What is the Purpose of the arts?

The most likely answer is :

The arts offer beauty and pleasure. They make life worth living.

However, to an Indian mind, the arts perform a much more important function. A function that the late statesman-scholar C. Rajagopalachari, lovingly called Rajaji, described so well:

Man is endowed by nature with the senses. Man has the Power to derive pleasure from the senses. This power tends to corrupt him. Man like other animals is inclined to overdo the use of his senses. There are two ways in which this power in a man is controlled so that over indulgence does not cause harm to himself or others.

Rajaji says the first is the Government that acts as an external restraint with its law. The total good sense is made to prevail over individual appetite and that good sense takes the shape of the Government. The other is Culture that acts through, tradition, religious belief, literature and education. Culture acts silently and subtly to make people think they obey of their own free will and it gives them a sense of pride in good behavior.

The fine arts, music, dance, painting and entertainments of many kinds are all cultural means, not merely to give pleasure, but operate to control and limit indulgence in sensual pleasures. The refined means of satisfying the various appetites train the senses to find enjoyment without over indulgence or indulgence in crude forms. The fine arts may be looked upon thus as instruments of restraint. They shape persons inclined to excessive indulgence into cultured men and women. Culture is the habit of successful self-control, concludes Rajaji.

We also know that to the Indian mind, the highest forms of art are always inextricably interwoven with the idea of God.