I

• The term culture has multiple meanings, and it is important to understand the Indian perspective on culture to explore the relationship between art and culture.
• In traditional India, art was considered a means of culturing one’s own self, by disciplining, purifying, and refining senses, sensibilities, feelings, emotions, perceptions, and responses to various aspects of life.
• Culture in the English language has several connotations, leading to imprecision and confusion in its usage.
• The term culture is used by anthropologists when discussing primitive, tribal, or simple communities, and in biological contexts like agriculture, sericulture, and blood culture.
• It’s not always clear whether the concept of culture in these contexts is the same across all usages.
• T.S. Eliot in his Notes towards the definition of Culture (1948) discussed the confusion of the term culture post-World War II, especially regarding its usage in European culture and its emotional connotations.
• Eliot identified that in certain instances like UNESCO, the term culture was misused as an emotional stimulant or anaesthetic, leading to confusion.
• The UNESCO definition of culture uses education, science, and culture together, which can be problematic as these are mutually exclusive concepts in logical construction.
• Many governments, including in India, have ministries of education, science, and culture, creating further ambiguity as the boundaries between these domains are unclear and often arbitrary.
• In traditional India, gatherings like pandita-sammelanas, kavi sammelanas, and samgita-sammelanas were held, but they were not labeled as cultural gatherings as they are today.
• Cultural conferences and functions in contemporary India are often focused on art, poetry, music, dance, drama, and intellectual debates, and are regarded as manifestations or evidences of culture.
• In contemporary Indian society, a person regarded as cultured is someone who is urbane, refined, sophisticated, and sensitive in response to people, events, and situations.
• The term culture in India is used in different connotations and these meanings are not always precise.
• It is essential to explore the traditional Indian concepts of culture, especially in ancient and medieval languages, to understand their connotations and usages over time.
• Understanding the traditional Indian sense of culture will clarify whether the English term aligns with the Indian concept and how art serves as a means or articulation of culture.

II

• The oldest Vedic Sanskrit word for culture is hyshți, found as early as the Atharvaveda.
• Hyshți is derived from the root kysh, meaning to cultivate, and refers both to the act and the result of cultivation.
• Another word for culture, Samskrti, also appears in the Aitareya Brahmana and connotes improvement of one’s own self and the cultivation of one’s life.
• Krshți, meaning agriculture, is directly related to the cultivation of fields and indirectly to the cultivation of life.
• The English word culture and the German kultur are derived from Latin cult, meaning cultivation, initially used in the context of agriculture, but later extended to the cultivation of one’s life.
• The term culture in modern contexts such as agriculture, sericulture, fissiculture, and blood-culture retains its meaning of cultivation to increase physical quantity, aiming to multiply the species or genus.
• In civilization, culturing aims not only at multiplication but at the improvement of the cultivated species, like the transformation of wild fruits and vegetables into edible, nourishing foods.
• Culturing improves the potency of seeds, grains, and even blood in biological contexts, and also involves improvement in size, shape, form, and quality.
• Improvement through culturing requires the intervention of human consciousness, skill, knowledge, and experience, beyond natural processes.
• In Euro-Aryan and Indo-Aryan languages, culture and krshți are used to indicate the bio-physical improvement of both physical objects and human life.
• By early stages of civilization, people in both Europe and India recognized that humans could improve themselvesphysically, emotionally, intellectually, ethically, and spiritually through cultivation.
• This extended sense of culture is used in ancient Greece, Rome, and traditional India, where people practiced the culture of the body, mind, religious life, and spiritual life.
• Medieval Christian scholasticism and traditional early and medieval India understood culture as the cultivation of the soul.
• In Bengal, a mid-eighteenth-century poet-saint, Ramaprasāda, wrote about the cultivation of the human soul, urging individuals to improve their inner life.
• The term samskara in Sanskrit, meaning an act to improve something, refers to the process of self-cultivation and the improvement of human life.
• Samskṛti, derived from samskara, refers to the product of the act of self-cultivation and corresponds to culture in European languages.
• The term samskrti is not widely used in early Sanskrit and Sanskritic languages, but is more common in modern regional languages of northern India and Maharashtra.
• The Aitareya Brahmana passage highlights that art (or silpa) was viewed as a means to improve oneself, i.e., to cultivate one’s life.
• Art in this context includes not just the creation of artifacts, but also procreation, community organization, state-building, and other human activities requiring skill, conscious will, and creativity.
• Culture (or krshți, samskṛti) refers not just to the refinement in art or individual behavior, but in all real-life activitiesinvolving human living.
• The terms krshți, samskṛti, and culture in the Indian context encompass the total arena of life, including all human activity and living, indicating a pervasive and holistic view of culturing.