Cultural Identity and the Viksit Bharat Ideal: A Study of the ‘Outlandish Figure’ Coomaraswamy’s Aesthetics

Abstract

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), the author of more than 650 works (including books, papers, articles, reviews, monographs, etc.), is generally considered “a forbidding terrain” and an “outlandish figure” (Narsimhaiah 1) for students of literature. The life-trajectory of this partly-Sinhalese, partly-English, ancestrally Indian geologist, art-historian and critic runs across countries like Ceylon, England, India and America, yet orbits intellectually around Indian art and knowledge-systems.

In 1947, the year of India’s political swarajya, this advocate of ‘swarajya in ideas’ passed away before he could complete his desire to retire back to India from Boston. That the contemporary Indian intellectual galaxy failed to retain Coomaraswamy and publish him for Indian students, remains to be a fact. Writes Mrs. Coomaraswamy in her 1937 letter to Moni Bagchi: “When I was in India in 1935, I hoped that both Sahitya Academy and National Book Trust would come forward and propose a plan for presenting Coomaraswamy works at the prices Indian students can afford to pay. However, nothing of this sort happened. The few proposals that came were such that they bordered on the absurd.” (qtd in Bagchee 187)