The Indian artist

”The Indian artist lived in the light of an inspiration which imposed this greater aim on his art and his method sprang from its fountains and served it to the exclusion of any more earthly sensuous or outwardly imaginative aesthetic impulse. The six limbs of his art, the sadanga, are common to all work in line and colour: they are the necessary elements and in their elements the great arts are the same everywhere; the distinction of forms, rupabheda, proportion, arrangement of line and mass, design, harmony, perspective, pramana, the emotion or aesthetic feeling expressed by the form, bhava, the seeking for beauty and charm for the satisfaction of the aesthetic spirit, lavanya, truth of the form and its suggestion, sadrsya, the turn, combination, harmony of colours, varnikabhanga, are the first constituents to which every successful work of art reduces itself in analysis. But it is the turn given to each of the constituents which makes all the difference in the aim and effect of the technique and the source and character of the inner vision guiding the creative hand in their combination which makes all the difference in the spiritual value of the achievement, and the unique character of Indian painting, the peculiar appeal of the art of Ajanta springs from the remarkably inward, spiritual and psychic turn which was given to the artistic conception and method by the pervading genius of Indian culture.”