Artistic Creativity: Western and Indian Perspectives

Speaker: Sudhir Kakar
Discussant: Alka Hingorani

January 22, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

The talk compares Western theories of artistic creativity with those of Hindu tradition. The focus of Western theories has been the creative person. Psychoanalysis continued this tradition by emphasizing the biographical roots of creativity, tracing its source to the creative person’s emotional conflicts and highlighting the therapeutic function of creativity. There is recently a shift from the psychological to the biological in that the special nature of the creative person’s cognitive and perceptual processes are receiving greater attention. Indian foundational texts on creativity, on the other hand, do not concentrate on the personality of the creative artist that needs to be transcended for the creativity to flower.  Creativity arises from his or her participation in a transcendent-spiritual unconscious. Kakar then looks at an anthropological study of traditional painters and the views of Rabindranath Tagore, perhaps the greatest creative genius produced by India in the last two hundred years, to discuss the contemporary relevance of the traditional Indian views of creativity.

Sudhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst, novelist, and a scholar in the fields of cultural psychology and psychology of religion. He has taught at premier educational institutions in India and abroad and has received prestigious academic fellowships. He is the author of eighteen books of non-fiction and five of fiction, many of his books have been translated into twenty-two languages around the world. His latest book is Young Tagore: The makings of a genius (Penguin-Viking, 2013).

Alka Hingorani is Associate Professor at the Design Center (IDC) in IIT Bombay. She teaches courses in aesthetics, storytelling and narrative, and is interested in the interaction between science and art that design often exemplifies. her interest in Indian Art lies geographically in the lower Himalayas and thematically in issues of aesthetics and identity. her book in Mohras and Mohra makers in Himachal Pradesh is called ” Making faces: Self and Image creation in Himalayan Valley” ( University of Hawaii Press, 2013).