‘Inside’ the Tradition of the Śilpaśāstras: Introductory Remarks on the Historical Study of Indian Texts on Art

and elusive notion of meaning, could hardly be admitted to a central position of the discipline, which continues to see itself as basically archaeological in character. Translations of the treatises on Indian art are also closely linked with an inclination to "archaeologize" the history of art. Bruno Dagens, the translator of Miiyamiita, a treatise on Indian architecture, admits that the basic idea of his masters to suggest him as an archaeologist to study that text was that "such a study would allow to know which monument could supposedly have been built according to it". It was much later that the scholar came to the conclusion though probably a deceptive one that "the theory of architecture we found in the Miiyamiita has been extrapolated from already existing monuments. In other terms, this ViistuSiistra has been made according to some monuments and not vice versa,,,3 The main questions which arise while investigating theoretical texts on Indian art and architecture (silpa [or viistu] siistras) are as follows: What is their purpose? How are they expected to be used? And finally, what is the benefit of them for us in studying the tradition of Indian art? The more detailed answers than those presented in this paper would require a much more comprehensive study. Therefore the issues discussed below, which pertain to the undeservedly neglected problem of shastric culture of art, are to be treated as preliminary remarks considering the early history of analysis of silpaSiistras within the nationalist agenda and its influence on formation of the methodological framework for investigation of traditional Indian art. To expose the problem in a wider methodological perspective, the artistic tradition of silpaSiistras was juxtaposed to the methodological background applied to other intellectual cultures of India. Nationalist interpretations of Indian art tradition Until the beginning of the 19 century the principles of Indian architecture known to the Europeans were almost exclusively based on the accounts of early travellers and on 2 Ibid., 6-7. 3 Bruno Dagens, .. Iconography in Saiviigamas: description or prescription?", in Shastric Traditions in Indian Arts, I: 151. 222 Valdas Jaskiinas observations of existing buildings made by the archaeologists. While very little was known about the aesthetic manuals, silpaSiistras, in formal studies these buldings were approached using European methods of studying works of architecture. It was only in 1834 with the Essays on the Architecture of the Hindus by Ram Raz (Rama Raja), which included translations of aesthetic manuals on architecture, that the Europeans got access to the knowledge of Indian aesthetics. The greater part of the Essay was based on the aesthetic manual called Miinasiira; other texts used by Ram Raz were Miiyamiita, KiiSyapa, Vaikhiinasa, and Agastya, which were mainly concerned with sculpture. The question that arises immediately is: What caused a gap of almost one hundred years that passed since the Ram Raz's compilation till the first complete translation into a Western language, namely Citrasutra of the Vi~1}udharmottara Purii1}a? One cause which really mattered was the authenticity of the extant texts, which was already pointed out by Ram Raz as the dichotomy that existed between the closely guarded world of high knowledge of the Brahmin authorities and the working world of 'the lower order' of artisans and craftsmen, where a practical knowledge of methods and canons was passed from generation to generation. According to Ram Raz, caught in a deadlock of communication between the two groups, the original aesthetic theories and manuscripts were lost and vastly distorted over time. Such a distortion of textual tradition of silpaSiistras, pointed out by Ram Raz, was directly associated with the descriptive character of the accessible silpaSiistras, which strongly debased their role in the ongoing polemics on the antiquity of Indian civilization. In this vein, studies in art tradition closely followed the development of the overall literary scholarship which, as Sheldon Pollock argues, on the one hand pursued the ideology of antiquity according to which the more archaic a text the purer it was thought to be, and the more recent the more derivative and even mongrel; on the other hand, it was religion that became and has remained virtually the single lens through which to view all texts and practices in the subcontinent. 6 Thus, despite the crucial role of the textual tradition which was called upon in the second half of the 19 century, the silpaSiistras did not pass the test of supposed authenticity even in art studies. One has to admit that the gap of time under discussion, though exhaustively studied from the point of view of colonial education on art, is stilI lacking a more thorough research on the attitudes towards the genuine shilpashastric tradition. As a remarkable landmark for the interpretative strategy applied in the first translations of silpaSiistras can serve the speculations on the principles of Indian art pertaining to the nationalist era. It seems natural that to prove the continuity of art tradition in India meant constructing a model of artistic activity 4 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The making of a new 'Indian' art. Artists, aesthetics and nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 118. On the issues discussed in Ram Raz's Essays see Partha MiUer, Much Maligned Monsters. History of European Reactions 10 Indian Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, 180-187. S Guha-Thakurta, The making of a new 'Indian' art, 118. 6 Sheldon Pollock, "Introduction", in Literary Cultures in History. Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock, New Delhi, 2004, 4f. 'Inside' the Tradition of the Silpasastras 223 based on abstract theoretical principles. In the words of Tapati Guha-Thakurta, the stress on 'tradition', within the vocabulary of art criticism, was backed by the parallel trend of reinterpretation of past history and the formulation of a body of traditional canons for the appreciation of Indian art. The polemics about what constituted 'genuine' Indian art sought sanction in tradition, therefore, the approach to the latter was highly conditioned by a search for authenticity and uniqueness. In Bengal, which in the very beginning of the 20 century was the main centre of nationalist movement, it was polemical articles written by the writer and painter Abanindranath Tagore that incited the idea of the uniqueness of Indian art. These writings in Bengali, edited in the journals or in the form of brochures and booklets, were much more widely distributed and called for a bigger response than those of the E. B. Havell, an authoritative art administrator and historian. The interpretation of the Indian art tradition that Abanindranath provided was brimming with the Orientalist ideas. As an attempt to provide a balance for understanding Indian art, which paid little attention to the principles laid down in the shastric texts, in two articles of 1913-1914 Abanindranath set out to provide an 'authentic' textual base in tradition to notions of a special 'Indian' mode of perception and representation. The first of these articles, "Miirti",8 drawing on two Sanskrit texts, Sukracarya's Sukranftisiira and Pratimiiia/qa1}a, a chapter in Varahamihira's BrhatsafJlhitii, outlined the norms for the specifically Indian conceptualization of the anatomy and creation of images of deities. Insofar as the polemics concerning the principles of anatomy in Indian sculpture, directly related to the prominent theory of Greek influence, and the 'Gandhara-bias' in Indian art history were addressed, Ordhendra Coomar Gangooly's foreword highlighted sharply the polemical intent of Abanindranath's work. The Indian artist, he explained, was called on to devise certain conventions of anatomy, suggestive of a higher and superior being 'beyond the form of things,.9 For the purpose of defining the patterns of suggestivity and therefore searching the silpaSiistras for a set of conventions for the creation of 'the aesthetically ideal figure' in Indian tradition, Abanindranath was probing quite specifically the question of form. The methodology he pursued incorporated also literary devices, such as similes and metaphors, within a pictorial image. 10 The free speculations on the affinity of different arts rendered a liberal drawing on various Sanskrit textual sources in articulating the aesthetic views of traditions in India. In the later essay, 'Sadrishya', 11 he argued that a picture, like a language, relied heavily on rhetoric and figures of speech to capture the right image and mood. To prove the process of 'Form' 7 Guha-Thakurta, The making of a new 'Indian' art, 196. 8 The English translation by Sukumar Ray later appeared in a separate booklet Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy (Calcutta, 1914). 9 o. C. Gangooly, "Foreword", in Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy, i. 10 Guha-Thakurta, The making of a new 'Indian' art, 204. 11 The English version of the article, entitled "Likeness", was published in the Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, November--l961. 224 Valdas Jaskiinas transcending itself and reaching 'the region of Thought', Abanindranath freely used references to Kalidasa, a master of similes and analogies in the Sanskrit literary tradition. The broadening of the theoretical base of visual arts with introduction of speculation on literary formal figures is particularly characteristic of the ideas laid down in the artist's article "Shadanga or Six Limbs of Painting" (1914), where he reconstructed a theory of painting out of a single stanza picked out of Yashodhara's commentary on Vatsyayana's Kiimasutra (1.3).12 As underlined in the foreword by O. C. Gangooly, in the absence of any clear aesthetic canons for painting in silpaSiistras, there was a need to search the aia1'J1kiirasiistras, so far applied mainly to dramaturgy and poetics, for a set of conventions that were equally applicable to the plastic arts of painting and sculpture. 13 The reconstruction of traditional Indian aesthetics done by Abanindranath undoubtedly fully followed the Romantic theories of art and artistic creation. Even in dealing with Indian textual tradition he called upon an unrestricted flight of spirit as characteristic of an artist and irrationality genuine to the work of art: [ ... ] Let us not forget that it is the artist and his creations that come first and and then the lawgiver and his codes of art. Art is not for the justification of the silpa-sastra, but the sastra is for the elucidation of Art. It is the concrete form which is evolved first, and then comes its analysis and its commentaries, its standards and its proportions codified in the form of sastras. 14

Paradoxically though as to the positive result of the Conference on Shastric Traditions in Indian Art held in 1988 at the University of Heidelber, one of the leading scholars in the field, T. S. Maxwell, referred to the definition of the historical problem of Indian art history as "a relatively new discipline which has not yet reached a maturity or consensus view from which to assess its position adequately in relation to a vast existing corpus of Indian literature including silpaSiistra.,,1 The main reason for this ambiguity, as the scholar maintains. is as yet unachieved definition of the relationship between meaning and style. or text and sculpture. and of their forging together into a single instrument for the understanding of historical Indian art. Given that the only descriptive discussion of form and meaning which can be directly relevant to the historical art tradition is contained in historical texts of the same tradition. and given that a number of such texts exist, one could expect more reliance on them to be evident in stylistic analysis. Nonetheless, the mainstream of Indian art scholarship demonstrates that the core of the discipline remains a detailed study of archaeological evidence using a stylistic approach, and the dependency on the textual sources is still very uncommon. It is stylistic analysts that lead this disciplinary mainstream, and their essentially aesthetic judgements, supported by numismatic and epigraphical sources, characterize the way the subject and the discipline are perceived and taught. As an alternative to the concentration on style, one takes up the topics such as the legitimizing of political power, the cult transformation of iconographical sequences, or the symbolic recording of historical events. But even these theories relating style and chronology, most probably because of dealing with the seemingly abstract and elusive notion of meaning, could hardly be admitted to a central position of the discipline, which continues to see itself as basically archaeological in character.

2
Translations of the treatises on Indian art are also closely linked with an inclination to "archaeologize" the history of art. Bruno Dagens, the translator of Miiyamiita, a treatise on Indian architecture, admits that the basic idea of his masters to suggest him as an archaeologist to study that text was that "such a study would allow to know which monument could supposedly have been built according to it". It was much later that the scholar came to the conclusion -though probably a deceptive one -that "the theory of architecture we found in the Miiyamiita has been extrapolated from already existing monuments. In other terms, this ViistuSiistra has been made according to some monuments and not vice versa,,,3 The main questions which arise while investigating theoretical texts on Indian art and architecture (silpa [or viistu] siistras) are as follows: What is their purpose? How are they expected to be used? And finally, what is the benefit of them for us in studying the tradition of Indian art? The more detailed answers than those presented in this paper would require a much more comprehensive study. Therefore the issues discussed below, which pertain to the undeservedly neglected problem of shastric culture of art, are to be treated as preliminary remarks considering the early history of analysis of silpaSiistras within the nationalist agenda and its influence on formation of the methodological framework for investigation of traditional Indian art. To expose the problem in a wider methodological perspective, the artistic tradition of silpaSiistras was juxtaposed to the methodological background applied to other intellectual cultures of India. The question that arises immediately is: What caused a gap of almost one hundred years that passed since the Ram Raz's compilation till the first complete translation into a Western language, namely Citrasutra of the Vi~1}udharmottara Purii1}a? One cause which really mattered was the authenticity of the extant texts, which was already pointed out by Ram Raz as the dichotomy that existed between the closely guarded world of high knowledge of the Brahmin authorities and the working world of 'the lower order' of artisans and craftsmen, where a practical knowledge of methods and canons was passed from generation to generation. According to Ram Raz, caught in a deadlock of communication between the two groups, the original aesthetic theories and manuscripts were lost and vastly distorted over time. 5 Such a distortion of textual tradition of silpaSiistras, pointed out by Ram Raz, was directly associated with the descriptive character of the accessible silpaSiistras, which strongly debased their role in the ongoing polemics on the antiquity of Indian civilization. In this vein, studies in art tradition closely followed the development of the overall literary scholarship which, as Sheldon Pollock argues, on the one hand pursued the ideology of antiquity according to which the more archaic a text the purer it was thought to be, and the more recent the more derivative and even mongrel; on the other hand, it was religion that became and has remained virtually the single lens through which to view all texts and practices in the subcontinent. 6 Thus, despite the crucial role of the textual tradition which was called upon in the second half of the 19 th century, the silpaSiistras did not pass the test of supposed authenticity even in art studies.

Nationalist interpretations of Indian art tradition
One has to admit that the gap of time under discussion, though exhaustively studied from the point of view of colonial education on art, is stilI lacking a more thorough research on the attitudes towards the genuine shilpashastric tradition. As a remarkable landmark for the interpretative strategy applied in the first translations of silpaSiistras can serve the speculations on the principles of Indian art pertaining to the nationalist era. It seems natural that to prove the continuity of art tradition in India meant constructing a model of artistic activity 4 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The making of a new 'Indian' art. Artists, aesthetics and nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920, Cambridge University Press, 1992 based on abstract theoretical principles. In the words of Tapati Guha-Thakurta, the stress on 'tradition', within the vocabulary of art criticism, was backed by the parallel trend of reinterpretation of past history and the formulation of a body of traditional canons for the appreciation of Indian art. The polemics about what constituted 'genuine' Indian art sought sanction in tradition, therefore, the approach to the latter was highly conditioned by a search for authenticity and uniqueness. 7 In Bengal, which in the very beginning of the 20 th century was the main centre of nationalist movement, it was polemical articles written by the writer and painter Abanindranath Tagore that incited the idea of the uniqueness of Indian art. These writings in Bengali, edited in the journals or in the form of brochures and booklets, were much more widely distributed and called for a bigger response than those of the E. B. Havell, an authoritative art administrator and historian.
The interpretation of the Indian art tradition that Abanindranath provided was brimming with the Orientalist ideas. As an attempt to provide a balance for understanding Indian art, which paid little attention to the principles laid down in the shastric texts, in two articles of 1913-1914 Abanindranath set out to provide an 'authentic' textual base in tradition to notions of a special 'Indian' mode of perception and representation. The first of these articles, "Miirti",8 drawing on two Sanskrit texts, Sukracarya's Sukranftisiira and Pratimiiia/qa1}a, a chapter in Varahamihira's BrhatsafJlhitii, outlined the norms for the specifically Indian conceptualization of the anatomy and creation of images of deities. Insofar as the polemics concerning the principles of anatomy in Indian sculpture, directly related to the prominent theory of Greek influence, and the 'Gandhara-bias' in Indian art history were addressed, Ordhendra Coomar Gangooly's foreword highlighted sharply the polemical intent of Abanindranath's work. The Indian artist, he explained, was called on to devise certain conventions of anatomy, suggestive of a higher and superior being 'beyond the form of things,.9 For the purpose of defining the patterns of suggestivity and therefore searching the silpaSiistras for a set of conventions for the creation of 'the aesthetically ideal figure' in Indian tradition, Abanindranath was probing quite specifically the question of form. The methodology he pursued incorporated also literary devices, such as similes and metaphors, within a pictorial image. 10 The free speculations on the affinity of different arts rendered a liberal drawing on various Sanskrit textual sources in articulating the aesthetic views of traditions in India. In the later essay, 'Sadrishya', 11 he argued that a picture, like a language, relied heavily on rhetoric and figures of speech to capture the right image and mood. To prove the process of 'Form' transcending itself and reaching 'the region of Thought', Abanindranath freely used references to Kalidasa, a master of similes and analogies in the Sanskrit literary tradition.
The broadening of the theoretical base of visual arts with introduction of speculation on literary formal figures is particularly characteristic of the ideas laid down in the artist's article "Shadanga or Six Limbs of Painting" (1914), where he reconstructed a theory of painting out of a single stanza picked out of Yashodhara's commentary on Vatsyayana's Kiimasutra (1.3).12 As underlined in the foreword by O. C. Gangooly, in the absence of any clear aesthetic canons for painting in silpaSiistras, there was a need to search the aia1'J1kiirasiistras, so far applied mainly to dramaturgy and poetics, for a set of conventions that were equally applicable to the plastic arts of painting and sculpture. 13 The reconstruction of traditional Indian aesthetics done by Abanindranath undoubtedly fully followed the Romantic theories of art and artistic creation. Even in dealing with Indian textual tradition he called upon an unrestricted flight of spirit as characteristic of an artist and irrationality genuine to the work of art: [ ... ] Let us not forget that it is the artist and his creations that come first and and then the lawgiver and his codes of art. Art is not for the justification of the silpa-sastra, but the sastra is for the elucidation of Art. It is the concrete form which is evolved first, and then comes its analysis and its commentaries, its standards and its proportions -codified in the form of sastras. 14 And further: If we approach our sacred art-treatises in the spirit of scholarly criticism, we find them bristling all over with unyielding restrictions, and we are only too apt to overlook the abundant, though less obvious, relaxation which our sages provided for, in order to safeguard the continuity and perpetuation of our art sevya-sevaka-bhaveshu pratimalakshmanam smritam. Images should conform to prescribed types when they are to be contemplated in the spirit of worship. Does that not imply that the artist is to adhere to sastric formulae only when producing images intended for worship and that he is free, in all other cases, to follow his own art instinct?15 Based on speculations on ancient Sanskrit treatises, the ideas of Abanindranath nevertheless acquired an Indian pedigree and succeeded in providing a text-based background for the national art. With this regard, one characteristic feature of Abanindranath's and his followers' textual analysis deserves a special emphasis because of its relevance to the strategies of translations of the first shilpashastric texts. What is meant under this, 12 Sloka goes as follows: Riipabheda-pramiiniini-bhiiva-liivanyayojanam-siidrisyam-van:Iikiibhailga. 13 Guha-Thakurta, The making of a new 'Indian' art,205. 14 Abanindranath Tagore, "Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy", quoted from John F. characteristic is the application of the act of interpretation as a radical strategy for conserving the text 'as it is'. This view was certainly related to the idea of the sanctity of the text, though, as Parul Dave Mukherji explicitely demonstrates while arguing the various translations of the Citrasiitra of the Vi~1}udhannottara Purii1}a, following different purposes this sanctity was constantly altered via the process of interpretation through a well-defined ideological framework, especially under nationalist reworking of the text. 16

'The Theory of Practice or the Practice of Theory?'
Putting into question the two main aspects of the shastric paradigm defined by Sheldon Pollock, in the field of art studies comes from questioning the conformity of extant art pieces to the regulations laid down in the technical treatises on art and architecture. Pollock is acute in pointing out that the understanding of the relationship of siistra ("theory") to prayoga ("practical activity") in Sanskrit culture is diametrically opposed to that usually found in the West. Theory is held always and necessarily to precede and govern practice; there is no dialectical interaction between them. 17 It may seem that sometimes studies of a particular art object and the texts that describe the latter contradict this statement l8 , but most probably it rather proves the shift in shastric culture from the descriptive to the normative discourse. Seemingly that was a unique cultural phenomenon in the premodern world, reflected in a thorough transformation of "models of' human activity into "models for", whereby texts that initially had shaped themselves to the reality so as to make it ordered (which is very much characteristic of vediirigas) end by asserting the authority to shape reality to themselves. 19 It is this tendency, expressed in the shastric "models for" human activity, that led to disappointment in the early research of Indian art and architecture, which was mostly confined to solving iconographical questions rather than dealing with aesthetics. The disenchantment was briefly summarized by D. D. Kosambi: "The traditional Sanskrit books on architecture and iconography are contradicted by the speciments actually found". 20 As Maxwell points out, this attitude does not invalide the status of silpaSiistra; on the contrary, it gives us a chance to rethink the way the textual culture of SiLpaSiistra operates. It must be unlikely that the portions of silpa, which almost certainly were compilations of iconographical texts gathered from various areas, though cast in a shastric form, were ever used as on-site instruction manuals as expected by early researcher such as Gopinatha Rao and others. Their purpose was rather confined to the preservation of what had to be remembered of former traditions and to discussing such issues as aesthetic theory.21 The tradition of textual legitimation helps to assesss critically the ideas of "canonical texts of Indian art" represented by the scholars probably influenced -consciously or not -by the essentialistic approaches to national culture. Explorations of the shastric tradition rather tend to support the view that none of the arts in India is legitimized by a single canon or an authoritative text. In this relation, Sheldon Pollock notes that the complete transmission of a siistra may take place, not through any intermediaries, but directly from God to the author. 22 For example, the earlier extant siistra on drama, Bharata's Nii!yasiistra, describes how the art of dramaturgy was transmitted to the authos by Brahma as a fifth veda. 23 The idea of an authoritative transmission is also clearly expressed in the later texts of historical origins. The Silpa prakiisa of Ramacandra Kaulacara, a treatise dated back to the 12th century, though written by an historical person, also attributes the authorship of all the silpaSiistras to mythical Visvakarman, and openly admits his knowledge being restricted to explaining "with knowledge and without hesitation" the Va~abhi temple in some particular form.24. This shows that the "creation" of knowledge is treated as an exceptionally divine activity. Moreover, knowledge is by and large viewed as permanently fixed in its dimensions: knowledge, along with the practices that depend on it, does not change or grow, but is set in a given corpus of texts that are continually made available to human beings in whole or in part. The efforts of intermediary transmission are confined with better and more clear explanation of the antecendent. That is the reason why all Indian learning, accordingly, perceives itself and actually presents itself largely as a commentary on the primordial siistras. 25 To put it in other words -and following the Maxwell's arguments, -"what is "shastric" in Indian tradition is not in fact the textual record but the human transmission of that which at any particular time is considered to be true tradition: authority stems from a person who best embodies and exemplifies the current social perception of cultural convention".26 Such practice was exerted at most of sculptural centres, though the textbooks or manuals that could have been referred to are not the texts that have come down to us as silpaSiistras. 21 Maxwell, "Silpa versus Sastra"', 10. 22  Landmarks for further investigation The history of research on and interpretation of silpa.siistra enables us to understand that an integra I approach to Indian art culture expressed in a non-dialectical relation between textual theory and practical activity will be achieved only when the objectives, provenance and historical particularities of shastric tradition are taken into account. Presently, the dominant attitude to art theory as to a digest of experimentally validated "canonical" principles applied to Indian intellectual culture rises more questions than gives answers. This understanding has been derived mainly from archaeology as a set of methodologies to investigate the past which supplied knowledge based on excavated materiaI. The latter was systematized also by applying abstract stylistic categories. Scholars, who witnessed the constantly increasing number and diversity of unearthed art objects, were expecting to find the principles underlying this stylistic variety in the tradition al Indian texts on art. When these efforts ended in failure due to different reasons (one of them pertained to a deficient access to the silpa.siistras), the principles of artistic activity were not rarely discovered through the appeal to the aĮa'!lkiirasiistras and later projected to art and architecture. Therefore, in prospect, the research on Indian silpa.siistra should proceed in presenting a more detailed assessment of the idea of siistra as pertaining to art activity in India, which would also con tribute to a critical inspection of the concept of art theory in Westem aesthetics.