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Straddling post-modernism and Ananda Coomaraswamy

Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

In 'Enabling Traditions' Prof. Wimal Dissanayake sets out for himself an ambitious intellectual task which is nothing less than examining the life and work of four Sri Lankan cultural intellectuals, namely Munidasa Cumaratunga, Martin Wickramasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra and Gunadasa Amarasekera within the matrix of tradition.

The justification for this book he locates in the space between tradition and modernity for each of these intellectuals who were also creative writers grappled in their own ways with the twin issues which could be said to have dominated the mental landscape of the previous century and continue to cast their shadows into our own times. He notes in passing that the inspiration for the book had come from an Indian friend, a renowned scholar who had said that very little was known of the works of modern Sri Lankan intellectuals outside the country's shores.

Dissanayake approaches the question of tradition from several directions and lists seven schools of contemporary thought on the question.

They are the transcendentalists, creative assimilationists, Marxists, inventionists, anti-traditionalists, counter-traditionalists and non-linearists. In this part of the book which constitutes Chapter One he draws heavily on classical philosophers such as Heidegger, Marxists such as Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton and post-modernists such as Foucault.

This intellectual tour-de-force leads on to a more relevant area of this work which is a discussion of the traditionalist views of Ananda Coomaraswamy who although not figuring among the four intellectuals indubitably was the major intellectual figure straddling Sri Lanka and India during the last century.

Born to a Sri Lankan Tamil father and English mother and educated in England Coomaraswamy evolved from being a critic of Sri Lankan and Indian art into one of the foremost theorists of philosophia perennis, the philosophy of tradition.

Influenced by the ideas of William Morris he travelled widely in colonial Ceylon as the Director of the Geological Survey as well as in India and became increasingly dismayed by the withering of the traditional arts and crafts of these countries under the onslaughts of imperialism. Dissanayake concludes that although a transcendentalist Commaraswamy sought to strip tradition of the then prevailing negative connotations and project it as a 'positive, highly valorized and pedagogically guiding notion.'

He notes that Coomaraswamy understood tradition in terms of his deep interest in aesthetics, nationalism and spirituality. His perception of the richness and vitality of medieval rural culture sustained by benevolent royal and religious patronage made him hostile to modernization and industrialisation. Believing strongly that tradition embodied universal and unchanging truths he wrote, 'There is only one mythology, one iconography and one truth, that of an uncreated wisdom that has been handed down from time immemorial.'

After a sympathetic summary of Coomaraswamy's thinking Dissanayake next turns to his critics. These are that he was an essentialist who did not take account of the historical factors and the multiplicities within tradition, that he upheld a monological view of culture which again did not take account of its diversities and that he was a celebratory traditionalist rather than a critical traditionalist.

Here he quotes the Indian cultural critic Ashis Nandy who juxtaposes Tagore to Coomaraswamy seeing the former as a good example of an intellectual who was able to allow the creative use of modernity within tradition.

However it is a moot point whether Coomaraswamy can be described in Dissanayake's terms as an Orientalist particularly when earlier on he himself had argued rather surprisingly (in the face of those who would devalue Coomaraswamy as a dogmatic traditionalist resolutely turning his face away from the present) that his glorification of tradition stemmed from what he perceived to be the obvious deficiencies and weaknesses of modernity itself. As Dissanayake correctly perceives Coomaraswamy's valorization of tradition arose out of a deep immersion in modernity itself.

He was a product of modern western education and was quite familiar with modern intellectual trends. Here Dissanayake is closer to the truth than Partha Mitter, the Indian art historian who is of the view that however substantial Coomaraswamy's writings on Indian art may have been he had to fall back on European standards of evaluation.

This obsession with Orientalism one suspects derives from the ghost of Edward Said but Dissanayake's own reading of Said's criticism of Orientalism, namely 'a way of producing distorted knowledge of the Orient so as to fortify colonial rule' would acquit Coomaraswamy.

For colonialism which brought in its wake the disruption of the traditional community and its lifestyles was anathema to him.

Coomaraswamy as a traditionalist may not be fashionable any more and might even look a quaint figure in the salons of the demi-monde but with his insistence on the indisolluble link between spirituality and art which degenerated neither to a narrow religiosity nor a fetish of the past for its own sake his vision is still relevant to our times which would make a fetish of rupture and dislocation, ennui and spiritual despair and make our times into 'a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.'

To be continued.

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