So far I have dwelt only upon the intellectual aspect of education, because with this we are familiar, because, like the moon, we, in modern India, present to the sun of the World-culture only one side of our life, which is the intellectual side; we do not yet fully realize that our other sides also require the same light for their illumination. From the educational point of view we know Europe where it is scientific, or at best literary. So our notion of modern culture is limited within the boundary lines of grammar and the laboratory. We almost completely ignore the aesthetic life of man, leaving it uncultivated, allowing weeds to grow there.
Therefore again I have to give utterance to a truism and say with profound seriousness that music and the fine arts are among the highest means of national self-expression, without which the people remain inarticulate.
Our conscious mind occupies only a superficial layer of our life; the subconscious mind is almost fathomless in its depth - where the wisdom of countless ages grows up from its base, like the great continents, beyond our ken. Our conscious mind finds its expression in numerous deliberate activities which pass and repass before our view. Our sub-conscious mind, where dwells our soul, must also have its adequate media of expression. These media are poetry and music and the arts; herein the complete personality of man finds its utterance.
Our newspapers are prolific, our meeting places are vociferous; in these we wear out to shreds the things we have borrowed from our English teachers, and make the air dismal and damp with the tears of our grievances. But where are our arts, which, like the outbreak of spring flowers, are the spontaneous overflow of our deeper nature, of our spiritual abundance of wealth? Must we be condemned to carry to the end the dead load of dolorous dumbness? Must we, like miserable outcasts, be deprived of our place in the festival of national culture, and wait at the outer court, where colour is not for us, nor the forms of delight, nor the songs? Must ours be the education of a prison-house, with hard labour and with a drab dress cut to the limits of minimum decency and necessity? Do we not know that the perfection of colour and form and expression belongs to the perfection of vitality - that the joy of life is only the other side of the strength of life?
The timber merchant may think that the flowers and foliage are mere frivolous decorations of a tree, but he will know to his cost that if these are suppressed, the timber also follows them.
During the Moghal period, music and art in India found a great impetus from the rulers, because their whole life was in this land, not merely their official life; and it is the wholeness of man from which originates Art. Our English teachers are birds of passage; they cackle to us, but do not sing - their true heart is not in this land of their exile. The natural place of their art and music is in Europe, where they are so deep in the soil that they cannot be transferred to a distant land, unless the soil itself is removed.
We see the European, where he is learned, where he is masterful, where he is busily constructive in his trade and politics, but not where he is busily constructive in his trade and politics, but not where he is artistically creative. That is the reason why modern Europe has not been revealed to us in her complete personality, but only in her intellectual power and utilitarian activities; and therefore she has only touched our intellect and evoked our utilitarian ambitions.
The mutilation of life owing to this narrowness of culture must no longer be encouraged. In the proposed centre of our cultures, music and art must have their prominent seats of honour, and not merely a tolerant nod of recognition. The different systems of music and different schools of art, which lie scattered in the different ages and provinces of India, and in the different strata of society, have to be brought together there and studied.
Thus a real standard of aesthetic taste will be formed, by the help of which our own art-expression will grow in strength and riches, enabling us to judge all foreign arts with the soberness of truth and to appropriate from them ideas and forms without incurring the charge of plagiarism.
Therefore again I have to give utterance to a truism and say with profound seriousness that music and the fine arts are among the highest means of national self-expression, without which the people remain inarticulate.
Our conscious mind occupies only a superficial layer of our life; the subconscious mind is almost fathomless in its depth - where the wisdom of countless ages grows up from its base, like the great continents, beyond our ken. Our conscious mind finds its expression in numerous deliberate activities which pass and repass before our view. Our sub-conscious mind, where dwells our soul, must also have its adequate media of expression. These media are poetry and music and the arts; herein the complete personality of man finds its utterance.
Our newspapers are prolific, our meeting places are vociferous; in these we wear out to shreds the things we have borrowed from our English teachers, and make the air dismal and damp with the tears of our grievances. But where are our arts, which, like the outbreak of spring flowers, are the spontaneous overflow of our deeper nature, of our spiritual abundance of wealth? Must we be condemned to carry to the end the dead load of dolorous dumbness? Must we, like miserable outcasts, be deprived of our place in the festival of national culture, and wait at the outer court, where colour is not for us, nor the forms of delight, nor the songs? Must ours be the education of a prison-house, with hard labour and with a drab dress cut to the limits of minimum decency and necessity? Do we not know that the perfection of colour and form and expression belongs to the perfection of vitality - that the joy of life is only the other side of the strength of life?
The timber merchant may think that the flowers and foliage are mere frivolous decorations of a tree, but he will know to his cost that if these are suppressed, the timber also follows them.
During the Moghal period, music and art in India found a great impetus from the rulers, because their whole life was in this land, not merely their official life; and it is the wholeness of man from which originates Art. Our English teachers are birds of passage; they cackle to us, but do not sing - their true heart is not in this land of their exile. The natural place of their art and music is in Europe, where they are so deep in the soil that they cannot be transferred to a distant land, unless the soil itself is removed.
We see the European, where he is learned, where he is masterful, where he is busily constructive in his trade and politics, but not where he is busily constructive in his trade and politics, but not where he is artistically creative. That is the reason why modern Europe has not been revealed to us in her complete personality, but only in her intellectual power and utilitarian activities; and therefore she has only touched our intellect and evoked our utilitarian ambitions.
The mutilation of life owing to this narrowness of culture must no longer be encouraged. In the proposed centre of our cultures, music and art must have their prominent seats of honour, and not merely a tolerant nod of recognition. The different systems of music and different schools of art, which lie scattered in the different ages and provinces of India, and in the different strata of society, have to be brought together there and studied.
Thus a real standard of aesthetic taste will be formed, by the help of which our own art-expression will grow in strength and riches, enabling us to judge all foreign arts with the soberness of truth and to appropriate from them ideas and forms without incurring the charge of plagiarism.
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