Idea and Image in Indian Art presents an exercise in the understanding of a few of the fundamental imaginative and aesthetic values of Indian art. The exercise makes full use of the archaeology and iconography of Indian art, but is not concerned with either. Its principal concern is Indian art, the author underlines. What in Indian art this exercise seeks to explore, is the nature and character of the relationship between IDEA and IMAGE, both in a process of change through time under the stress of situations which were socio-religious and ideological as much as aesthetic and technical. From the rich repertory of ideas or themes on which imaginative and intellectual speculation in India as articulated in literary language, have always been very subtle, abstruse and abstract, the author has chosen three, with a view to find out as to how these IDEAS were concretized in terms of IMAGES through the medium of the plastic language of sculpture, and how the forms of IMAGES in their turn,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Niharranjan Ray
Formerly Bagisvari Professor of Indian Art and Culture, now Emeritus Professor at the University of Calcutta and Founder-Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, Niharranjan Ray is today one of the foremost interpreters of the history, tradition, art and culture of his country and people. His most significant contribution has been his introduction to historical writing in India, of the approaches, tools and techniques of social analysis, and presentation of historical events and situations in a sociological framework free from any ideological straight-jacket. In the late forties, the doyen of historical research in India, Jadunath Sarkar, welcomed this new departure initiated by Niharranjan Ray, as the promise of a new direction in Indian historiography. Equally significant has been his contribution to the interpretation of India’s artistic activity through the ages in terms of her changing social process. He has salvaged art history and art criticism from the hidebound formulae of archaeology and iconography on the one hand and from emotional effusions and pseude-metaphysical cobwebs on the other.
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