ART REVIEW : INDIA ‘ESSENCE’ EXHIBIT AGLOW WITH INNOCENCE

They must have guilt in India, but you’d never know it from looking at works on view at the Asian Art Museum until Nov. 9. It is a trove, entitled “Essence of Indian Art,” and includes some 200 objects ranging from zaftig amazonian stone dancing girls to delicate miniatures that seem wafted onto paper by perfumed breath.

The fact that these objects are rarely seen outside India is certainly important. The fact the compendium is the last flourish of a yearlong Festival of India and includes hallowed national treasures is surely imposing. The fact that this exhibition has been shown previously only at Paris’ Grande Palais is inescapably impressive.

But the thing that sticks in the mind is that this is an art seemingly grounded in innocence, as if the Hindu and Buddhist traditions at their roots escaped the concept of guilt. There is a buoyancy and freshness uniting every personage here, from the dancing elephant god Ganesha to a blissed-out saint Manikkavachaka. A prancing blue Shiva gorging butterballs recalls early childhood, when every emotion seemed good and right because it was natural and suited the occasion. Nobody said it was wrong. A miniature called “Like Holding Quicksilver” achingly evokes first love. The erotic is intertwined with the beatific, before the discovery that the beloved is an adversary object of guilty lust.

The sense of the idyllic is built into fundamental conceptions of Indian art. Its sculpture is grounded in merry spherical volumes, its painting in weightless, decorative flat patterns of pretty colors, magical intricacies and graceful arabesques. And all of it is literally dramatized by an unusual organizational idea behind the show.

Indian scholar B. N. Goswamy grouped the art according to ancient classifications of emotions found in a treatise on the theater that dates back to the beginning of the Christian era in our terms. Called the Natayshastra and written by the venerable Bharata, it divides human emotions into nine groups known as the rasa . The word resonates in meaning, from a basic definition indicating the simple taste of things to a complex formulation pointing to emotional essences that the actor--or artist--must evoke if his work is to be successful.

Part of the fun of this show is reading the catalogue essay, which retains a kind of medieval delight in classification. Here, as among the scholastics of our Middle Ages, the sorting of things is less a rational activity than an incantatory ritual aimed at evoking magical, virtually alchemical essences. It’s just a hoot to detect the Indian scholar’s solemn delight in identifying the main symptom of the successful expression of a rasa . It is horripilation , the tendency of the hairs to stand up on the back of the neck.

In practice, this all means the exhibition is organized according to the vectors of such aesthetic emotions as hasya (the comic sentiment) or bibhatsa (the odious sentiment), rather than in the usual fashion of a linear chronological parade or the encampments of geographical styles.

Purists and rationalists probably have a right to be driven crazy by this arrangement. If it were a European exhibition, we would be seeing, say, a French 19th-Century painting next to a Spanish 16th-Century sculpture next to an American 20th-Century assemblage, just because they all had to do with, say, heroism.

With familiar art, such an arrangement might appear excessively rudimentary. With an art as insistently illusive and exotic as Indian material, the ploy works very well despite inevitable pitfalls of distortion.

For one thing, this emotional compartmentalization is based on an Indian system that is accessible to us and permits the contemplation of the Indian genius. Distinctly, the freshness of their aesthetic essence plays at its absolute best in the rasa of shringara, the erotic sentiment. A universal dream of the poetry of love bodies forth without being either naive or salacious in works like “Loves Longing.” The Indian sensibility plays equally well at the nether end of the rasa scale in shanata, the quiescent sentiment. Here the lyric of worldly love is transformed into the serene otherworldliness of the Buddha.

Everything in between is more familiar to our culture. It is striking to recognize so much of the Christian sensibility in the section called karuna, the pathetic sentiment. A head of the fasting Buddha recalls Donatello and a drawing of an emaciated horse and his groom is like a Grunewald crucifixion. The erotic metaphor is essentially banned from Christian art, which replaces it with compassion.

There are superb individual works in every section, like “Woman and Scorpion,” which is more likely to make us horripilate over its artistic effect than its eroticism. An imaginary beast of the 13th Century is the very spirit of raudra , the furious rasa . The heroic vira sentiment reaches all the way back to 2000 BC for a charioteer as noble as an Etruscan and as magical as a Giacometti. When we get to adbuta-- the sense of the marvelous--it seems almost redundant. This stuff is all pretty marvelous. It consistently does what Western art does only partly. We love realism so much that art can seem to disguise itself as reportage. Indian art never relaxes its sense of wonder and thus remains attached to realities both more fundamental and more transcendent.