A bibliography of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy.

Brown, Robert L.

A Bibliography of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. By JS. CROUCH.Delhi; INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL CENTRE FOR THE ARTS,2002.Pp. 430.

Ananda Coomaraswamy died sixty years ago, in the summer of 1947. James Crouch's bibliography is likely to be the final and most comprehensive listing of his publications. Will it be used, and by whom? Indeed, what is Coomaraswamy's legacy today?

Before I turn briefly to these rather complex but important questions, here is the organization of the book. Coomaraswamy's publications are arranged into five sections. Section A contains Cooma-raswamy's own books, of which there are ninety-seven entries arranged chronologically. These entries contain a great deal of information, including such things as a physical description of the first edition, an account of the book's contents, annotations of the contents (often using Coomaraswamy's own words), and a listing of reviews (which can often run into a number of entries, his Elements of Buddhist Iconography, for example, published in 1935, has twenty reviews, many written by the major scholars of the day, from Paul Mus to Mircea Eliade to D. C. sirear).

In section B are listed Coomaraswamy's contributions to books, again arranged chronologically. There are ninety-six entries, including the two-volume collection of his selected papers, edited by Roger Lipsey and published in 1977 as part of the Bollingen Series (vol. 89) by Princeton University Press. This publication stimulated something of a renewed interest in and evaluation of Coomaraswamy's scholarship by another set of scholars, and produced some twenty-four reviews, including one by John Kenneth Galbraith in the New York Times, and one by Michael Meister in this journal (JAOS [1980]: 153-54). Section C contains Coomaraswamy's contributions to periodicals, both newspapers and journals, also arranged chronologically, 909 entries in all. Section D is a tiny miscellaneous section with three entries, and the final section E has a selection of 216 entries of material about Coomaraswamy written by other authors, the entries arranged alphabetically by the authors' names. Three is finally a fifty-seven-page index.

The total, then, for publications by Coomaraswamy in this bibliography is a mind-boggling 1,105 entries, including ninety-seven books. Crouch says in a brief "Introductory Note" that "The existence of every item ... has been verified by the compiler through personal inspection ..."Crouch did not compile his lists from previous bibliographies without finding and verifying each reference himself.

Ananda Coomaraswamy was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1877. His father was a Tamil Sri Lankan, and his mother an Englishwoman. His father died only two years later, in 1879, when Ananda and his mother were then in London awaiting his arrival to take up residency in England. His mother stayed the rest of her life in England, and thus Ananda had an English boyhood. He returned to Sri Lanka as a young man trained in geology, but although his experience during this brief period (1902-7) decidedly shaped his later views of Asian art and religion, most of his life was spent outside of Asia, in England and the United States. Whether to regard Coomaraswamy as a Western or a native ("Indian") scholar is one of the central questions constantly debated with regard to him. There is, however, no question as to how Coomaraswamy saw himself: he was the interpreter and champion of Indian art and religion as understood by the indigenous tradition, and was the adversary of most things Western and modern, particularly the materialist culture and realistic art of the post-Renaissance West.

This short review cannot enter into the complexities of Coomaraswamy's approaches to Indian art and culture (there are, after all, the 216 entries about him given by Crouch, as well as the hundreds of reviews listed under his publications). In many ways Coomaraswamy's scholarship could not be more out of synch with the approaches of contemporary scholars. It is essentialist, Orientalist, chauvinist, ahistorical, and spiritual, as well as being extremely difficult, with lengthy linguistic and literary references in multiple languages (including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Pali). We can turn to the judgment of Partha Mitter as to how successful Coomaraswamy was in his interpretation of Indian art. Mitter's now classic study of how incorrectly the West understood Indian art (first published in 1977 by Oxford, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art), ends the history of misunderstandings that starts in the thirteenth century with Marco Polo with the writings of Coomaraswamy. Mitter says on the next to the last page of his text: "However persuasive Coomaraswamy's interpretations may have been it did not really bring us any closer to the understanding of Indian art" (p. 285). Thus Coomaraswamy is the last in this story of Europeans who maligned Indian art.

What were Coomaraswamy's interpretations? His basic argument was that Indian art was made up of forms that had meanings, that Indian art was symbolic. The meanings could be found in Indian texts, were religious in nature, and could be applied directly to the art. The art-as-symbol was a system that could be understood by everyone; that is, it was traditional. This interpretation of art stood in stark contrast to how he saw art in the West from the Renaissance onward. This art was only attractive, made to mimic profane nature, and was highly individualistic--part of the West's cultural and economic turn toward gross materialism and the cult of the individual.

When F. D. K. Boseh published in 1948 the Dutch edition of his lengthy study The Golden Germ: An Introduction to Indian Symbolism (the English edition was published in 1960), Coomaraswamy had just died. Boseh dedicated his book to Coomaraswamy, saying "I honor him as the precursor who ... discerned for the first time the full extent of the importance of Indian symbolism." That Indian art had this rich meaning (and was not just sometimes beautiful, sometimes strange forms) was a revelation to scholars at the time, and is the basis for the writings of a generation of writers, from Stella Kramrisch to Benjamin Rowland. That the connection between the religious texts and the artistic objects could be taken too far (as it clearly was by Bosch in The Golden Germ) was the danger. Still, the linkage between text and image remains, in my opinion, central to understanding Indian art.

If Coomaraswamy's approach to understanding Indian art was a dead-end, as Mitter has suggested, how is Indian art to be understood? Most art historians today teach how the art was used, patronized, created, located--broadly, the social history of art--in the same way as our colleagues teach art from other areas of the world. I suspect Coomaraswamy would regard this approach more as ethnographic or anthropological studies, but certainly would not have disparaged it, perhaps only thinking it fairly limiting and not very challenging.

But I can close this brief discussion with my own view of Coomaraswamy: he is the greatest historian of Indian art who ever lived. His work can bear constant re-reading, and each reading brings new insight. He held his anti-West ideology to the end of his life, but it, as with other views that we consider today as biases, are easy to spot. My suggestion is for students to look through Crouch's bibliography and try their hand at negotiating some of the incredible thought that they will find in the entries they choose. It might be something of a back-to-the-future experience.

ROBERT L. BROWN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES