SELECTED LETTERS OF ANANDA K. COOMARASWAMY
Edited by ALVIN MOORE, JR. and RAMA POONAMBULAM COOMARASWAMY
1988, xxxiii+479 pp. App., bibl., indexes, ISBN: 19-562306-1: Rs 250 (HB)
| Ananda K.Coomaraswamy's contributions in the field of art and literature are stupendous. But little is known about the man himself. Coomarasamy detested in autobiographical and considered it vulgar, yet he wrote thousands of letters to Scientists, Sanskritists, Buddhist monks and poets and also scholars like Schweitzer, Eric Gill, Needham, George Sarton, Herman Goetz., Muirhead and many other establishing intimate personal contacts with his contemporaries. | |
| The letters included
in this volume published for the first time reveal the razor-sharp precision of his mind.
He believed in no theories of ideologies, political or philosophical issues as such; he
addressed himself to the discipline of history, religion, arts and crafts. The letters
show the incredible range of his mind which cut across civilisations, cultures, languages,
arts and crafts, encompassing the whole. The letters have been compiled by Domi Raja Singam, a lifetime devotee of Coomaraswamy. |
|
ANANDA K COOMARASWAMY, a reputed
scholar on Indian art and culture was a man of prodigious learning, equally at home in
vedic, classical, mediaeval, European and Islamic literature. With a D.Sc., degree from
the University of London, he came to the field of art by way of Science. Conversant with
about a dozen languages, he was an art critic, a historian, a philosopher and
metaphysician whose mind encompassed the sum total of the eastern and western
traditions of learning and thought.
| ALVIN MOORE, JR. formerly
of the Library of Congress and a close friend of A.K.COOMARASWAMY. RAMA P.COOMARASWAMY, a distinguished surgeon is the son of A.K.COOMARASWAMY. |
