Beauty, Art and Man: Recent Indian Theories of Art

In Beauty, Art and Man the author seeks to explore the answers given to the question: why is art possible? by such thinkers as Rabindranath Tagore, A.K. Coomaraswamy, Sri Aurobindo and as diverse as K.C. Bhattacharya, Kalidas Bhattacharya and N.V. Banerjee. All of them have proposed distinct anthropologies in answering the question. Their notions of art have varied according to their human ontologies. The first three thinkers are brought into a framework of professionally philosophical thinking, while the last three are studied in terms of a search for concepts and ideas, their formulations. The freshness and significance of the six thinkers suggest newer dimensions of the philosophy of art. In their stride they have taken the notion of the creative self, the idea of art as a reflex of an evolving consciousness, the concept of art as freedom through feeling, and art as iconography. There is a reexamination of the notion of Sahrdaya, the possibility of aesthetic communications and also of our knowledge of the artist’s intentions, besides the nature and types of imagination in art. The book presents a wealth of ideas on the relation of Poetry and Philosophy, art and society, men’s alienation and its possible transcendence. Neither tradition nor individual talent alone is the secret of creativity, but a dialectic of the two. This is what one can learn from the thinkers studied in course of that book. They are not only our elders, but also among our moderns.