Machine summary:
THE LOTUS AND THE ROSE SOME INFLUENCES OF INDIAN ART ON EUROPE AMOENS' famous poem describing the discovery of India by Europe, "The Lusiad," has been thus eulogised by an enthusiasticBritish commentator : " The grandest subject it is which the worldhas ever beheld.
For in spite of the early foreign enthusiasts, a great change has come over the spirit of the commentators, who, if they concede that the Argonauts of the six• teenth century did indeed discover a new Garden of the Hesperides in India, and abstract therefrom another Golden Fleece, point out that they also imported into that earthly paradise the dragon known as " Western Influence "I And although, like its amiable prototype in the Hellenic Myth, this monster has figured as the guardian of the.
" IL is rather the purpose of this essay to examine something of the other side of the picture, some of the cultural, romantic, and artist1c reactions of Europe to its Indian discoveries, from those Medias• val times when India was, for Western adventurers, as attractive as the magnetic island which drew all vessels to its rocks, and nearly proved the destruction pf that voracious navigator, Es-Sindabad of the Sea !
1 If Sir Thomas, as we cannot doubt from his own account, learnt about art from jchangir, his experience symbolised the influence of the India of the period upon Europe.
as though testi• fying with its last breath to the long reality of the Mogul's lavish bequest of art and beauty, not only to India, but to the World !