Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) was one of the great art historians of the twentieth century whose multifaceted writings deal primarily with visual art, aesthetics, literature and language, folklore, mythology, religion, and metaphysics. His most mature works adeptly expound the perspective of the perennial philosophy by drawing on a detailed knowledge of the arts, crafts, mythologies, cultures, folklores, symbolisms, and religions of both the East and the West. Along with René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy is considered as a leading member of the Traditionalist or Perennialist school of comparative religious thought.

Born in Ceylon in 1877 of a Tamil father and an English mother, Coomaraswamy was brought up in England following the early death of his father. He was educated at Wycliffe College and at London University where he studied botany and geology. As part of his doctoral work Coomaraswamy carried out a scientific survey of the mineralogy of Ceylon and seemed poised for an academic career as a geologist. However, under pressure from his experiences while engaged in his fieldwork, he became absorbed in a study of the traditional arts and crafts of Ceylon and of the social conditions under which they had been produced. In turn he became increasingly distressed by the corrosive effects of British colonialism.

In 1906 Coomaraswamy founded the Ceylon Social Reform Society of which he was the inaugural President and moving force. The Society addressed itself to the preservation and revival not only of traditional arts and crafts but also of the social values and customs which had helped to shape them. The Society also dedicated itself, in the words of its Manifesto, to discouraging “the thoughtless imitation of unsuitable European habits and custom.”[1] Coomaraswamy called for a re-awakened pride in Ceylon’s past and in her cultural heritage. The fact that he was half-English in no way blinkered his view of the impoverishment of national life brought by the British presence in both Ceylon and India.

In the years between 1900 and 1913 Coomaraswamy moved backwards and forwards between Ceylon, India, and England. In India he formed close relationships with the Tagore family and was involved in both the literary renaissance and the swadeshi movement. All the while in the subcontinent he was researching the past, investigating arts and crafts, uncovering forgotten and neglected schools of religious and court art, writing scholarly and popular works, lecturing, and organizing bodies such as the Ceylon Social Reform Society and, in England, the India Society.

In England he found his own social ideas anticipated in the work of William Blake, John Ruskin, and William Morris, three of the foremost representatives of a fiercely eloquent and morally impassioned current of anti-industrialism. Such figures had elaborated a biting critique of the ugliest and most dehumanizing aspects of the industrial revolution and of the acquisitive commercialism which increasingly polluted both public and private life. They believed the new values and patterns of urbanization and industrialization were disfiguring the human spirit. These writers protested vehemently against the conditions in which many were forced to carry out their daily work and living. Ruskin and Morris, in particular, were appalled by the debasing of standards of craftsmanship and of public taste. Coomaraswamy picked up a catch-phrase of Ruskin’s which he was to mobilize again and again in his own writings: “industry without art is brutality.” The Arts and Crafts Movement of the Edwardian era was, in large measure, stimulated by the ideas of William Morris, the artist, designer, poet, medievalist and social theorist. Morris’ work influenced Coomaraswamy decisively in this period and he involved himself with others in England who were trying to put some of Morris’ ideas into practice. The Guild and School of Handicraft, with which Coomaraswamy had some connections, was a case in point. Later in life Coomaraswamy turned less often to explicitly social and political questions. By then he had become aware that “politics and economics, although they cannot be ignored, are the most external and least part of our problem.”[2]

Closely related to his interest in social questions was his work as an art historian. From the outset Coomaraswamy’s interest in art was controlled by much more than either antiquarian or “aesthetic” considerations. For him the most humble folk art and the loftiest religious creations alike were an outward expression not only of the sensibilities of those who created them but of the whole civilization in which they were nurtured. There was nothing of the art nouveau slogan of “art for art’s sake” in Coomaraswamy’s outlook. His interest in traditional arts and crafts, from a humble pot to a Hindu temple, was always governed by the conviction that something immeasurably precious and vitally important was disappearing under the onslaught of modernism in its many different guises. Coomaraswamy’s achievement as an art historian can perhaps best be understood in respect of three of the major tasks which he undertook: the “rehabilitation” of Asian art in the eyes of Europeans and Asians alike; the massive work of scholarship which he pursued as curator of the Indian Section of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the penetration and explanation of traditional views of art and their relationship to philosophy, religion, and metaphysics.

In assessing Coomaraswamy’s achievement it needs to be remembered that the conventional attitude of the Edwardian era towards the art of Asia was, at best, condescending, and at worst, frankly contemptuous. Asian art was often dismissed as “barbarous,” “second-rate”, and “inferior” and there was a good deal of foolish talk about “eight-armed monsters” and the like.[3] In short, there was, in England at least, an almost total ignorance of the sacred iconographies of the East. Such an artistic illiteracy was coupled with a similar incomprehension of traditional philosophy and religion, and buttressed by all manner of Eurocentric assumptions. Worse still was the fact that such attitudes had infected the Indian intelligentsia, exposed as it was to Western education and influences.

Following the early days of his fieldwork in Ceylon, Coomaraswamy set about dismantling these prejudices through an affirmation of the beauty, integrity, and spiritual density of traditional art in Ceylon and India and, later, in other parts of Asia. He was bent on the task of demonstrating the existence of an artistic heritage at least the equal of Europe’s. He not only wrote and spoke and organized tirelessly to educate the British but he scourged the Indian intelligentsia for being duped by assumptions of European cultural superiority. In studies like Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908), The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon (1913), and his earliest collection of essays, The Dance of Shiva (1918), Coomaraswamy combated the prejudices of the age and reaffirmed traditional understandings of Indian art. He revolutionized several specific fields of art history, radically changed others. His work on Sinhalese arts and crafts and on Rajput painting, though they can now be seen as formative in the light of his later work on Buddhist iconography and on Indian, Platonic, and Christian theories of art, were nevertheless early signs of a stupendous scholarship. His influence was not only felt in the somewhat rarefied domain of art scholarship but percolated into other scholarly fields and eventually must have had some influence on popular attitudes in Ceylon, India, England, and America.

As a Curator at the Boston Museum from 1917 onwards, Coomaraswamy performed a mighty labor in classifying, cataloguing, and explaining thousands of items of oriental art. Through his professional work, his writings, lectures, and personal associations Coomaraswamy left an indelible imprint on the work of many American galleries and museums and influenced a wide range of curators, art historians, orientalists, and critics—Stella Kramrisch, Walter Andrae, and Heinrich Zimmer to name a few of the more well-known. Zimmer wrote of Coomaraswamy: “the only man in my field who, whenever I read a paper of his, gives me a genuine inferiority complex.”

Traditional art, in Coomaraswamy’s view, was always directed towards a twin purpose: a daily utility, towards what he was fond of calling “the satisfaction of present needs,” and to the preservation and transmission of moral values and spiritual teachings derived from the tradition in which it appeared. A Tibetan thanka, a medieval cathedral, a Red Indian utensil, a Javanese puppet, a Hindu deity image—in such artifacts and creations Coomaraswamy sought a symbolic vocabulary. The intelligibility of traditional arts and crafts, he insisted, does not depend on a more or less precarious recognition, as does modern art, but on legibility. Traditional art does not deal in the private vision of the artist but in a symbolic language. By contrast modern art, which from a traditionalist perspective includes Renaissance and, generally speaking, all post-Renaissance art, is divorced from higher values, tyrannized by the mania for “originality,” controlled by aesthetic and sentimental considerations, and drawn from the subjective resources of the individual artist rather than from the well-springs of tradition. The comparison, needless to say, does not reflect well on modern art! An example: “Our artists are ‘emancipated’ from any obligation to eternal verities, and have abandoned to tradesmen the satisfaction of present needs. Our abstract art is not an iconography of transcendental forms but the realistic picture of a disintegrated mentality.”[4]

During the late 1920s Coomaraswamy’s life and work somewhat altered their trajectory. The collapse of his third marriage, ill-health and a growing awareness of death, an impatience with the constrictions of purely academic scholarship, and the influence of René Guénon all co-operated to deepen Coomaraswamy’s interest in spiritual and metaphysical questions. He became more austere in his personal lifestyle, partially withdrew from the academic and social worlds in which he had moved freely over the last decade, and addressed himself to the understanding and explication of traditional metaphysics, especially those of classical India and pre-Renaissance Europe. Coomaraswamy remarked in one of his letters that “my indoctrination with the Philosophia Perennis is primarily Oriental, secondarily Mediaeval, and thirdly Classic.”[5] His later work is densely textured with references to Plato and Plotinus, Augustine and Aquinas, Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics, to Shankara and Lao-tzu and Nagarjuna. He also explored folklore and mythology since these too carried profound teachings. Coomaraswamy remained the consummate scholar but his work took on a more urgent nature after 1932. He spoke of his “vocation”—he was not one to use such words lightly—as “research in the field of the significance of the universal symbols of the Philosophia Perennis” rather than as “one of apology for or polemic on behalf of doctrines.”[6]

The influence of Guénon was decisive. Coomaraswamy discovered Guénon’s writings through Heinrich Zimmer some time in the late 1920s and, a few years later wrote, “no living writer in modern Europe is more significant than René Guénon, whose task it has been to expound the universal metaphysical tradition that has been the essential foundation of every past culture, and which represents the indispensable basis for any civilization deserving to be so-called.”[7] Coomaraswamy told one of his friends that he and Guénon were “entirely in agreement on metaphysical principles” which, of course, did not preclude some divergences of opinion over the applications of these principles on the phenomenal plane.[8]

The vintage Coomaraswamy of the later years is to be found in his masterly works on Vedanta and on the Catholic scholastics and mystics. There is no finer exegesis of traditional Indian metaphysics than is to be found in these later works. His work on the Platonic, Christian, and Indian conceptions of sacred art is also unrivalled. Some of Coomaraswamy’s finest essays on these subjects are brought together in Coomaraswamy, Vol. II: Selected Papers, Metaphysics, edited by Roger Lipsey. Special mention should be made of “The Vedanta and Western Tradition,” “Sri Ramakrishna and Religious Tolerance,” “Recollection, Indian and Platonic,” “On the One and Only Transmigrant”, and “On the Indian and Traditional Psychology, or Rather Pneumatology.” But it hardly matters what one picks up from the later period: all his mature work is stamped with rare scholarship, elegant expression, and a depth of understanding which makes most of the other scholarly work on the same subjects look vapid and superficial. Of his later books three in particular deserve much wider attention: Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (1939), Hinduism and Buddhism (1943) and Time and Eternity (1947). The Bugbear of Literacy (1979) (first published in 1943 as Am I my Brother’s Keeper?) and two posthumous collections of some of his most interesting and more accessible essays, Sources of Wisdom (1981) and What is Civilization? (1989), offer splendid starting-points for uninitiated readers. We can hardly doubt that the life and work of this “warrior for dharma”[9] was a precious gift to all those interested in the ways of the spirit.

In 1947 Coomaraswamy intended to retire from his position as Curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in order to return to India, where he planned to complete a new translation of the Upanishads and take on sannyasa (renunciation of the world). These plans, however, were cut short by his sudden and untimely death.

Adapted from Harry Oldmeadow, Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with
Eastern Religious Traditions (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004), pp. 194-202.