The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c15.s1.28

c15.s1.28

Those who care to cultivate a direct contact with the images, sculptures, frescoes and *bas-reliefs* without the metaphysics of the "knower and the known, seer and seen meeting in an act that transcends distinction" will find that the creations of Hindu artists have very often been not only sensate but sensuous and sensual as well. Material life in all its forms, the vital impulses of all sorts and denominations, not only the nine *rasas* (tastes, flavours or emotions) of Indian psychology but the manifold emotions and sentiments known to the modern psychological laboratories have all been rendered in stone, bronze, terracotta, wood etc. in the most graphic and realistic manner by Hindu artists of all regions and ages. If men and women, unsophisticated by the touch of traditional Indology, view the objective delineations of plants and animal life, human figure, genre scenes and so forth by Hindu artists and craftsmen they will realize at the first sight that these works are "human, all too human."⁹ They are not likely to be misled into the thought that these works are generally the creations of persons to whom "everything has a divine meaning and no element of life is treated for its own sake."