Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c3: Foreword
Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c3
- Language
- English
Foreword
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THIS book is a record of the work and the life of the craftsman in a feudal society not unlike that of Early Mediæval Europe. It deals, not with a period of great attainment in fine art, but with a beautiful and dignified scheme of peasant decoration, based upon the traditions of Indian art and craft. Sinhalese art is essentially Indian, but possesses this especial interest, that it is in many ways of an earlier character, and more truly Hindu—though Buddhist in intention,—than any Indian art surviving on the mainland so late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. The minor arts, and the painting, are such as we might expect to have been associated with the culture of Aśoka’s time, and the builders of Barāhat.
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The period dealt with I have called Mediæval; but it must be understood that changes of style in decorative art take place comparatively slowly, and that it is generally impossible to say at a glance whether a given piece of work be of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth century, or even older or later. Most of the specimens here figured or described date from the latter part of the eighteenth century. Mediæval conditions survived in full force until the British occupation of Kandy in 1815, and what is actually described in this book is the work of Sinhalese craftsmen under mediæval conditions, mainly as these survived in the eighteenth century, and, in a less degree, even to the present day.
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Mediæval Sinhalese Art was the art of a people for whom husbandry was the most honourable of all occupations, amongst whom the landless man was a nobody, and whose ploughmen spoke as elegantly as courtiers. It was a religious art, and so a popular art. It was also essentially a national art; the craftsmen, forming an integral part of the Civil Service, were rewarded with grants of State land, no less than soldiers or husbandmen. It was the art of a people whose kings were ‘one with the religion and the people,’—perhaps the most significant phrase in the whole of that magnificent chronicle, the Mahāvaṃsa, from which I have so often quoted,—a phrase embodying an ideal hopeless of attainment by a foreign ruler.
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It was the art of a poor people, the annual income of whose kings did not in the eighteenth century exceed £2000 in money, beside revenue in kind. It was very different from the sumptuary art of the great courts and wealthy cities of India, of which we trace but a faint reflection here and there in the use of Indian materials, and the importation of Indian craftsmen. But it is the only true art discoverable in Ceylon to-day. In a few years it may be gone for ever, I have tried to make a picture of it, before it was too late.
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If we would understand the significance and the history of the arts and crafts in India, it will be needful to begin with such survivals of them as we can study readily, and work back from these to earlier times. Hence, even from a wider point of view, I make no apology for writing a large book about a time when the traditions of fine art were stereotyped, and even the traditions of the crafts intensely formalised and rigid. Such an art is, as it were, an outlier, left by long continued denudation, in extent severely limited, yet evidence unmistakeable of a former continuity which it helps us to understand. Even so considered, the intrinsic value of the art is great; the capacity for certain types of designing survives even to this day amongst a few craftsmen almost perfectly developed; and whatever limitations even late Sinhalese art possessed, it is at least immeasurably superior to anything produced by any would-be-modern Sinhalese artists of the present day. An eighteenth century jataka painting is as much superior to a modern Low-country book illustration, as a Kandyan jewel is to a modern imitation of a design borrowed from a Birmingham catalogue, or a Kandyan temple to a modern structure such as that described on p. 132.
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This book is not primarily intended as a work of scholarship, but is written first of all for the Sinhalese people, as a memorial of a period which at present they are not willing to understand. The ‘educated’ Sinhalese of to-day, after, on the one hand, a century of foreign government, and of education in which the national culture has been completely ignored, and, on the other hand, an equal period of subservient and obsequious imitation of foreign manners, have little reason to be proud of their present achievement in the Art of Living. Evidence of shallow thought is everywhere to be seen in an exaltation of the present age at the expense of the past. It is, however, only in an effort to realise the ideals of this very past, and of the past of India, that there lies the possibility of a true regeneration and revitalising of the national life of the Sinhalese people. This book, then, is written first of all as a contribution to the understanding of this past.
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Secondly, it is meant for those in East or West who are interested in the reorganization of life, and especially of the arts and crafts under modern conditions.
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Thirdly, an endeavour has been made to render it as far as possible of value to the anthropologist, and to students of sociology and folk-lore. Criticism, only too easy from several points of view, should take into account the actual purpose of the book, and the fact that such a detailed account of the arts and crafts of a small area in the East, is really pioneer work.
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In Ceylon, as in India, the direct and indirect influence of contact with the West has been fatal to the arts. The two most direct causes of this adverse influence have been the destruction of the organization of state-craftsmen, following upon the British occupation; and the subsequent systematic neglect, by British and Sinhalese alike, of a local architectural tradition. A less direct, but equally sure and certain, cause of the decline of the arts has been the growth of commercialism,—that system of production under which the work of European machines and machine-like men has in the East driven the village weaver from his loom,* the craftsman from his tools, the ploughman from his songs, and has divorced art from labour. In the words of Blake,
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“When nations grow old
The arts grow cold,
And commerce settles on every tree.”
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In such grim fashion has commerce settled in the East.
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The Sinhalese people are not, in my opinion, happier or better than they were in the eighteenth century. Talk of progress, and the reality, are not the same. Civilisation is supposed to advance by the creation of new desires, to gratify which the individual must endeavour to improve his position. But in reality it is not quantity, but quality of wants that may be taken as evidence of progress in the Art of Living. No one acquainted with modern Sinhalese taste will pretend that it gives evidence of any improvement in the quality of wants. Indeed, it is is sufficiently obvious that quantity, variety, and novelty are not really compatible with quality.
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From a study of the arts and crafts under mediæval conditions in East and West: under modern conditions in the West: and under conditions resulting from the influence of West on East, something may be learnt of the true and false relations between art and life. What are the conditions necessary to the existence of a worthy art? Let us first enquire what conditions forbid its existence in the modern West. They may be summed up in the words commercialism and irreligion.
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∗ In euphemistic language, “successfully contested the village weaver’s market.”
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The essential method of commercialism is to create a want in order to have the opportunity of profiting by the filling of it. Under the commercial system, it is no longer demand that regulates supply, but production that ‘forces a market.’ Machinery has enabled the capitalist to do this to the fullest extent. The promise of labour-saving machinery was: a millenium for the worker, shorter hours and easier work; its result have been merely increased production, increased profit to the capitalist, and not less, but less intelligent, work for the producer. Not merely is the workman through division of labour no longer able to make any whole thing, not only is he confined to making small parts of things, but it is impossible for him to improve his position or to win reward for excellence in the craft itself. Under guild conditions, it was possible and usual for the apprentice to rise through all grades of knowledge and experience to the position of a master-craftsman. But take any such trade as carpet making under modern conditions, by power-looms. The operator has no longer to design or to weave in and out the threads with his own fingers. He is employed in reality, not as a carpet weaver, but as the tender of a machine. He may rise to a higher place it is true,—but it is the place of a man responsible for the successful running of many machines by many men. He can never rise in virtue of his knowledge or experience in the craft itself. That craft is for him destroyed as a means of culture, aud the community has lost one more man’s intelligence,—for it is obviously futile to attempt to build up by evening classes and free libraries, what the whole of a man’s work is for ever breaking down. It is no longer possible for culture and refinement to come to the craftsman through his work; it must be won, if won at all, in spite of his work; he must seek them in a brief hour snatched from rest and sleep, at the expense of life itself. It is not strange that he does not seek them, nor that their expression is lacking in his work. He has not even the capacity for idling, but must continually seek amusement and excitement. There can be no quality of leisure in his work. In short, commercial production absolutely forbids a union of art with labour. It is instructive to compare the still surviving, but fast disappearing, relics of this union in the East, with the results of Western endeavours through education and free libraries to restore that general culture which cannot under commercialism exist; not there does the ploughman speak as elegantly as the courtier, not there are riches little valued; nor can these things be where life is lived, not as an art, but as a wild beast fight.*
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The conditions of labour affect not merely the producer, but also the consumer, who under modern conditions must put up with the lack of temperament in the mechanical work composing his environment; and must suffer economically also, inasmuch as work in which the worker is not interested, or of which he cannot be proud, generally costs the consumer more in the long run than the initial cheapness saves.
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But the primary importance of all that is meant by craftsmanship relates to the life of the producer. Cheap work, cheap men; and the community suffers accordingly. A society which sees wealth in things rather than in men, is ultimately doomed. It appears, therefore, that it is absolutely essential that mechanical production should in the future, not abandoned, but controlled in the real interests of humanity. If this appears to be impossible, as I am unwilling to believe, it must be admitted that civilization is not much better than a failure; for it is not much good being more ingenious than our forefathers if we cannot be either happier or better.
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One of the most interesting and difficult distinctions that can be drawn is that between a tool and a machine. It is, however, one that the craftsman can always draw for himself, when he is free to do so. Thus the carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch, for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsman's fingers; but the power loom is a machine, for it does the essential part of the work, and in so doing imposes limitations on the spontaneity and freedom of the design and on the intelligence of the worker. The gouge and chisel are tools, but the mechanical carver is a machine, perhaps the most stupid yet invented. It is essential, then, for a re-union of art with labour, that machinery should be controlled; and this control can be properly exercised only by the craftsman himself. The place of machinery in a true civilisation will be that of a hewer of wood and drawer of water, a servant, not a master; its concern will be rather with the preparation than with the subsequent manipulation of materials. Its purpose will be, not to rob the craftsmen of that part of labour which is very craft itself, but to save him from the heaviest and least interesting work, and to carry out only the simpler and most mechanical processes of manufacture. It is, of course, true that even in the preparation of materials, and the execution of monotonous labour, the machine is in many cases inferior to the hand. Thus, to take a single example, the hand-woven textile is, *ceteris paribus*, more durable than the machine woven, owing to the regularity and mechanical character of the strains put upon the threads of the latter; and the surface, even if quite unornamented, is artistically superior. So again, a machine-stamped binding, or a machine-planed table, or a lathe-spun bowl, lack the peculiar surface characteristic of each material, and developed by hand-work on it; the technical perfection of the surface in the one case is simply uninteresting, in the other varied. The machine, however, has come to stay, and, rightly used, may be transformed from a curse into a blessing. The problem is not how to abolish machinery, but how to regulate it that it shall serve without enslaving man; how to stop competition between machine and hand-work, by defining and delimiting intelligently the proper spheres of each. The community cannot afford to dispense with the intellectual and* imaginative forces, the educational and ethical factors which go with the existence of skilled craftsmen and small workshops. It must, therefore, protect these in their proper sphere. This can be done only by restoring the entire control of production to the actual workers, as in the old guild systems; or by the endowment of craftsmanship as in Ceylon, in the feudal manner, but substituting for the king or overlord the democratic community as patron. The first method may perhaps be achieved through a development of the trade-unions of the West, historically the representatives of the old guild associations of producers.* The second may be achieved by the action of the community in appointing as its servants, for life or good conduct, its craftsmen and its artists, just as it now appoints its judges, its preachers, its professors and medical officers.
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A community, convinced of the desirability of possessing within itself a body of skilled craftsmen, and of benefiting from the educational influence and actual productions of such workmen, could attain these ends by appointing master-craftsmen as servants of the community, endowing them with a salary, or with a house or other security from want, on condition of performance of work for the community. Such Public Craftsmen should be required to keep apprentices, and choose from these one to be their successor in office. Such a system would effect the object in view more certainly and more economically than much larger sums spent on technical education, or the encouragement of competitive designs for large public works. Without some such solution of the problem, humanity will in the future have to face a complete alienation of art from labour, resulting in a civilisation “divorced from Nature, but unreclaimed by Art.”
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∗ *Works of the first importance on this subject are: A. J. Penty, ‘Restoration of the Guild System,’ London, 1906; C. R. Ashbee, ‘Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry,’ Campden, 1908.*
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Side by side with commercialism, the growth of irreligion has been destructive of the arts. Needless to say that by irreligion I do not refer to the decline of one or another particular form of dogmatic belief, but to the prevalence of that superficial view of life which concentrates the attention solely upon outward things, and not at all upon things of the imagination, real things. The distinction between naturalism and idealism in art is one that is fundamentally religious. It is the lack of a metaphysic in modern materialistic culture that makes it possible for the artist to find sufficient satisfaction in the imitation of beautiful appearances, and a sufficient aim for art in the giving of pleasure. This reduction of the highest aim of art from prophecy to amusement strikes at the root of any possible revival of true art,—which has to do, not with imitation, but imagination. Art that is driven to save its life, as in modern Europe, by emancipation from all metaphysical and subjective conceptions, is bound in the end to lose that life; it becomes, in fact, the work of amateurs lacking equally in inspiration and tradition. To reunite imagination with technique is as necessary as to reassociate art with labour.
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So far as Ceylon is concerned, it is of course true, that as in later India, a “too conclusive reliance on traditional practice has led to a mental stagnation which deprives Indian art of its former vitality.” The true impulse to a wider and fuller life must come once more, as in Ceylon it has always come, from India. If this book in any way contributes towards the preparation of the ground for the reception of such impulses, the labour spent upon it will be repaid in full.
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It is of interest to record, in connection with the arts and crafts aspect of the questions just discussed, that this book has been printed by hand, upon the press used by William Morris for printing the Kelmscott Chaucer. The printing, carried on in the Norman Chapel at Broad Campden, has occupied some fifteen months. I cannot help seeing in these very facts an illustration of the way in which the East and the West may together be united in an endeavour to restore that true Art of Living which has for so long been neglected by humanity.
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A few words may be said as to the pronunciation of Sinhalese words. The following alphabet is employed in transliteration: *a, ā, e, ē, i, ī, u, ū, ri, rī, ḷri, ḷrī, e, ē, ai, o, ō, au, k, kh, g, gh, ṅ, c, ch, j, jh, ñ, ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ, t, th, d, dh, n, p, ph, b, bh, m, y, r, l, v, ś, sh, s, h, ḷ, ṃ, ḥ*, also the semi-nasals, *n, m*. The chief vowel sounds are:
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*a* like *a* in America. *ā* like *a* in father. *e* like *a* in man, or *e* in effort. *ē* like *a* in man, but longer. *i* like *i* in ill. *ī* like *ee* in meet, or *i* in machine. *u* like *u* in full. *ū* like *oo* in fool, or *u* in rule. *e* like *e* in pen. *ē* like *a* in rate. *o* like *o* in top. *ō* like *o* in rope. *au* like *ou* in doubt.
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The chief consonant sounds requiring notice are:
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ṅ like *n* in *pink*. *c* like *ch* in *church*. *ch* like *chh* in *coach-house*. ñ like *n* in *punch*. *ṭ* like *t* in *cut*. *ṭh* like *th* in *out-house*. *ḍ* like *d* in *sad*. *ḍh* like *dh* in *mad-house*. ṇ like *n* in *print*. *t* like *th* in *thirst* (nearly). *th*, the same aspirated.
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*d* like *th* in *that* (nearly). *dh*, the same aspirated. *n* like *n* in *in*. *ph* like *ph* in *uphold*. *bh* like *bh* in *abhor*. *l* like *l* in *lip*. *v* like *v* or *w*. *ś* like *s* in *sure*. *sh* like *sh* in *shun*. *s* like *s* in *sun*. *ḷ* like *l* in *rail*. *ṃ* like *n* in (Fr.) *bon*.
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The English reader is recommended to ignore all diacritical marks on consonants, pronounce consonants as in English, and vowels as in French, except ‘e’ which is like ‘a’ in *man*. The *n* in Sinhalese (*siṃhala*) is pronounced like the *n* in *pink*, or, more exactly, like the *n* in the French word, *bon*. The *h* should be distinctly pronounced, like the *h* in *pin-head*. A few fully anglicised words such as *adigar* for *adikārama*, are printed without diacritical marks. In Sinhalese words the common contraction ‘e’ (or ‘e’*) for *aya* is used side by side with the full termination, as in *ḍaṅge, ḍaṅgaya*. The ending *ya* is also often omitted, as in *vihāra*, for *vihāraya*, a Buddhist temple. The corruption ‘e’ for *aya* in *devāle* (*deva+alaya*, god-mansion) is also used. Sinhalese words in the plural are usually given in the Sinhalese form, as *tuppoṭi*, plural of *tuppoṭiya*; but the English ‘s’ is sometimes added instead.
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The illustrations are for the most part drawings or photographs of objects in the Colombo and Kandy Museum; belonging to the Daḷadā Māligāva and Mahā Dēvāle, Kandy; and in my own collection. A majority of the objects illustrated are of eighteenth century date. I am indebted to many friends for assistance and advice. First and foremost to my wife for taking over a thousand photographs in Ceylon; most of those reproduced in the Plates are her work, and they are but a selection of those taken. Those who have photographed in a tropical climate will appreciate the labour involved. I am also indebted to her for working out with me the subject of Sinhalese embroidery, and for her assistance in recording many other observations made jointly. Secondly I have to thank Don M. de Zilva Wickremasinghe, of the Indian Institute, Oxford, for reading the proofs. Many errors have been thus avoided; but he is not to be held responsible for those that remain. I am indebted to Miss A. G. Daniels, B.A., for very kindly undertaking the heavy labour of making an adequate index. To Mr. C. R. Ashbee I am greatly indebted for assistance and advice in matters connected with the Press, and for the pressmark which he has specially drawn for this book. It represents, in a design based on a Sinhalese painting, the gathering of flowers from the tree of Eastern art, and records the history of the Press on which the book has been printed. In Ceylon I have to thank Dr. Willey, Director of the Colombo Museum, for the facilities which he kindly gave for the examination and photography of any and every object in the Museum, and Mr. G. A. Joseph, the Librarian, for his continual assistance in the same work. I have also to thank Mr. H. W. Codrington, C.C.S., for assistance and information; the Hon. J. P. Lewis, Government Agent of the Central Province; Mr. C. B. Nugavela, Diva Nilame, Daḷadā Māligāva; Mr. A. Ratvatte, Basnāyaka Nilame, Mahā Dēvāle; Mr. T. B. Keppiṭipola, Basnāyaka Nilame, Embekke Dēvāle; Mr. W. Dunuville, J.P.; Mr. S. D. Mahavalatenna, H. E. Dambevinne, A. Maduvanvela, and other Kandyan chiefs; Mr. P. E. Pieris, C.C.S.; Mudaliyār E. R. Gooneratne, for his invaluable assistance in translating for me the Rūpāvaliya and Sāriputra; the late Silānanda Thēra, Librarian of the Oriental Library; many jewellers of Kandy and Colombo, and particularly Mr. A. B. Casse Lebbe, for permission to borrow and photograph at any time any of the specimens of Sinhalese work in their possession. Amongst Kandyan craftsmen I am chiefly indebted to Dēvasurēndra Muhandirama, of Embekke, for abundant information, of which I was able to tap the surface only in the course of, for a time, almost daily conversation and observation of methods. I am indebted also to the invariable courtesy of Buddhist Priests, both at Malvatte and in the country districts. For the use of photographs reproduced on Pls. II., III., IV. (1), VIII. and VIIIA I have to thank Messrs. Skeen & Co. and the Colombo Apothecaries Company.
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ANANDA K. COOMARASWAMY.
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BROAD CAMPDEN, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. December 1st, 1908.