Preface iii
no significance to a critic like Sen except what may be g<athered from the ultimate triumph of Venus oval: Juno in the life-history of Aeneas !
The poet, Rabindranath TSgore, also, in his lectures and essays, has harped on the soul's yearning for the Infinite, the " quest of the Holy Grail," as being the chief ingredient in the Indo Damashii, the spirit of Hindusthan. An absurd position consistent with the poet's unhistorical way of studying history and social problems, which would reduce the ancient and mediaeval people of India almost into non- political, non-economic, invertebrate, backboneless human beings. Gen- erally speaking, his method consists in taking one or two fine phrases from the Hindu classics without reference to the time or place of their origin, and summing up in them the " spirit " of India or the trend of Indian history, whether of the tenth century B.C. or of the tenth century A.D., whether of the Himalayan valleys or of the Bengal plains or of the Deccan trap. This would be like generalizing two thousand years of European history into one or two verse-maxims of the Hebrew Old Testament or Elizabethan England into a line of Shakespeare.
And Coomaraswamy, to whom Young India owes a great part of the present-day art-consciousness as a factor in the nationalist movements, has also yielded to the same idola in the air when he discovers an ex- cessive dose of yoga or dhyana, i.e., meditation in Hindu sculptures and paintings. He seems to have lost his balance especially in his " elucida- tions " of the songs of Vidyapati about the Radha-Krishna affair.
It is the object of the present essay to urge the need for a sober interpretation of the facts of Hindu life and movements. Even where the setting is religious or mythological and the dramatis personae divine or serni-divine, one need not be tempted to mean by them " more than what meets the ear." Ninetynine percent of what has been passing for other-worldly literature and art in India is really the literature and art of human passions, human ideals, human interests and conflicts. To be more definite, it may be said, that folk-life and sex- life have been the two chief motifs of a considerable portion of Indian thought. Most of the mediaeval writings, whether in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, or Sanskrit, e.g., Kavi-kamkana Chandt, the Puranas, etc., have to be approached exactly as one approaches the works of Virgil, Dante and Milton, with the methodology of art-criticism.
