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The Indian Concept Of Beauty:
Dimensions And Contexts
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The Indian Concept Of Beauty: Dimensions And
Contexts
Article of the Month – December 2009
‘Beauty is skin deep’ was the first
page leading story in this morning’s
re-mix supplement of an English daily
seeking to compound with filmy broth
spices of different hues and tastes –
arts, cultures, sciences, global trends
in fashions, researches in various
domains, and even trade and
industry and sometimes religion and
philosophy. Its mystique caught the
eye. It seemed to explore beauty in
layers deeper than the skin,
somewhere beyond its
phenomenalism – beyond its colour,
fluidity, transparence, tenderness,
smoothness, wrinkles or roughness,
all that belonged to surface, perhaps
the same as in early days the
Buddhist canonical literature ordained
when artists assembled to represent
the Buddha’s likeness were
commanded to paint the Buddha
beyond colours.
The Origin of the Buddha Image
However, the text that followed was a bit disappointing. It talked of beauty, the
most mysterious thing in the entire creation, without talking of its mystique. Except
the heading the entire text was formal and informative – how a new research has
revealed that a woman with an even and radiant skin finds more admirers than one
with the symmetry of face, that is, a face, however symmetrically cast, does not
have same charm as has one mounted with lustrous and even skin. Incidentally, the
write-up discovers that it is because of their good skin in their close-up shots that
the older actresses – the text mentions a few by names, continue to retain their
charm despite their age. In the next paragraph it abruptly shifts to the relative
behaviour of men and women in matters of love acclaiming that men are quicker in
making proposals of love than women and that men over fifty-five years of age are
most active and experimental in seeking dates. In paragraphs that followed it talked
of yoga, tips as to how to remain youthful and attractive, love-jealousies, and some
other aspects of human behaviour, besides interviews of some young college girls
and professionals on results of these researches. A truly re-mix, if anything was
completely missing it was the term ‘deep’, crux of the phrase, if it was read over and
under the lines. The entire text fluttered around the surface betraying no eagerness
to peep inside.
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BEAUTY AS ART PERCEIVES IT
This essay seeks to simply explore how art perceives beauty. Beauty has been the
most common theme of rhetoric and intellectual discourse world over for about two
and a half millenniums, some scholars/philosophers dragging it into this domain, and
others, into that; hence, such simplification of the subject as this might hardly be
conceded. At least this much would be argued that representation, not perception, is
more appropriate a term for defining art’s relation with beauty. This position is not,
however, fully correct. No doubt, art represents a form but mere representation of a
form is not its objective. Every form, at least such as art seeks to represent, has
inherently a beyond-form essence – its beauty, at least as this ‘beyond-form
essence’ is visually defined. In art, form, and even its actual dimensions as a camera
reproduces, becomes a mere vehicle of this ‘beyond-form essence’. Thus, art
represents a form ordinarily for representing the beauty that such form manifests;
and unless the art perceives, or rather discovers, that beauty manifesting in the
form, it might reproduce a material model of the represented object, not its
essential spirit, and thus not a work of art.
A work of art, a painting, sculpture, metal-
cast or whatever, discovers its distinction
in its power to reveal this essence – the
beauty, and the relative levels of its
excellence. It is this power of art that
discovers in the portrait of Mona Lisa, a
woman believed to be having an odd-
looking inflated neck, the highest level of
sublimity of beauty that a feminine form
enshrines, and thus one of a few great
masterpieces of world art. It is in
manifestations of the Great Goddess as
ferocious Kali, Bhairavi, Chamunda,
Chhinamasta and several other forms
including those of Buddhist deities, Shiva
as Bhairava or Vishnu as Narsimha among
others that the Indian art has created
many of its most beautiful divine forms and
many of its great masterpieces. Art
attributes to these and similar other
ferocious looking forms such divine
dimensions that in them manifests a
strange benignity and their awfulness is
dispelled. Mother Goddess Kali
Hence, beauty in context to art is more or less the vision of the mind that the artist
translates into a form, or rather into a transform beyond such form’s actual
dimensions. Formal accuracy, measured point to point – a kind of instrumentality,
belongs to the domain of technology; the art does not dwell on surface or confine to
measurements; it rather delves deeper into it where dimensions diffuse,
immeasurable ‘inner’ – its spiritual quiescence or material conflicts surface, and
what appears seems to be foreign to the represented form. Even in realistic art the
‘real’ is the mere semblance – impression of the real, not real; in terminology of art
‘real’ is not the same as ‘actual’. Though often striving to incorporate into its body
some features from domains beyond it, ‘actual’ relates to utility or serves some
practical purpose; art transcends utility and is not meant to serve a practical
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purpose. A painting might be a ladder for someone’s ascendance into the realms of
delight but not for reaching the first floor of a building. A wooden table, however
artistically made, is a carpenter’s thing manufactured for a purpose; it passes into a
painter’s domain the moment it emerges on canvas which gathers along its image
also various effects – light, shade, angles, perspectives and total ambience along its
enshrining spirit, independent or as part of the portrayal of the sitter. Now it is an
image for pleasing the eye and thereby the mind, not an object to serve a utility.
Sometimes a canvas fixed on a wall takes you to lands where none of your modes of
transport – an aircraft, bullet-train or whatever, can ever carry.
BEAUTY IS SKIN DEEP
If the phrase ‘beauty is skin deep’ is
taken as suggesting that beauty is
not merely what appears to eye or
which gratifies the senses but
something deeper than the ‘sensory’
or ‘sensual’, it is closer to the art’s
vision of beauty. From the East to
the West, ancient days to modern
times, and religious scriptures to a
roadside hawker’s ‘masala’ – spicy,
magazine beauty is celebrated as
bliss beyond par. The Indian maxim
‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram’ dually
applies.
Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram
{Truth, Godliness and Beauty}
It perceives beauty as the manifestation of the ultimate truth and the highest good,
and at the same time conjointly all three are the attributes of the Supreme.
However, even as attributes of the Supreme they have different levels significance.
Of the three beauty alone manifests into a form while truth and good do not. Truth
and good reveal in act, and the act itself is the attribute of the form. Thus, truth and
good themselves seek formal expression in beauty. Adi Shankaracharya propounded
: ‘Brahma satyam, jagat mithya’ which equates ‘satya’ with Brahma, the Ultimate,
and ‘jagat’ – all created things, with false. Thus, beauty, the manifestation of satya,
is also the manifestation of Brahma. Irrespective of how the western
metaphysicians/philosophers/scholars view or viewed it, the common man’s
perception of beauty in the West, which aptly reflects in the words of English
Romantic poet Keats : ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that’s all ye know and all ye
need to know’, only reverberates this Indian vision of beauty.
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Not truthful or blissful, beauty is the ultimate
truth, supreme bliss and the timeless source of
creativity. This ages’ long Indian vision of
beauty combining aestheticism with theology
deifies beauty and perceives it enshrining all
forms, divine or ephemeral, live or dead, or
even those that common mind considers awful
or ugly. No system of faith in India, not even
such ones as Jainism that favoured complete
renunciation, has ever denounced beauty. The
Jains conceptualised over figures of their
Tirthankaras, emaciated by long rigorous
penance, glowing faces with divine aura
beautifying them.
Jain Tirthankar
As in Buddhist religion, the Buddha of art has always been
one whose face enshrined the light of the Enlightened, his
intrinsic beauty, the Buddha beyond colours, as the
Buddhist canonical literature standardized his vision. Thus,
art, especially the Indian, has always spiritualised its
aestheticism when beauty was its theme.
Standing Buddha
BEAUTY AND ART’S UNIVERSAL APPEAL
Unlike other possessions beauty has strange universality. While food, however rich,
or money, however voluminous, gives satisfaction and pleasure only to him who eats
or holds it, beauty delights universally, beyond barriers, without question or
calculation, and unconditionally. This universality is the essence of beauty and it is
what gives to art its universal appeal and timeless quality. Beauty’s significance in
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an individual’s life is hardly any less. Man’s desire to live is subordinate to his sense
of beauty. Even a leper, a disabled, or a beggar is found engaged in beautifying his
person. The day one begins believing that he is ugly he loses that desire to live.
Beauty is oceanic but without ocean’s tides and tempests. Grace, tenderness,
placidity, sublimity and power to inspire are beauty’s essential organs, and it is in
them that beauty seeks its form and expression in Indian art. In the contemporary
world it is in this universalizing quality of beauty that market has discovered
immense potentials and now beauty is perhaps a more potent bread-earner than
any other market-commodity.
MAN’S SENSITIVITY IN REGARD TO BEAUTY
Beauty is strangely phenomenal but it as
strongly inspires subjectivity, so much so
that one discovers beauty’s first
manifestation in oneself. This sensitivity is
so strong that he can not even think that
anyone, even an animal, might be
indifferent to one’s appearance. As reflects
in a number of folklore and legends, man
has attributed even to nature his own mind
contemplating how an animal, bird or plant
would react to its look, both agreeable and
disagreeable. The peacock’s legend is one
of its best examples. The magnificence and
beauty of peacock, a charming dancing
bird, is superb when in monsoon months it
dances under a sky covered with clouds.
Its fully blown brilliant multi-hued feathers
are its most beautiful body-part, while its
crude bony legs, the ugliest. As the nature
has it, when on peak of excitement during
its dance, there roll from its eyes a couple
of tears. This human mind perceives that Peacock: In Indian Art, Thought and
the peacock sheds these tears when during Literature
its dance it looks joyously at the beauty of
its feathers, and painfully, at its ugly feet, one inspiring joy, while other, generating
pain and tears.
The Champa flower, known for its exceptional sweet fragrance, comprising
irregularly shaped petals much like a bunch of sick pale leaves, has quite an
ordinary, if not ugly, look. Unlike other flowering plants the flowers of Champa grow
inside covered under its thick leaves. This human mind feels that abashed of
unattractive ordinary look of its flowers Champa does not like displaying them. A
crow, jealous of the beauty of cuckoo’s melodious voice, kills its offspring, and a
monkey, alike jealous of the great beauty of a weaver-bird’s nest, destroys it. In the
Pancha-tantra, Kalila-ba-Dimana and dozens of other texts man has woven around
animals hundreds of similar tales which reveal his mind rather than theirs.
ADORNMENT OF BEAUTY : EVOLUTION OF THE CULT
Obviously, whatever the form it manifested in, the beauty has been exclusively the
man’s vision – his passion, and sometimes his obsession. Myths and fictions apart,
man alone has the ability to apprehend and appreciate beauty. He has instinctively
in him since times immemorial a desire to possess ‘beauty’ – anything beautiful,
nature’s creation or his own, a person or an object, and an eagerness to adorn it.
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Creation of beauty into a form always required a talent or at least some level of
skill; however, the adornment of oneself has always been common to all men and
women, and not merely that there reflected in the level or kind of such adornment a
person’s individual or social status and aesthetic taste, but also the same level of
commitment as he or she has for a ritual. It is now long when the cult of adorning
beauty – shringara or roop-sajja as it was called, seems to have attained such level
of sublimation as attributed to it the sanctity or divinity of a rite.
This magnification of the cult of adornment is
obviously metaphoric. It seems that the
tradition, which perceived beauty as the
manifestation of the Supreme, saw beauty’s
adornment as service rendered to Him for the
beauty was seen as His manifestation. Roop-
sajja, inherently linked with auspices,
festivities and piety, is not thus an act of
mere aesthetic domain but has rather ritual
connotations. A bath, foremost of adornment,
is also the foremost of all rituals and
preceded every auspice, a significant
occasion, or even a routine, from taking a
meal or opening a business establishment to
coronation or worship of deity. A ‘bindi’ on
the forehead, ‘mangala-sutra’ – auspicious
thread, on the neck, bangles on the wrist,
ear-rings, nose and feet ornaments, or
vermilion applied to hair-parting, red dye on
feet etc. are essence of an Indian woman’s
marital status as well as her rites by
performing which she is believed to attain the
Nayika Dressing Herself
highest good and salvation.
More closely than the beauty and rites are linked beauty
and culture. Appreciation of beauty and its adornment
was man’s ever first step towards his transformation into
a cultured being. As suggests some of the rock-shelter
drawings, even the nomad, at least after he settled in his
rock-shelter, aspired to have a different look and sought
to enhance it by adorning it. Terracotta figurines and
seals cast with human figures, excavated from various
Indus and Harappan sites, especially the different forms
of the Indus mother goddess, reveal exceptional taste for
fashion-costumes and jewellery of which the excavated
material reveals quite a wide range. The Vedic asceticism
had its own contexts of beauty. The Rig-Veda perceives
Ushas, the goddess of dawn, emerging from behind the
eastern sky like a bride in radiant costume and glittering
jewels.
Usha, the Goddess of
Dawn
The Vedas and the later Vedic literature have scattered over their leaves in
abundance such sets of imagery which present glaring examples of how they
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visualised beauty and its adornment. By the time of Puranas not merely the
iconography of each god and goddess but also the types of their specific costumes
and ornaments were specified.
ADORNMENT SET TO STANDARDS
Some kind of class-wise allocation of
ensembles and jewellery was
ordained by Manu in his Smriti;
however, as reflects in a number of
episodes in the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, it was perhaps around
the period of the great Epics that
some kind of ritual sanctity was
attributed to personal adornment.
Sita gives up all her ornaments and
replaces with bark-cloth her silk
costume before she leaves Ayodhya
Lord Rama Sita and Lakshmana in Exile with Rama for exile. Sage
Vashishtha, the family teacher, rules
that king Dasharatha has exiled Rama, not Sita; hence, it is against the Law that
she wears bark – the attire of ascetics.
Though not expressly, this mandate of Law reflects later also in the act of Anasuya,
the wife of sage Atri, herself well-versed in scriptures, tradition, and Law. In her
silent disapproval of Sita’s unadorned person she gives her ever-lustrous divine
costumes and jewels when the latter comes to the hermitage of her husband, and
restores Sita’s essential identity. In the Mahabharata, there are many similar
episodes. After Pandavas lost Draupadi, their wife, in the game of dice, Dushasana,
the younger brother of Duryodhana, brought her dragging by hair in the open court.
What tormented Draupadi most, and haunted her memory ever after, was that she
was brought before the elders when she had not even dressed her hair. She vowed
to dress it only after she had Dushasana’s blood to anoint. Obviously, an unadorned
body was not presentable and nothing could disgrace a woman more than depriving
her of the adornment prescribed to her class.
Around the beginning of the Common Era there
emerged several schools of thought that not only
innovated numerous forms of the art of love
making but also discovered hundreds of herbs,
waxes, essential oils, perfumes, minerals, essences,
pastes, ointments, powders, ashes, excrements,
and even bones among others which on one hand
added elegance, glow and grace to a person’s
appearance enhancing feminineness of a woman
and masculinity of a man, and on the other, re-
vitalized their energies and redeemed them of age-
effects and related ailments. As suggest a number
of treatises on the subject including sage
Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra, the art of adornment and
love making were essential parts of curriculums
taught at Gurukulas – seats of teachers. In the
introductory part of his Kamasutra sage Vatsyayana
makes a mention of many earlier treatises on the
subject some of them claimed to have been
composed by the descendant of Brahma himself
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and to have extended into one lac verses. Sage Vatsyayana has devoted one of the
seven chapters of his treatise, the last one, to adornment of beauty and how it could
become more bewitching.
Inspired largely by
Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra
there emerged a wide
tradition of the art of love of
which adornment of beauty
was the most significant
aspect. Vatsyayana’s
Kamasutra gave to the Indian
art, especially temple-
sculptures, across the land
for many centuries its
timeless imagery thriving
with the vigour of life. The
sculptural panels in the
Shringar temples, like those at
Khajuraho, Konark,
Bhuwaneshvara, Bhoramdeva in Chhattisgarh, and at hundreds of other places, not
only portrayed ‘mithunas’ – couples engaged in amorous acts, but also numerous
‘nayikas’ – heroines, engaged in ‘shringara’, bathing, looking into mirror, applying
vermillion into hair-parting, putting on ensembles and ornaments or removing them.
As a matter of fact, ‘shringara’ is the crux of conventions like ‘Nayika-bheda’ –
classification of maidens in love, or Barahmasa – emotional reactions of those in love
to month-wise changes of nature around, and of Rati-shashtra –love-classics. It is in
the form of maidens engaged in ‘shringara’ that the Indian art has got many of its
timeless classics.
‘SHRINGARA’ : ADORNMENT OF DEITY
Later, with the spread of Vaishnava devotional
cult, the term ‘shringara’, especially when used in
isolation, denoted adornment of deity, more often
Krishna, Vishnu’s incarnation. In all forms of
Krishna’s worship, either as ‘sewa’ – service
rendered to him, the mode of worship that
Vallabhacharya propounded under his cult of
Pushti-marg, or otherwise, adornment of the
deity-image was the first step towards it. Not only
that ‘shringara’ during winter was not the same
as in summer or monsoons but it followed a day-
long periodical schedule, the morning ‘shringara’
being different from that of the noon, afternoon,
evening and for the night. The Vaishnava
tradition, a blend of aestheticism with spiritualism
and of love with service and devotion, saw
Krishna manifesting in his divine form the totality
of the masculine beauty, the same as the Gopis –
cowherd maidens of Brij who collectively
represented the Bhagavata Purana’s heroine,
aggregated the feminine. Later, Radha epitomized
in her being this totality of Gopis and the model
of absolute feminine beauty. Thus, in Vaishnava
tradition Krishna and Radha represented Radha Krishna
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conjointly the total good and absolute truth, which as absolute model of beauty
manifested in their beings.
Incidentally, none of the four major deity-forms of
Krishna, Banke Bihari at Vrindavana, Shri Natha Ji
at Nathdwara, Dwarikadish at Dwarika, and
Jagannatha at Puri, has an image of Radha
enshrining along Krishna any of these seats.
Obviously, most of the Krishna-related worship
traditions perceived him as the Absolute One, and
thus, also as the absolute model of beauty –
masculine or feminine. Such traditions perceive
Radha only as a subordinate entity, or as one who
stood to him in the same relation as the ‘soul’ to
the ‘supreme soul’, or as one who is his mere part
– an aspect of his being. Philosophical literature
has hardly a rationale to interpret this merger of
totality into Krishna, though the thesis, which the
legend of Swami Haridasa – saint, poet and singer,
reveals, gives some idea of it. As has his legend,
every day, with the fall of the evening Swami
Haridasa entered into the forest near Vrindavana
and wandered into it the whole night searching
Radha and Krishna Merge as One
Krishna said to visit the place every night and
meeting Gopis there. Days, months and years
passed but Swami Haridasa could not find him.
One night when the moon was in full glory and the whole forest, trees, meadows,
ponds, glowed in its lustre, there appeared before Swami Haridasa two divine forms,
one representing Krishna, and the other, Radha. Suddenly he saw Radha’s figure
merging into Krishna’s, and what Swami Haridasa had now before him was Krishna
alone, his form aggregating total feminineness and total masculinity.
FORMS EXPLOITED IN ART FOR REVEALING BEAUTY
As discussed before, despite that beauty is not
merely for eye but something beyond it and it is
in this ‘something’ from the domains beyond the
eye that the essence of beauty – ‘lavanya’ as it is
sometimes called, lies, it is in form that beauty,
or rather all abstractions, seek to manifest. The
form, a human figure or a thing’s dimensions,
has its own beauty; however, instead of a static
form beauty manifests more effectively in a form
revealing an act. Besides that an act imparts to
form curves, angles, postures, perspectives and
rhythmic vibrancy with which the façade of a
temple or a painting’s canvas moves, it is in an
act that the form discovers its dramatic
dimensions. While modern painters like Picasso
and F. M. Hussain discover such dramatic
dimensions and rhythm in sharply conceived
geometric curves of their figures, the Khajuraho
sculptor discovered it in softer aspects – facial
demeanour and gentle acts of body : writing a
letter, looking back at a cat, tying a foot
Waiting at the Door
ornament or a costume, or looking into mirror
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among others. Figures engaged in applying lacquer on feet or vermilion into hair-
parting, awaiting one’s spouse from behind a door, bathing, adorning, swinging,
celebrating festivals, Holi with colours and Diwali with crackers and sparklers,
looking at a crow believed to be delivering the loved one’s message and hundreds
other comprise the diction with which the form has its discourse with beauty.
Besides, some forms – a bride, a coy maid, blossoming creeper, a shrub laden with
flowers, a demeanour of innocence, a baby bird, animal or child and thousands
more, are perpetual source of beauty in art. While attire and ornaments attribute
greater beauty to a woman’s figure, the surroundings, to an individual object, for
the wholeness is always more beautiful than a fragment.
FOR FURTHER STUDY:
• Mahabharata, Gita Press, Gorakhpur; Poona; Calcutta.
• Rig-Veda Samhita, edited by F. Maxmuller; English trans. by H. H. Wilson,
Poona.
• Valmiki Ramayana, Gita Press, Gorakhpur.
• Vatsyayana’s Kama-sutra.
• Koka Shashtra.
• Ananga-ranga
• Indira Sinha : The Teachings of Kama Sutra, London
• Vachaspati Gairola : Kama-Sutra Parishilan, Delhi
• Dr. Daljeet and P. C. Jain : Indian Miniature Painting, New Delhi
• Dr. Daljeet and P. C. Jain : Khajuraho, New Delhi
• Dr. Daljeet and P. C. Jain : Monuments of India, New Delhi
• P. C. Jain : The Magic Makers, New Delhi
• Dr. Saroj Bhargava : Saundarya Bodh Evam Lalit Kalayen, Varanasi
• Dr. R. B. Patankar : Saundarya Mimansa, New Delhi
• Mulk Raj Anand : The Book of Indian Beauty, New Delhi
• Celebration of Love, ed. by Dr. Harsha V. Dahejia, New Delhi
• Kanwar Lal : Kanya and the Yogi, Delhi
This article by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr Daljeet.
We hope you have enjoyed reading the article. Any comments you may have will be
greatly appreciated. Please send your feedback to feedback@exoticindia.com.
Copyright © 2009, ExoticIndiaArt
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