Ananda Coomaraswamy

The Story

Born in Colombo to a Tamil father and English mother, Coomaraswamy studied geology in London but found his true subject on his first visits to Bhārat and Ceylon, where he saw the great art of the land being neglected and misunderstood. He devoted his life to studying and championing it.

His early book, 'Medieval Sinhalese Art', and his masterwork, 'The History of art of Bhārat and Indonesia', established the field. He argued that art is not primitive or merely decorative, but a profound expression of philosophy of Bhārat — that the image is a doorway to the divine. He also championed the village craftsman and the idea of the dignity of handmade work.

From 1917 he served as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he built one of the world's great collections of art of Bhārat. In his later years he wrote on the philosophy of art, the Vedas, and the unity of Eastern and Western thought. He died in 1947, having made the world see what Bhārat had always seen.