
sensed that his life was about to run its course, chose to leave his
body in the manner of a Hindu renunciate, also in a garden, symxi
From the World Wisdom online library:
www.worldwisdom.com/public/library/default.aspx
bolizing the fact that he brought to us from all possible worlds the
spiritual fragrance of humanity, fresh from the exquisite gardens of
its various religions. And they are various. For none of the great
expositors of the perennial philosophy—not Coomaraswamy in any
case—made the mistake, to which some are prone, of imagining
that just because all the religions say more or less the same thing
that they are therefore all the same. Thus Coomaraswamy has rightly
been hailed as a bridge-builder at a time when the West was acting
like a steamroller in the rest of the world.
All the reader need do to verify what I have said, lest he or she
be inclined to consider the thoughts and emotions I have just
shared as too encomiastic or enthusiastic, is to read this book.
-Arvind Sharma
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