Ananda Coomaraswamy


Ananda Kentish Muthu Coomaraswamy was a Ceylonese Tamil metaphysician, pioneering historian and philosopher of Indian art who was an early interpreter of Indian culture to the West. In particular, he is described as "the groundbreaking theorist who was largely responsible for introducing ancient Indian art to the West."

Life

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was born in Colombo, British Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, to the Ceylonese Tamil legislator and philosopher Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy of the Ponnambalam–Coomaraswamy family and his English wife Elizabeth Beeby. His father died when Ananda was two years old, and Ananda spent much of his childhood and education abroad.
Coomaraswamy moved to England in 1879 and attended Wycliffe College, a preparatory school in Stroud, Gloucestershire, at the age of twelve. In 1900, he graduated from University College, London, with a degree in geology and botany. On 19 June 1902, Coomaraswamy married Ethel Mary Partridge, an English photographer, who then traveled with him to Ceylon. Their marriage lasted until 1913. Coomaraswamy's field work between 1902 and 1906 earned him a doctor of science for his study of Ceylonese mineralogy, and prompted the formation of the Geological Survey of Ceylon which he initially directed. While in Ceylon, the couple collaborated on Mediaeval Sinhalese Art; Coomaraswamy wrote the text and Ethel provided the photographs. His work in Ceylon fueled Coomaraswamy's anti-Westernization sentiments. After their divorce, Partridge returned to England, where she became a famous weaver and later married the writer Philip Mairet.
By 1906, Coomaraswamy had made it his mission to educate the West about Indian art, and was back in London with a large collection of photographs, actively seeking out artists to try to influence. He knew he could not rely on museum curators or other members of the cultural establishment – in 1908 he wrote "The main difficulty so far seems to have been that Indian art has been studied so far only by archaeologists. It is not archaeologists, but artists … who are the best qualified to judge of the significance of works of art considered as art." By 1909, he was firmly acquainted with Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, the city's two most important early Modernists, and soon both of them had begun to incorporate Indian aesthetics into their work. The curiously hybrid sculptures that were produced as a result can be seen to form the very roots of what is now considered British Modernism.

Coomaraswamy then met and married a British woman Alice Ethel Richardson and together they went to India and stayed on a houseboat in Srinagar in Kashmir. Commaraswamy studied Rajput painting while his wife studied Indian music with Abdul Rahim of Kapurthala. When they returned to England, Alice performed Indian song under the stage name Ratan Devi. Alice was successful and both went to America when Ratan Devi did a concert tour. While they were there, Coomaraswamy was invited to serve as the first Keeper of Indian art in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1917. The couple had two children, a son, Narada, and daughter, Rohini.
Coomaraswamy divorced his second wife after they arrived in America. He married the American artist Stella Bloch, 20 years his junior, in November 1922. Through the 1920s, Coomaraswamy and his wife were part of the bohemian art circles in New York City, Coomaraswamy befriended Alfred Stieglitz and the artists who exhibited at Stieglitz's gallery. At the same time, he studied Sanskrit and Pali religious literature as well as Western religious works. He wrote catalogues for the Museum of Fine Arts and published his History of Indian and Indonesian Art in 1927.
After the couple divorced in 1930, they remained friends. Shortly thereafter, on 18 November 1930, Coomaraswamy married Argentine Luisa Runstein, 28 years younger, who was working as a society photographer under the professional name Xlata Llamas. They had a son, Coomaraswamy's third child, Rama Ponnambalam, who became a physician and convert at age 22 to the Roman Catholic Church. Following Vatican II, Rama became a critic of the reforms and author of Catholic Traditionalist works. He was also ordained a Traditionalist Roman Catholic priest, despite the fact that he was married and had a living wife. Rama Coomaraswamy studied in England and then in India, learning Hindi and Sanskrit. Became a psychiatrist in the United States, he was an opponent of Pope John Paul II and remain a wider correspondent of mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose first healing attribution was recognized by Wojtyła in 2002.
In 1933 Coomaraswamy's title at the Museum of Fine Arts changed from curator to Fellow for Research in Indian, Persian, and Mohammedan Art. He served as curator in the Museum of Fine Arts until his death in Needham, Massachusetts, in 1947. During his long career, he was instrumental in bringing Eastern art to the West. In fact, while at the Museum of Fine Arts, he built the first substantial collection of Indian art in the United States. He also helped with the collections of Persian Art at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts.
After Coomaraswamy's death, his widow, Doña Luisa Runstein, acted as a guide and resource for students of his work.

Contributions

Coomaraswamy made important contributions to the philosophy of art, literature, and religion. In Ceylon, he applied the lessons of William Morris to Ceylonese culture and, with his wife Ethel, produced a groundbreaking study of Ceylonese crafts and culture. While in India, he was part of the literary circle around Rabindranath Tagore, and he contributed to the "Swadeshi" movement, an early phase of the struggle for Indian independence. In the 1920s, he made pioneering discoveries in the history of Indian art, particularly some distinctions between Rajput and Moghul painting, and published his book Rajput Painting. At the same time he amassed an unmatched collection of Rajput and Moghul paintings, which he took with him to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, when he joined its curatorial staff in 1917. Through 1932, from his base in Boston, he produced two kinds of publications: brilliant scholarship in his curatorial field but also graceful introductions to Indian and Asian art and culture, typified by The Dance of Shiva, a collection of essays that remain in print to this day. Deeply influenced by René Guénon, he became one of the founders of the Traditionalist School. His books and essays on art and culture, symbolism and metaphysics, scripture, folklore and myth, and still other topics, offer a remarkable education to readers who accept the challenges of his resolutely cross-cultural perspective and insistence on tying every point he makes back to sources in multiple traditions. He once remarked, "I actually think in both Eastern and Christian terms—Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Pali, and to some extent Persian and Chinese." Alongside the deep and not infrequently difficult writings of this period, he also delighted in polemical writings created for a larger audience—essays such as "Why exhibit works of art?".
In his book The Information Society: An Introduction, Armand Mattelart credits Coomaraswamy for coining the term 'post-industrial' in 1913.

Methodology

Coomaraswamy was a firm believer in the comparative method. The analysis of both texts and symbols across a wide variety of cultures and time periods allowed him to see below the surface of local interpretations and religious exclusivism to locate the bedrock of tradition. By tradition, he meant that which has been handed down from time beyond memory.

The folk has thus preserved, without understanding, the remains of old traditions that go back sometimes to the indeterminably distant past, to which we can only refer as “prehistoric”. Had the folk beliefs not indeed been once understood, we could not now speak of them as metaphysically intelligible, or explain the accuracy of their formulations.

His extensive knowledge of ancient languages allowed him access to primary sources and his understanding of metaphysics helped him discern the deeper meanings that other scholars often missed. Given the specialization and compartmentation of knowledge that was part of the Western academic tradition, his efforts were not always appreciated. He expressed some of his feelings in a letter to Graham Carey:

What the secular mind does is to assert that we are reading meaning into things that originally had none: our assertion is that they are reading out the meaning. The proof of our contention lies in the perfection, consistency and universality of the pattern in which these meanings are united.

His criticism of the academic world was centered around a number of related issues. First, the academic method, by itself, was ill-equipped to deal with the way in which ideas where transmitted in non-literate cultures, due to an over-reliance on written documentation. Too much was left out.

By “folklore” we mean the whole and consistent body of culture which has been handed down, not in books but by word of mouth and in practice, from time beyond the reach of historical research, in the form of legends, fairy tales, ballads, games, toys, crafts, medicine, agriculture, and other rites, and forms of social organization, especially those that we call “tribal.” This is a cultural complex independent of national and even racial boundaries, and of remarkable similarity throughout the world.

A second point of conflict was the obsessive tendency of Western scholarship to divide cultures, religions, and time periods into discrete categories in order to fit into academic organizational and mental structures.

It is equally surprising that so many scholars, meeting with some universal doctrine in a given context, so often think of it as a local peculiarity.

As a traditionalist, Coomaraswamy emphasized the continuity of culture. He was well aware of historical change but he felt that the connecting elements had been lost by the extreme emphasis placed on change and “progress”. Conflict between a new religion and an older one often obscured the commonalities that linked them.

The opposition of religion to folklore is often a kind of rivalry set up as between a new dispensation and an older tradition, the gods of the older cult becoming the evil spirits of the newer.

He pointed out that the Greek word daimon, which at root indicates something given, was synonymous with the Christian Holy Spirit, God’s gift of life. If Christian propagandists chose to emphasize the demonic at the expense of the daimon it was only to further their own cause. Ideas like this did not go over well with other scholars and his correspondence has its share of angry or condescending responses to his work which he deflected with a combination of erudition, tact, and humor.
A third issue that raised his ire was the racism inherent in the Western world’s criticism and misinterpretation of traditional and tribal cultures, attitudes tied closely to literacy and the attendant idea of progress.

It was possible for Aristotle, starting from the premise that a man, being actually cultured, may also become literate, to ask whether there is a necessary or merely an accidental connection of literacy with culture. Such a question can hardly arise for those to whom illiteracy implies, as a matter of course, ignorance, backwardness, unfitness for self-government: for you, unlettered people are uncivilized peoples and vice versa—as a recent publisher’s blurb expresses it: “The greatest force in civilization is the collective wisdom of a literate people."

Like Franz Boas and a handful of others, Coomaraswamy waged a constant war against racism with the press and academic world. He was a strong advocate for Indian independence and was pressured to leave England for publicly suggesting that Indians not fight in the First World War.
Unlike Rene Guenon and others who shared many of his understandings, he was not content to describe traditional ideas from the inside out, in metaphysical terms alone. His commitment to the Western intellectual tradition was deep. He didn’t believe that science and metaphysics were in opposition but were two different ways of looking at the world. He was trained as a geologist and was well equipped to deal with science as well as metaphysics.
Nor did his work suffer from the oversimplifications and distortions that can afflict comparative studies. He was highly critical of the writings of Carl Jung and of Theosophy which he believed distorted the meaning of traditional ideas. The details he provided in support of his arguments could daunt the ablest scholar; his footnotes sometimes took up more room on a page than the text. The comparative method has achieved a good deal of success in linguistics but its application to culture had rarely gone beyond mere documentation before Ananda Coomaraswamy.

Traditional symbolism

One of Coomaraswamy’s most important contributions was his profound understanding of how people communicated in early times and how their ideas were transmitted and preserved in the absence of writing. He felt that traditional symbolism could best be understood by means of images, which preceded writing and which contained ideas that had been handed down from the earliest times and preserved in a vast array of media.

To have lost the art of thinking in images is precisely to have lost the proper linguistic of metaphysics and to have descended to the verbal logic of “philosophy.

His study of traditional symbols had taught him that symbols were meant to express ideas and not emotions and that a study of “styles” and “influences” would reveal little of significance.

An adequate knowledge of theology and cosmology is then indispensable to an understanding of the history of art, insofar as the actual shapes and structures of works of art are determined by their real content. Christian art, for example, begins with the representation of deity by abstract symbols, which may be geometrical, vegetable, or theriomorphic, and are devoid of any sentimental appeal whatever. An anthropomorphic symbol follows, but this is still a form and not a figuration; not made as though to function biologically or as if to illustrate a text book of anatomy or dramatic expression. Still later, the form is sentimentalised; the features of the crucified are made to exhibit human suffering, the type is completely humanised, and where we began with the shape of humanity as an analogical representation of the idea of God, we end with the portrait of the artist’s mistress posing as the Madonna and a representation of an all-too-human baby; the Christ is no longer a man-God, but the sort of man we can approve of.

In keeping with his traditionalist stance, he saw this process as one of gradual decay in which the human life world began to encroach gradually on the divine with an attendant growth of sentimentality and loss of meaning. He was fond of quoting the curator, John Lodge: “From the Stone Age until now, quelle dégringolade.”
Coomaraswamy spent a lot of his time documenting themes and images that appeared to be very old, given their widespread distribution. Major areas of study included:
He found these symbols in many cultures and time periods, both in religious writings and in folklore. He saw little opposition between religion and folklore. Folklore was transmitted in the vernacular as compared to the sacred languages in which scripture was delivered and interpreted. Folklore was less moralistic but its themes shared a common source with those of religion; Jack’s beanstalk was Jacob’s ladder. Religion was not “contaminated” by folklore but used it to express the same ideas in a more rationalized and moralized setting, just as Plato used myths to explain his philosophy.
The designs we found in Neolithic times were derived from older images. Thus the continuity of tradition reveals itself best in art, which expresses ideas. Even when religious philosophies developed with writing, a continuity of meaning could be observed often because the change was gradual and the old and the new existed side by side.

In the Vedas, the belief appears in the form of an old popular theory, for which are substituted the successively more philosophical concepts of Space Cosmology, of a belief in the origin of the world in Non-being, in an origin of the world from Being, and finally in the conception of Brahman as world-ground. The Water Cosmology, it is true, persists side by side with, and linked with these deeper views, even in post-Vedic literature; but it is typically not a creation of the Vedas and seems to belong to an even older stratum of ideas than that which is developed in the Vedas.

The ideas expressed by images were made explicit by writing, which allowed for a greater degree of abstraction and elaboration but since the concrete preceded the abstract, all philosophy started with images. In the absence of writing, the tribal cultures of the world have preserved a good deal of this older symbolism.
Coomaraswamy also maintained that traditional technologies were applications of metaphysical ideas, just as modern technology is an expression of scientific principles.

Primitive man knew nothing of a possible divorce of function and meaning: all his inventions were applied meaning.

The American art historian, Carl Schuster, who corresponded with Coomarawamy and learned much from him, would go on to identify some of the Paleolithic sources of this symbolism.

Perennial philosophy

He was described by Heinrich Zimmer as "That noble scholar upon whose shoulders we are still standing." While serving as a curator to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the latter part of his life, he devoted his work to the explication of traditional metaphysics and symbolism. His writings of this period are filled with references to Plato, Plotinus, Clement, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, Shankara, Eckhart, Rumi and other mystics. When asked how he defined himself foremost, Coomaraswamy said he was a "metaphysician", referring to the concept of perennial philosophy, or sophia perennis.
Along with René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, Coomaraswamy is regarded as one of the three founders of Perennialism, also called the Traditionalist School. Several articles by Coomaraswamy on the subject of Hinduism and the perennial philosophy were published posthumously in the quarterly journal Studies in Comparative Religion alongside articles by Schuon and Guénon among others.
Although he agrees with Guénon on the universal principles, Coomaraswamy's works are very different in form. By vocation, he was a scholar who dedicated the last decades of his life to "searching the Scriptures". He offers a perspective on the tradition that complements Guénon's. He was extremely perceptive regarding aesthetics and wrote dozens of articles on traditional arts and mythology. His works are also finely balanced intellectually. Although born in the Hindu tradition, he had a deep knowledge of the Western tradition as well as a great expertise in, and love for, Greek metaphysics, especially that of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism.
Coomaraswamy built a bridge between East and West that was designed to be two-way: among other things, his metaphysical writings aimed at demonstrating the unity of the Vedanta and Platonism. His works also sought to rehabilitate original Buddhism, a tradition that Guénon had for a long time limited to a rebellion of the Kshatriyas against Brahmin authority.

Works

For a complete bibliography, see James S. Crouch, A Bibliography of Ananda Kentish Coomarswamy. Indira Gandhi, National Center for the Arts, Manohar, New Delhi,.
;Traditional art
;Metaphysics
;Social criticism
;Posthumous collections
Rama Coomaraswmay provides a biography of his father at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-IFdz1Gp7A.