Kapila Vatsyayan: An Icon Scholars Of Indian Culture Look Up To

With the demise of Kapila Vatsyayan, an important living link in a lineage in the domain of Indian cultural studies, has passed into eternity. That lineage had been nurtured in the past by remarkable personalities such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, Rabindranath Tagore and Stella Kramrisch.

She belongs to a school of thought that is deeply rooted in India’s culture and spirituality — and it has been exploring the phenomena of life around and within through a framework that is ancient, holistic and transcends time.

She was close to the Nehru dynasty — particularly Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. But that proximity was put to good use in the service of India's cultural history — she served as the founding director of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA).

One should remember that her very active decades coincided with the Nehruvian-Marxist takeover of every domain of humanities including traditional and tribal art forms.

In the Indian context, the approach has at its core the conflict between the so-called Aryan and non-Aryan, the Brahminical and the non-Brahminical, the Vedic versus the tribal, Sanskrit culture versus the folk culture etc.

The school of thought which Kapila Vatsyayan represented, stands diametrically opposite to such a conflict-oriented paradigm. It is based on the reality of lived Hindu experience in the highest sense of the term.

Consider for example the way she views the dynamics of India’s performing arts. In the introduction to her work Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams, she says:

One should note how she shows that the understanding of the spiritual heart of India — its everchanging yet timeless core, the Dharma Sanatana — overawes and makes irrelevant the so-called Aryan/non-Aryan or more sophisticated Brahmin/non-Brahmin, classical/folk to the study and understanding of Indian art forms.

More importantly, her worldview thus rooted in the deepest spiritual principles of India was not an armchair theorising as in the case of most ‘scholars’ of ‘the theory’. Going through her work, anyone will be astonished by her in-depth knowledge of regional diversity of Indian art forms.

Consider this from the same book, taken from the chapter on Kutiyattam:

She explains how almost every part of India has contributed to the evolution of highly specialised art forms from any part of the country. She shows repeatedly and in a highly scholarly manner the ‘unity in diversity’ phenomenon that animates every aspect of the Indian culture.

Kapila Vatsyayan chose to write in English so that she could reach out to that sections of Indian mind seated in power and yet enslaved to alien thought process. She had to constantly battle with the limitations of Western contexts of the language when expressing Indic phenomena and their roots.

Consider this, for example, in her seminal work The Square and the Circle of the Indian Arts (1997):

Then just a page or two later she explains:

She was the editor of the seventh volume of The Cultural Heritage of India published by the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata. In its preface, in her own gentle way, she criticised the neglect scholars of her school were receiving from the establishment humanities scholars:

This she wrote in 2006. It is relevant and will remain relevant as a caution for generations to come.

Under her stewardship, IGNCA became an island preserving the essence of India that is eternal amidst the Marxist takeover of every institution. She fought the aggression in her own style.

As the Nehruvian-Marxist deluge submerged our social science and humanities institutions, Kapila Vatsyayan like the Manu of our puranas and the Noah of Hebrew Bible, silently preserved in that ark called IGNCA, the essence and core seeds of our culture.

She conducted some of the best seminars and brought out volumes on the basic nature of science as well as the interaction of science, culture and society.

Particularly important are the Prakrithi series — a five-volume combination of the papers of five seminars which brought together the best minds in science, culture and philosophy.

One should note here that the scholar-scientists she brought together belonged to diverse philosophical worldviews.

In fact, the editor of the fourth volume was none other than the physicist Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, who though a Sanskrit scholar could not be said to be in sympathy with the spiritual worldview in at least one sense of the term. But such differences were completely ignorable compared to the magnificence of the cause which Kapila Vatsyayan envisioned through IGNCA.

In her preface to the first volume of the series, citing the paper by physicist educationist Kothari, she wrote:

In a neutral environment, these seminar series should have become part of the guiding principles for those who frame the science, art and humanities curriculum. At least the educationists associated with the present government should seriously venture into that.

Equally important was her concern for developing an Indic model for environmentalism — both at the level of science and activism. When asked to write a preface for the volume Water: Culture, Politics and Management brought out by India International Centre, she wrote:

Here she points out how the multiple components of Indian culture and spirituality namely the puranas, rituals, art forms, engineering and architecture are harmonised through a grand unifying vision and value — Rta. She also underlines the universal nature-venerating aspect of all ancient sacred traditions of which only the Indian tradition survives today.

Now that she has become immortal, the responsibility of reviving those seeds collected by her, and through them decolonising the humanities domain from the conflict-oriented ‘tamasic’ model and integrating it with the harmony-oriented Sanatana model, should begin.

May her sacred memory and her works guide and inspire us in that endeavour.