Second Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Memorial Lecture to be held on 6th October at IGNCA
New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts is going to organise Second Ananda Coomaraswamy Memorial Lecture to be held on the topic ‘Towards Decolonizing Indian Art History via the Problem of Mimesis in the Citrasutra’ to commemorate the 76th Death Anniversary of A.K. Coomaraswamy. Prof. Parul Dave Mukherji, School of Arts & Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi and the session will be chaired by Prof. Sachchidanand Joshi, Member Secretary, IGNCA, New Delhi.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was one of the pioneering art historians of the 20th century whose art-historic writing is an intellectual landmark due to its interpretative eloquence and ardent advocacy in favour of the indigenous roots of Indian art. He remains a unique and inspiring scholar and author across the many fields of study he made his own.
With this view in mind, IGNCA is organising the second Memorial Lecture titled ‘Towards Decolonizing Indian Art History via the Problem of Mimesis in the Citrasutra’ by Prof. Parula Dave Mukherji to acknowledge the critical and comprehensive work done by Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy in the field of art and culture. In 2008, IGNCA acquired his collection of books, art objects and paintings (Bengal school, Rajput and Pahari School of paintings etc.), photographs and his correspondences with Indian and Western philosophers, historians, church chroniclers/historians, curators and friends, from his legal heir. He was the first to recognize and condemn the far-reaching consequences of the Macaulayite education system.
In Education in India, he writes, “I cannot think that European teachers and educationists quite realize how far ‘English’ education as it is given in the East is crushing all originality.. in the unfortunate individuals who pass through the mill. Yet the ‘Babu’ and the ‘failed B.A’. upon whom the Englishman looks down so contemptuously are the fruit of his handiwork, the inevitable result of the methods of education which he has introduced. Broadly speaking, you take people, educate its children in foreign subjects, and do so in a foreign language, ignoring their culture–and then are surprised at their stupidity! Suppose England was governed by Chinamen, and a premium set on Chinese culture; English children taught Chinese subjects in the Chinese language and left to pick up the English language and traditions anyhow at home–would there not be some ‘failed mandarins?’ ” Modern Review, 1908.
The study of Indian art history initiated between the mid-19th and early 20th century by Western scholars applied European norms and methodology to Indian art. More recently, this Eurocentric bias has diminished. Increased familiarity with objects of Indian art and their aesthetic language has led to attempts to understand and explain such objects from the point of view of those for whom they were made.
Most of the 19th-century scholars of European art, who had little access to Indian art objects, derived their dismal view of the art of the subcontinent mainly from exotic travelogues.
They saw Indian architecture as subject to no rules, Indian sculpture as dominated by obscene or monstrous forms and Indian painting as a mere exercise in crude, bright colours, lacking such Western techniques as perspective and Hegel (1835) and John Ruskin (1859) saw Indian art as irrational or unnatural, flying in the face of ‘Classical’ (Hegel’s term) and Christian values, having reached this state by degeneration from rational origins in ancient Greece.
The talk aims to develop the idea of decolonizing Indian art history through this theory and a new engagement with the visual arts of early India.
What does decolonising Indian art history mean today? This question will be addressed by revisiting an overlooked theory of Indian aesthetics, anukarana vada or the theory of performative mimesis.
Date- 6th October
Day- Friday
Time – 4 PM
Venue – Samvet Auditorium, Janpath Building, Janpath, New Delhi- 110001(Nearest Metro Station- Janpath Gate No-1)