Life and Afterlife of Sādṛśya: Revisiting the Citrasūtra through the Nationalism-Naturalism Debate in Indian Art History

Abstract

This paper sets out to revisit the Citrasūtra , a seminal section on painting from the Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa , in the light of key concerns around the cultural politics of art historiography, the śāstra-prayoga debate (Maxwell 1989, 5–15), and the related question of interpretative frameworks for studying early Indian art. The latter concern has lately come to the forefront in the context of post-colonial studies and global art history. It is critical of intellectual parasitism (Dhareshwar 2015, 57–77) and pushes postcolonial thought to explore ‘native’ interpretative frames to study Indian art (Asher 2007, 12). This paper attempts to complicate the search for alternative frameworks by underlining gaps and slippages that surround the meaning of terms in a given text and their modern appropriations. To this end, it traces the genealogy of the term sādṛśya , from the śilpaśāstric lexicon through its twentieth-century reception in art-historical discourse. How does a term acquire an afterlife when it enters into the force field of reinterpretation steeped in cultural nationalism? How could a newly “discovered” Sanskrit text function in such a space?1 In this paper, I also intend to address the larger question: what is the genealogy of the view of India’s cultural past, and specifically its “art,” as transcen-dental/ idealistic/spiritual, which has translated itself into a belief? And why does this belief persist, although in different configurations? In more recent times, an ethnographic approach to the study of texts has emerged as a corrective, which I will critically examine for its relevance for alternative inter-pretative frames for the study of Indian art. In the end, I will conclude by relating Coomaraswamy’s transcendentalism to David