I am grateful to Messrs. George Allen and Unwin Ltd., for their courtesy in allowing me to include in this collection my late father Prof. Hiriyanna's article Art Experience appearing in Radha-krishnan: Comparative Studies in Philosophy presented in honour of his sixtieth birthday. My thanks are also due to the Secretaries of the All-India Oriental Conference, the Registrars of the Uni-versities of Madras and Mysore and the Registrar of the Annamalai University, the Editors of the Indian Review, the Aryan Path and The Hindu and the Authorities of the Adyar Library, Madras, who readily gave permission to include in the present volume the several essays and reviews first published by them.
For decades Art Experience has been a lamp which has provided illumination to many a serious student of Indian aesthetics. It first appeared in 1919. At that time there was a general acceptance of the view that while there were many philosophic schools in India, aesthetics was not the concern of any of the systems. Alongside was the heated debate on the nature of Indian art. Ruskin, Birdwood, William Archer and Sri Aurobindo had crossed swords. In many essays now included in Foundations of Indian Culture, Sri Aurobindo denounced these mistaken notions. A.K. Coomaraswamy joined the debate first in defence and later to expound the metaphysics which governed the art. Although the text of the Natyasastra had been located, neither authentic editions nor the commentary of Abhinava Bharati be-came the subject of serious discourse in the disciplines of either philosophy or aesthetics.
A contemporary of the late Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, M. Hiriyanna was steeped in Indian philosophy and known for his precision, scrupulousness and economy of expression. He was the first amongst the pioneers to establish meaningfully the relationship of philosophy, aesthetics and life. As if in a flash of incisive insight, Hiriyanna pointed at the core concept of the Upanisadic view which was as relevant to philosophy as to art. The central point of this view, he said 'is that whatever is one... is manifested most clearly in the inner self of man than in the outer world'. This, he added, brought about a total revolution, for it led directly to the enunciation of the absolute kinship of Nature and Man. This observation had far-reaching implications for the critical discourse in both philosophy and art. Of equal signifi-cance was his penetrating statement. The world of sense equally with the world of thought is but an appearance of the ultimate truth, an imperfect expression of it, but yet adequate if rightly approached to point at the under-lying unity. Through a few precise sentences M. Hiriyanna turn-ed the pattern of the discourse on Indian art and aesthetics from histories, chronologies and mythologies, monotheism and pantheism to its fundamentals of a world view, and the diverse paths of the quest for truth, viz., through speculative thought or, alternately, refinement of senses and sense perceptions. Also it was Hiriyanna who sharply pointed at the relevance of the concept of the jivanmukti here and now and not a life hereafter or world beyond to the whole field of Indian art. He highlighted the Indian view that achievement of a life of harmony was not through ex-tinguishment of interests but by an expansion of them through training and refinement of feeling and the cultivation of emotion. The simple lucidity of these deep insights into the Indian tradition was as fresh and unconventional at that time as authentic and pure.
A generation of scholars have carried these observations as a talisman for investigating the contours of Indian aesthetics, be it a V. Raghavan, K.C. Pandey or Krishnamurthy or others. Hiriyanna had, as if in one gentle stroke, cleared the path for others to walk steadily without fear of taking on defensive positions. Consequently, over these decades many vistas have opened up for interpreting Indian aesthetics on its terms at the deepest level. No longer is it necessary to understand Indian aesthetics by referring to Plato, Aristotle and others. Nor is it any longer necessary to prove that there is a long and a most sophisticated philosophic discourse on aesthetics.
These essays, particularly 'Indian Aesthetics I' and 'Indian Aesthetics II', are thus landmarks in scholarship on Indian aesthetics. Although Hiriyanna does not discuss the interpretation of the theory of Rasa from other philosophic schools, he elucidates the theory from the point of Sankhya in a masterly fashion.
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