Abstract

THE CONCEPT OF CREATIVITY IN TRADITIONAL INDIAN ART

Dr. Priyam Ankit

Volume: 5 Issue: 1 2015

Abstract:

Rather than recording the details of their own ephemeral existence, the traditional people think it more important to write about the legendry and heroic characters. However unimportant one’s own life and the lives of one’s own associates may be, these provide the only authentic window into the life-situations as such. The traditional people therefore achieve in their lives an interesting symbiosis of the temporal and the eternal. Instead of writing about his own experience of conjugal relations, Kalidasa chooses to write about the love of Shiva and Parvati in Kumarasambhavam. He lends his own feelings to the love of Shiva and Parvati, and consequently concretizes his own experiences through the paradigm of Shiva and Parvati. Undoubtedly, impersonation is a common feature of all dramatic art; but traditional drama essentially rests upon the replay of certain myths or legends. It must be kept in mind that it is in this re-enactment of these myths and legends that the traditional Indian artist achieves the fulfillment of his creative urge. But, to be sure, re-enactment does not mean mechanical repetition. This sense of creativity is quite at variance with our contemporary understanding of the term. For traditional artists creativity lies in their transfiguring the eternal into images, in being original in the sense of turning to the original – the primeval. Traditional art forms do not set so many stores by novelty and extraordinary creative independence as by a skillful and innovative use of already existing parameters of artistic excellence. The fact that the traditional artist does not experiment with the vagaries of his whims and fancies does not imply that his work is hackneyed and has no ingeniousness about it.

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