The Influence of Narrative Structure on Indian Traditional Art

Abstract

A distinctive quality of Indian aesthetics is its wholistic approach to the arts, whereas, in the West there has been an increasing tendency to separate the arts into different "mediums'', so that the plastic or visual arts have been put in to one category, while the literary arts, including poetry have been shown to have their own distinctive medium of expression. Then in yet another group are the performing arts, and music has a place all of its own. But in India there has been a movement not so much to distinguish the arts as to find their common denominators. Thus it has been felt that dance drama is the mother of the arts, and that from this, music and poetic literature have derived their force, whereas in the other direction visual or plastic arts have been expressed in the still poetry of carved stone, or painted fresco, the inner joy (harsh a) which is to be derived from all the arts. The "common denominator" of artistic expression has thus been rhythm (rtu ) and playfulness which, it has been felt from the very basis of the whole of creation as we experience it in the cosmos.