Indian Antiquary Vol 54

SR No.: 032546
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Richard Carnac Temple, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications
Publication Year: 1985
Total Pages: 376
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 18 MB

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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[DECEMBER, 1925
Two sides especially of Hindu-Javanese art have interested the European researcher; namely, the historical and the aesthetical. The historical or scientific interest seeks to investigate the developing stages of Hindu-Javanese architecture. The materials at their disposal are, first of all, the buildings themselves, by following the study of whose form of style it is possible to arrive at a chronological classification: secondly, the sources of history, such as the pean of Nagarakrotagama, the history Pamraton, and the legends: thirdly, the iconography, or knowledge of images, with which is closely connected the interpretation of the rows of bas-reliefs along the galleries of walls of the temples.
The purely aesthetical method of contemplation is usually opposed to this learned point of view. At present nobody asks who made these works of art, or how or when they were created, or what ideals and aims they express. The only object is to admire the beautiful as the beautiful. The qualities of beauty free the work from its surrounding and temporary milieu. The artist, who creates an actual work of art, works, according to the aesthetes, by grace of divine inspiration, and is thus raised above all temporary happenings. The attitude of complete surrender in devout admiration is the only one possible towards the revelation of creative artistic genius.
It stands to reason that these two points of view can never be so one-sidedly defended in practice. The historian must take over something of the sense of beauty, the aesthete some. thing of the scientific notion. There is room for an unlimited amount of individual opinion between the above-mentioned extreme courses. Yet the information about ancient Javanese art, which the Javanese receive from the West, moves between these two poles.
How will the Javanese react thereto? He will feel attracted towards everything appertaining to his own modern Javanese culture, to the antiquities of the Majapahit, known to him from the babads, to the temple reliefs which show the well-known figures and tales from the wijang. But towards the large sphere outside this he will remain a stranger, and all the beauties the aesthete can display will pass him by without making any deep impression on his mind. From the most distant ages the Javanese have always revealed a tendency to elucidate and group things according to their mystical value, to draw them within the sphere of the supernatural, and to encompass them with the many-colored threads of parables and symbols. Even now-a-days this tendency shows plainly in the mystical contemplations of the wajang figures. When the wajang still continues to exercise a fascination, not only over the crowd, but over even the most enlightened Javanese, then that fascination is not due to interest in the historical development, nor to rapture over the beauty of the leathern figures, but to the mystical feelings of the spectators which seek something round which to crystallize.
The love of the Javanese will also first be awakened towards ancient Javanese art, when this speaks to him mystic in language. When witnessing a production of Hindu. Javanese art, the interest of the Javanese appears generally just where that of the European savant and the aesthete ceases. He asks for the symbolic significance of the performance, and if he receive no answer, he himself has one quickly at hand, in which good and evil powers, the senses, the vital spirits play an important part-an explanation which usually mocks the most reasonable claims science demands. For instance, the greatest and the only value for its contemporaries of a shrine like the Borobudur must have lain in the fact that it revealed to them the eternal truth about the highest matters-creation, humanity, redemption from the cycles of reincarnation,-in an ingenious symbolism. Nevertheless, over the meaning of the Borobudur as a great symbol, in which the creed of a whole period is expressed,