Nietzsche in India: A. K. Coomaraswamy and the Supermen in the East

Presenter:

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Abstract

This paper explores translation of cultural ideals in the service of Indian nationalist cultural politics, specifically A. K. Coomaraswamy’s understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), a central figure in Indian thought and nationalist history, was an expert on the arts of the Indian subcontinent and the relationship between art, education and the development of a national character. He championed a swadeshi approach to Indian art that privileged a pure and ideal India in distinction to a materialist West. Coomaraswamy’s writings explore the intersection of the political and spiritual as they create the unique synthesis that marks Indian cultural and historical consciousness. In this paper, I explore how his “Cosmopolitan View of Nietzsche” appropriates the Nietzschean Superman ideal into the pantheon of Indian religious achievers. Then, I show how, in much less well-known essay, “Rajput Cartoons: A Criticism after Nietzche,” Coomaraswamy positions Rajput painting as an expression of a pure Hindu essence and a will to power that lays the ground for the Indian nation. Taken together, I argue that Coomaraswamy’s essays locate generally in India the spiritual power, and particularly in the Rajputs the temporal power, that Nietzsche sought in his ideological antidote to Western (read Christian) civilization. Coomaraswamy, however, far from privileging Nietzsche, actually subordinates and Indianizes Nietzsche by showing how India already existed in that space beyond good and evil that Nietzsche idolized. Coomaraswamy introduces what he sees as India’s supermen, the Rajputs, to the Nietzschean analysis that was, in his mind, rightfully suited to them.