28
Hermann Goetz: Indian Art
Of all great art traditions of mankind thaf o( India is the least
known. Nevertheless, the number of monuments which survive to-
day is no smaller than what survives in the Occident, and these
again are but a fraction of what was created in the course of
thousands of years. Even monuments built betöre the sixteenth
Century are wholly incomplete, while from the times betöre the
turn of our millenium only Occidental ruins have been preserved
for US, preserved by their own durability, by the loneliness of the
jungle, by the earth itself from total destruction. And mosf of it
lies still unrevealed beneath the tens of thousands of mounds of
rubble which cover the whole counfry. For refinement of taste and
workmanship, richness of form and significance of content, the
Creations of Indian art, however varied in kind and quality, fairly
rival the work of ancienf Greece and Rome, Gothic or Renais
sance times, ancient Egypt of Babylon, China or Japan. The dis-
covery of Indian arf is still of fairly recent date, and a long series
of misconceptions, familiär to us from the story of the uncovering
of other culfures, has so far stood in the way of its appreciation.
All thaf was accessible to the traveller until late in the nineteenth
Century were temples and palaces, offen of overwhelming pro-
portions but with fheir mannered style, overloaded decoration
and complicaied symbolism, no less difficuli to understand than
a baroque Jesuit church or a late Renaissance or rococo mansion.
In addition, much that the foreigner was able io see was every-
day merchandise, temples and mosques as boring and iasieless
as many of our nineteenth Century churches, cheap or meaningless
religious art such as we find in great quantities in Europe, and
Works of arf no better than the Irash which we, too, seil as Souve
nirs to tourisis. In fact, most of what found its way into our mu-
seums, even in the nineteenth Century, as Indian — in fact as
Asian — 'arl" can Claim no higher valuation. Reproduciions in
iravellers’ reports were still worse. Whether Indian Originals or
— much more offen — clumsy amateur drawings, bofh were "im-
proved” by the copper-plate engravers to the point of being un-
recognisable.
It was therefore above all Indo-Islamic art, easily accessible in
the Principal eitles, comparatively simple and without too many
symbolic preconditions, which first found recognition in Europe.
The Taj Mahal, the monumental tomb of the Mughal Empress
Mumtaz-Mahal and her husband the Emperor Shahjahan, al-
though anything but a pure Indian creation, became at an early
date a world-famous landmark of Indian art, although certainly
the unbelievable quantities of purest white morble and costly
inlays of precious stones must impress even the most artistically
blind. Mughal painting reached Europe from the seventeenth
Century onwards in (mostly second-rate) albums and was col-
lected by Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds.
When India became better known in the nineteenth Century, its
appreciation was blocked by classical taste in art and religious
prejudice. For the majority of Europeans, Indian art was really
no more than the expression of a dark and dreadfui heathen
religion, and even the study of Sanskrit at our universities could
do little to change this attitude. Preoccupied as it was in general
with a far older religious literature, such study helped as much,
or as little, as, say, Ihe study of the Bible or the ancient classics
would help to understand the Strasbourg Minster, Rembrandt or
Tiepolo. It was only in the middle of the Century, when Sir Alex
ander Cunningham, followed by James Burgess, Ff. Cousens and
others, began to catalogue the Indian monuments systematically;
when, later, surviving Indian Works of art were no less sysiemati-
cally collected and indexed; when James Fergusson made the first
attempt af a Classification in his ’Fiistory of Indian and Eastern
Architecture;" when at the end of the nineties the publication of
painstaking copies of the Ajanta frescoes under the supervision of
J. Griffiths aroused a Sensation hardly less than was caused by the
excavation of Pompeji, a hundred years earlier; as the Archae-
ological Survey produced its first good illustrated yearly reports
a few years later — only then did true Indian art gradually begin
to become known. And öfter piefures in a Graeco-Roman pro-
vincial style — only of minor importance for India — had come
to light in Afghanistan, Europe began to take an Interest in
Indian art. When finally, with the rediscovery of our own medi-
aeval art, of Baroque and Rococo, one-sided classicism yielded
to a broader and more elastic appreciation of arf, and when the
Islamic World, Further India, China and Japan were discovered
by our artists and art collectors, the time was ripe for the com-
prehension of Indian art.
Nevertheless, there recurred Ihe same misconception of a one-
sided religious Interpretation which had at first hindered access
to Greek, Gothic or ancient Egyptian art. India, a "colonial”
country since the most ancient times, with unbelievably varied
cultural strala, soon acquired the repufation of being narrowiy
preoccupied with religion because many ancient cusloms and
examples of bizarre sectarianism were exaggerated by Iravellers,
because religious piclures, easiest Io acquire and carry, filied our
museums, and because in consequence, our universities also con-
