Abstracts

Right from its establishment in 1961, the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad attempted to reorient art and design theory and practice away from the legacy of colonial-era arts pedagogies, and toward internationally resonant ideas borrowed from academies such as the German Bauhaus and Ulm School of Design. Techniques to make new products at the NID were joined by crafts documentation endeavors of the kind undertaken by faculty and students at the school even today. During the 1970s and right around the time the NID was proudly publicizing a decade of its achievements, the institute’s critical reception within and beyond the mass media caused the school to restructure its pedagogy from experimental design toward embracing economic developmentalism more centrally. This paper directs attention to archival materials and print media representations that foreground the lively debates on the real and intended meanings and values of design work, and that implicated the NID. These debates involved administrators, faculty, funding body representatives, and intellectuals, all affiliated with the NID in one way or the other. Collectively, they shed light on the efforts to encourage ideal attitudes, values, and behaviors among designers that were in-turn mired in their own problems and contradictions. Some of these problems stemmed from configuring the responsibilities of individual designers and administrators within the structure of the design school as a collectivity. Other issues pertained to differing ideas on the significance of the artist or designer in society at large. The paper suggests how and why scholarly interpretations of the work of artists, artisans, and designers – apart from a recognition of these individuals’ involvement in the making of impressive products or commodities to cater to government or industry – are drawn into ethical issues and questions of value formation and reformulation.

Recent archival research has revealed a symbiotic relationship between international collectors and officials in the Government of India during the quarter century following Independence. During this period, the prices of European and Persian art soared sharply; as a result, many collectors and museums turned their attention to the less costly art of India. At the same time, the newly formed nation was eager to seed prestigious collections worldwide with works of Indian art considered to be of high aesthetic quality, created by artists whose skills equaled those of their western counterparts. Collectors — and the dealers from whom they purchased works of Indian art — relied on scholarly publications to determine quality and importance and to guide the content of their collections. In this presentation I discuss the role of art historical scholarship in the removal of works of art from key sites across India during the 1950s and 1960s and show how that model was followed with respect to the widespread looting and sale of art from sites in Southeast Asia through the early 2000s. Finally, I will show how the same works of scholarship are being used today to support repatriation efforts by governments with new and different agendas.

Are past viewpoints on the sacrality and authenticity of objects, including the built environment, fixed or fluid within cultural contexts and over time? If the latter, what factors impart and impact fluidity, and what does this mean for the ethics of collecting and ownership? The 2022 book Storied Stone: Reframing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s South Indian Temple Hall uses a deep dive into a single ‘object’ to bring new insights to these questions. The book explores the group of 16th century carved granite Vaishnava architectural elements bought in Madurai in 1913 that have been constructed, displayed, and interpreted in Philadelphia’s ‘encyclopedic’ museum for over a century. Through my running narrative supplemented with four specialist essays, the book approaches these architectural elements and their history from many perspectives to weave a thick case study, far beyond provenance research that is usually intended to prove or disprove the legitimacy of ownership. From my internal placement as longtime curator handling India’s arts, my aim in the book and in this talk is to pull back the curtain on museum decision making. By breaching the seemingly monolithic, anonymous barricades of museums as well as temples, we hear a cacophony of voices located at multiple points on intersecting trajectories of time, place, identity, and emotion. How have these voices contributed to the ethical stances on ownership, sacrality, and identity that we hold today?

This paper uses a set of recent affairs centered in the Indian contemporary art world – large and small, consequential, and not – to examine the ways that gossip, defined as speech that is personal, possibly untrue, and about other people, provides the art world a powerful tool for adjudicating its ethical dilemmas. I have previously considered gossip as a crucial archive for tracking the rapid rise of the market in contemporary art in the early 2000s, and for understanding the work around exhibition-making. In so doing, I have intervened in a contemporary art historical discourse that – against the remainder of the discipline – privileges the voices of artists and curators over other actors. I advocate in favor of the careful use of gossip in research methods that require active participation in informal discourse in ways that require the generation of a daily practice of ethical decision-making. In this paper, I consider how gossip functions in the growing critique of art institutions, which has centered on the personal and professional conduct of individual actors as well as institutional practices and is often conducted on social media platforms. The goals of this paper are to establish the role played by informal speech in regulating a largely unregulated social and professional sphere, to identify the ethical challenges faced by the art world, particularly in India, and to open a discussion of how contemporary art historians must grapple with those issues as part of their research and writing.

Shiva Vinadhara (Shiva as the Lord of Music) is one of the many sculptures associated with the now-destroyed goddess temple at Kaveripakkam, Tamil Nadu, India. This form of Shiva, who holds a stringed instrument, was often depicted alongside the Saptamatrika in sculptures from the Deccan at sites such as Ellora and Alampur. Yet, he is missing from the extant Yogini temples in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. What is Vinadhara’s role in the heptad formation of the matrikas? What does his presence in the Tamil Yogini Temple reveal about the sculptures? And what does it reveal about the role of Vinadhara in the temples of Tamil Nadu? This paper explores how and why Vinadhara Shiva came to be associated with the Saptamatrikas in the early medieval period. I propose that the association of Vinadhara Shiva with the Saptamatrikas in Shaivite spaces during this period reflected the contemporary courtly culture, which emphasized the arts of music and dance. Focusing on form and function, I examine various sculptural and textual sources to shed light on the nature of Saptamatrika imagery and worship under the Kalachuris and the Rashtrakutas and their connections with the imagery that flourished in the South, especially the Tamil Yoginis. Lastly, I suggest an alternative reading for the Tamil Yoginis — that they mark the moment of transition between the Saptamatrika tradition, which was highly entrenched within the political and cultural milieu of the early medieval period, and the Yogini cult, which flourished under the esoteric religions of South Asia.

Is it possible to see the trace of artists’ hands in the objects they produce? This paper will explore that possibility by analyzing the sculptures of yoginis surviving from a 9-10th century temple in northern Tamil Nadu. I will pay special attention to features that would fly under the radar, as it were, of iconographic rules or the expertise of religious specialists.

Two Yoginis from the Tamil set now sit in museums where we are curators. We are planning an exhibition (projected for 2027–28) that will reunite these Yoginis and their one-time companions, exploring their thousand-year history from their no-longer-extant temple to their movements within India, to their eventual export and arrival in the museums that steward them today. In this presentation, we will discuss our working ideas for portions of the exhibition that focus on the meanings and functions of the Tamil Yoginis within their original temple. We ask how best can we do this, when so much about this temple remains unknown or even unknowable? How do we help a broad range of audiences — almost none of whom have any familiarity with Yogini goddesses — understand the complexities of these goddesses and the tantric traditions from which they emerged? How can we proactively address challenging responses to the sculptures’ fierce and voluptuous forms — ranging from discomfort to an exoticizing fascination — without over-sanitizing them or inadvertently playing into stereotypes? Since planning began, we have envisioned arranging the Yoginis and Shiva-Vinadhara in a semicircular formation, an installation that will evoke their likely arrangement within their original temple. Other proposed sections of the exhibition will introduce South Asian goddesses and goddess groups, before turning to Yogini temples. Interpretive content will address questions about the Tamil Yoginis’ iconography and artistic forms. Lighting and design will optimize visitors’ experience of the immersive installation. At ACSAA 2024, we welcome discussion that will help further refine these plans.

Moving beyond regional classifications, this paper will examine intersections of artistry and functionality of a selection of silver vessels made between the 1830s-1930s in South Asia (present-day India & Pakistan, Sri Lanka) from the collection of Harish K. Patel, now housed at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. How these vessels were intended to function illuminates market-making for mass production and consumption of both these silverwares as well as the products they reference. Highlighted vignettes will explore not only large-scale production of tea and coffee that was initiated during this period within South Asia, but also shifts to turn-of-the-century mass consumption of claret, punch, Indian pale ale, fruits, sugar, pepper, mustards, and relishes promoted through new processing techniques. The very habitats that made these products successful are illustrated on the vessels. Similarly, the production of railroads, automobiles, diplomatic service, and the messiness of military aspirations and reflections related to the acceleration of global trade will be discussed. How fashionable silver service enhanced the perceived need for all of these items will be forefronted while raising the question of the role of soft-power in the aesthetics of the arts from these regions in this time period.

The preciousness and symbolic importance of silver made it an appropriate material for the creation of objects associated with power and status in India. With access to great amounts of silver due to New World trade and an influx in demand, the manufacture of Indian silver goods grew throughout the 18th to 20th centuries. Indian silversmiths were engaged to create all manner of furniture and objects for elite domestic and foreign patrons. Focusing on testimonials and on examples of royal furniture, this paper will explore the use of silver as a medium of state in India during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will examine how silver objects fulfilled South Asian and European concepts of gifting. We will explore how power is negotiated through imagery, as inventive Indian designers and makers melded indigenous iconographies and decorations with European forms. Finally, we will see how silver objects can be subversive, through our examination of early 20th-century thrones created for the Dungarpur and Mewar courts at the high point of British colonial power in South Asia.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Maharanas of Mewar gifted photographic portraits to and received them from elite visitors to the kingdom, exchanged them with their hosts when they travelled, and bestowed them on subordinates, as formal tokens of favour, friendship, or remembrance. When the presenting of photographic portraits is recorded in the bahidas — the hand-written daily records of the Maharanas — the silver frames that held the photographs are often mentioned. The bahidas refer to the framed photograph as tasvir chandi ka phrem me jadi hui or a photographic portrait fixed in a silver frame. The silver frame thus becomes a significant component in the ritual of gifting, on display when the gift is actually given, but also visible for posterity in the written accounts. The collection of The City Palace Museum, Udaipur — comprising the estate of the erstwhile Maharanas—includes frames with photographs of the Maharanas, probably similar to the ones gifted by them on occasions that are recorded in the bahidas. The collection also comprises a large selection of framed photographs that were given to the Maharanas by such illustrious persons as the Prince of Wales, the King and Queen of Sweden, the Maharajas of Bikaner, Dungarpur, and Kapurthala, and various Viceroys of India during visits to the kingdom. In this paper, I will explore the silver frames as agents in the complex web of relationships the Maharanas were negotiating and the global networks of exchange they were participating in. I will also discuss how identity is visualized and sustained, but also eclipsed via gifted framed photographs.

This paper examines for the first time, a miniature scroll in the Indian manuscripts department at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library), inventoried as “Sanscrit 735”and identified as a Rāmāṣṭaka. The text and its eleven illustrations are displayed on a strip of fine Kashmiri paper, measuring just under a meter in total length and only 5 cm wide, the size testifying to intimate engagement, perhaps use like that of an amulet. This study focuses on the importance of the text in relation to the ‘magic’ use of the scroll. The omnipresence of the text in several fragmented forms including micrography and calligrams visually emphasizes its significance. The invasive, overwhelming, and ultimately illegible text guides the reader beyond the written word, demanding to be read between the lines, to decipher and extract its spiritual meanings. Thus, despite preliminary impressions of ‘naivete,’ determined from the crude, minimalist style of the images and the random nature of the Sanskrit, the scroll in fact reveals great complexity and mystical depth in the apprehension of the powers of the written word as an active force in the physical realm.

Books and their illustrations have been central to the study of the art history and visual culture of South Asia, and therefore to ACSAA, since its very inception. But “book” here has almost exclusively meant hand-copied and illustrated manuscript. At ACSAA it has not meant the printed book, printed either with lithography or movable type (or other more recent digital technologies). Over the course of twenty symposia and forty years, there have been many papers on illustrated hand-copied manuscripts, but only two papers on printed books (in 2013), and both of those on art books. Sonal Khullar’s recent Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia calls on us to bridge the gap between scholarship on illustrated manuscripts and scholarship on printed books. This paper is a first step in that direction. I look at the first two extended book printing enterprises by the Śvetāmbar Jains: the 1874-1900 twenty-three book Āgama Saṅgraha patronized by Rāy Dhanpatisingh Bahādur of Murshidabad and printed variously at nine different printing presses in Calcutta, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Banaras and Murshidabad; and the Prakaraṇ Ratnākar, a sumptuous four-volume collection of Jain texts published by Bhīmsingh Mānak and printed at Nirṇaya Sāgar Press in Bombay. This paper explores the printed books as visual artifacts, looking at features such as font, script, layout, and content, as well as the full-page black-and-white engravings included as frontispieces in several of the volumes. This presentation is an invitation to ACSAA colleagues to include the printed book in their considerations of South Asian art.

Isamu Noguchi, widely considered one of the preeminent sculptors of the twentieth century, wrote in 1949 that visiting the seventh century Pallava site of Mahabalipuram in South India was his “first and most authentic lesson.” Between then and his death in 1988, Noguchi visited India at least ten times. Yet there is little sustained investigation about the nature of this long and deep connection, and the impact it had on the sculptor’s work. The few existing studies on this topic emphasize Noguchi’s interest in the architectural modernity of post-Independence India. However, Noguchi’s photographs, notes, drawings, and letters, provide evidence of a hitherto unexplored aspect of his career. This paper foregrounds Noguchi’s enduring interest in premodern South Asian sculpture. His photographic archive reveals the sculptor’s formal studies of raw, monumental, and often fragmented sculptural forms that he encountered firsthand at Elephanta, Mahabalipuram, Sanchi, and numerous other sites. Through a critical examination of Noguchi’s 35 mm contact sheets, this paper demonstrates the manner in which the sculptor used his camera to attentively study the structural and procedural choices made by anonymous artists of premodern South Asia, which ultimately propelled him to consider new ways of scrutinizing, selecting, and sourcing stone. This paper reconsiders dominant approaches to Noguchi’s oeuvre which have emphasized his creative debt to Constantin Brancusi’s highly polished surfaces. This investigation is supplemented by notes and correspondence that substantiate the sculptor’s evolving philosophy of working in stone which came to be increasingly rooted in the materials and techniques of the past.

A recently-identified archive of photographer Mazher Master traces his photographic practice from the 1940s to the 1970s and from Palanpur, Gujarat, India to Karachi, Pakistan to Ottawa, Canada. It provides critical insights into the landscape of photography in mid-20th century South Asia spanning amateur camera clubs, photo competitions, and popular print media. It shows a photographer engaged with intersecting aesthetic arenas including Pictorialism, photojournalism, industrial and commercial photography. In this paper, I focus on Master’s pictorial photographs, which unarguably constitute the majority of his practice. In the archive, the negatives are neatly organized in small albums marked “Pictorial” in Master’s own handwriting. But what did he mean by “Pictorial” and how exactly did Pictorialism manifest within South Asia? In a 2021 issue of Aperture magazine, Diva Gujral observes that “by the mid-twentieth century, Pictorialism was considered passé in the United States and relegated to the terrain of the amateur. But South Asian practitioners such as J.N. Unwalla, A.L. Syed, and [O.P.] Sharma in India, along with Lionel Wendt in Sri Lanka, kept the style alive.” It is no coincidence that Mazher Master was a student of A.L. Syed’s while Syed served as official photographer to the Maharaja of Palanpur. What does it mean for an aesthetic style to inhabit a colonial space? How does it take on new urgencies and meanings to speak to generations of photographers living at a time of profound political and social change? In this paper I use Mazher Master’s work to explore the ways Pictorialism, an aesthetic language meant to embody self-expression and an individual’s unique view of the world, may have been aligned and even played a generative role in the spirit of anti-colonial resistance and the desire for self-governance. I also consider the nature of photography’s archive and how archives from the geo-imaginary of Asia demand a rethinking of received photo histories.

In the summer of 1964, the Asia House Gallery hosted an exhibition entitled “The Art of Nepal” displaying a selection of more than hundred religious artefacts curated by Dr. Stella Kramrisch. The catalog for the exhibition claimed to offer a pioneering statement on Nepali art historiography to a world unbeknownst of its aesthetic ingenuity. In this paper, I engage with art historian Caroline Jones’ notion of catalogs as “discursive apparatus” to articulate a critical exhibition history of mid-twentieth century Panchayati cultural politics of Nepali nation-building. The Panchayat regime (1960-1990) is marked by a direct rule of absolute Hindu monarchy who dissolved a democratically elected government consolidated at the cusp of a global decolonial non-aligned movement. This paper explores the circuitous worlds of institution building and international display regimes that set an assemblage of sovereign and scared bodies into motion. I draw from historian Carol Breckenridge’s notion of “diplomatic mobilities” to trace sovereign body politics of monarchy and museum-objects as a series of exhibitions of Nepali artefacts that are held in various museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, University Art Museum – Texas, and Museum of Fine Arts – Boston in the United States between 1960s-1970s. Methodologically, I examine the catalogs produced during these exhibitions as a generative archival site wherein state and museum practices become folded into a political project of imagining cultural histories. In doing so, I situate both nation-states and museums as ideologically fraught institutions embedded within regimes of power that govern processes of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption.

The lack of any depicted body of the Buddha during the centuries before the common era is an extraordinary innovation by the artists of South Asia. This paper seeks to move beyond aniconism as a way to analyze this period and argues that narrative visual signs of the Buddha are rooted in a preexisting world of signs. The perception of the Buddha’s absence was of great significance for these artists, and monastics considered this to be crucial for worshipers at the time. I make the case that this visual mode did not suddenly emerge in stone but develops within a preexisting world of signs enmeshed in ancient systems of knowledge production in South Asia, which is in part exemplified by ancient punch-marked coins and the omens of the early astral traditions, and the social roles of their usages.

Within cave 23 at the monastic caves of Pandavleni, Nāsik (carved ca. sixth century CE), we find the core of an early Buddhist mandala in stone relief. When compared with roughly contemporaneous tantric ritual manuals, we can easily recognize depictions of the lotus and vajra mantra families (kulas) here. Texts describe the male and female deities in each grouping as earthly emanations of their kula leaders, Avalokiteśvara and Vajrapāṇi. Differing in style from Nāsik and likely of an earlier sixth-century date, a triad panel carved at nearby Kānherī consists of two female figures flanking Avalokiteśvara and equal to him in scale. Scholars have described these so-called “consorts” as Tārā and Bhṛkuṭī, but have not addressed the goddesses’ functions as mantra deities of the lotus family, and thus Avalokiteśvara’s emanations. Quasi-circular assemblages (in Kānherī caves 67 and 90 respectively), carved in close proximity to the triad panels, appear to represent early mandalas. Both panel-types (triad and mandala) reflect semiotic innovations through the artists’ augmentation of two ubiquitous western Deccan image-types to include goddesses. Their specific positioning within each cave must also be considered. Because the Kānherī panels differ markedly from those at Nāsik, how might they be productively interpreted in connection with the ritual developments visualized there? How are these likely-earlier compositions symbolically encoded? While acknowledging the slippage between texts and on-the-ground practice, signs of a ritual world concerned with earthly bodhisattva manifestations nonetheless emerge in the art forms.

Two under-interpreted terracotta figurines are on display at the Sigiriya site museum in Sri Lanka. They were excavated in the 1980s from site B11, a monastic cave within the archaeological garden complex, which also contained a carved drip ledge, low stone wall, and remains of a brick stupa-like structure. Other nearby features, including seats, tree shrines, and cells, date this monastic complex to CE 7th-10th centuries. Thus, these terracotta figurines are fairly well-dated when contrasted with other terracotta figural finds from nearby regional settlement surveys. Their fine finish differentiates the Sigiriya apsara figures, however, from the majority of similar deposits. One interpretation presumes them souvenirs, symbols of the place, not the more familiar mnemonic ritual deposits at Buddhist sites. Art historians have explored South Asian terracotta production as vernacular artisanal and ritual Buddhist practices. Both interpretations contribute to my understanding of this Sri Lankan case. My paper will reflect upon the Sigiriya terracotta figures via an architectural treatise and contextual archaeological data to depict them in a new way – as what I call ‘earthen water.’ Potters moved the Sigiriya apsara figures from the earth, opening space for speculation about wet clay and baked form. Quickened by their materiality, they are also icons and indexes of a critical landscape practice supporting the rice paddy production of the region. I will suggest that such terracotta figurines indicate ecological practices relating rainwater and its collection to the materials and iconographies of the apsara, in this case applied to terracotta deposits within the landscape of a once-famous place.

Between 1819-1829, the Gujarati religious leader Sahajanand Swami (1781-1830), popularly known as “Swaminarayan,” traveled around Gujarat expounding his new variation of Vaishnava Hindu theology. He moved around delivering hundreds of discourses that were recorded and compiled by his foremost devotees into the Vachanamrut, the sect’s primary text. This text vividly describes the settings of each gathering, including how Swaminarayan was dressed and adorned, and where and when each gathering was assembled. Additionally, the text includes instructions by Swaminarayan on how to worship his preferred forms of Vaishnava divinity, including Krishna, Vasudeva, and Nar-Narayan. Swaminarayan also directed followers how to worship him as a self-manifest form of God, commissioning devotee artisans to produce small votive prints on paper and cloth. Known as prasadi, or a gift from God, these were distributed to his devotees as a proselytizing and educational tool and were treated with reverence. Some prints were made with woodblocks, but more remarkable are those made with metal-plate printing, a technology which was not previously known in western India and possibly derived from imported Dutch sources, as English printing had yet to appear in this area of western India. While Swaminarayan made use of a non-indigenous technology, however, the visual imagery of these prints is primarily derived from such local sources as Gujarati wall-painting and local Hindu practices. These prints are unique in their new technology, their materiality, the innovative uses to which they were put, and the inventiveness of using these materials to advertise Swaminarayan’s fledgling Vaishnava sect.

Krishnahari Das (Kristo Hurry Doss) was a prolific maker of lithographs in 19th century Bengal. Formally trained at the Government School of Art, he made a career as an illustrator, depicting plants in the Annals of the Royal Botanic Gardens, drawing seashells for the Geological Survey of India, and producing illustrations for books by the musicologist Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840-1914). Particularly intriguing are his illustrations for Tagore’s 1880 book The Ten Principal Avataras of the Hindus, a Short History of Each Incarnation and Directions for the Representation of the Murtis as Tableaux Vivants. Loftily dedicated to the Governor General on the occasion of anniversary of Queen Victoria’s “Proclamation Durbar,” the book was intended to assist Bengalis in the creation of tableaux vivant of Vishnu’s avatars in their homes. In addition to lithographic images of the avatars, the book contains instructions on creating convincing tableaux, as well as Sanskrit texts, mythological stories, and musical compositions for each avatar. This paper examines Krishnahari Das’ pre-Raja Ravi Varma lithographic depictions of Hindu gods in the context of Tagore’s book and his broader project to update and elevate a social and cultural space for the coming together of drama, art, music, and poetry in modern Bengal.

The Chhatar Mahal at Bikaner’s Junagarh Fort makes an unprecedented and extensive reuse of British blue-and-white ceramics as ornamentation. Dinner plates broken into flat, rectilinear tiles and oval drainers that were once part of serving platters cover the entire four walls of the rooftop pavilion built by Maharaja Dungar Singh (r. 1872-1887). While the cobalt blue palette immediately evokes hand-painted Chinese porcelain, the remarkable quantities of the blue and-white ware and their varied patterns, ranging from the popular Willow pattern to even views of Indian monuments based on the aquatints of Thomas and William Daniell, were in fact the product of industrialized technology. Developed in Staffordshire in the mid-eighteenth century, the technique of transferring copperplate engraving to the ceramic body allowed the mass production and consumption of affordable yet appealing ceramics in endless varieties of blue-and-white patterns. Taking the Chhatar Mahal as a point of departure, I explore how the design and materiality of British transferware acquired new meaning and purpose in nineteenth-century India. At the Chhatar Mahal, the arrangement of the ceramics set into cabinet-like niches implies the intention of display in addition to architectural ornamentation, referencing at once the Mughal chini khana and European “China rooms” – spaces of prestige, sovereignty, and cosmopolitanism. I argue that such reuse of contemporaneous British ceramics allowed the Indian prince, expected to be “traditional” yet “modern” under the Raj, mediate and negotiate these contradictory demands and identities.

Built by the industrialist Gyansham Das Birla and inaugurated by Gandhi, the Laskhmi-Narayan temple (1933-1939) in New Delhi articulated a bold vision of religious and cultural pluralism in which all could worship together regardless of caste. Arguably the first-ever sarvajanak mandir (“temple of the people”), it was designed by Sris Chandra Chatterjee, a staunch Congress Party member and a prime advocate for the creation of a modern “national” style of architecture by drawing together diverse references from India’s archaeological past. The Lakshmi-Narayan temple exemplifies his influential revivalist vision, bringing together diverse regional forms and religious references into a medieval structural framework. A decade after its creation, the temple was hailed in the international press as “a modern version of ancient temple architecture” inspired by a combination of Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh spaces of worship. This paper argues that this revivalist vision was also deeply indebted to colonial-era visual technologies by focusing on the murals and sculptural details in the gardens surrounding the main temple. Together these interweave mythology with empirical histories, and collapsing antiquity with modernity, by bringing together traditional Indic modes of representation (e.g., processional friezes) with forms of visual documentation associated with British archaeological surveys and pictorial conventions of history painting popularized by Ravi Varma and popular presses that would resonate particularly with educated Indian audiences. In producing an eclectic vision of India’s past, significantly situated within the capital city, the temple’s visual program reveals a fundamental entanglement of modernity with colonial epistemologies that still persists today.

In 2017, thousands of archaeological objects were transferred from the colonial-era Patna Museum to the new Bihar Museum for the inauguration of the recently completed history galleries. Orchestrated by the state government, a transfer of archaeological remains of this scale had not been seen since the Partition of India in 1947. As a case study of postcolonial engagements with archaeological histories, the Bihar Museum highlights the tension between authoritarian efforts to control heritage at national and regional levels and the desire of local communities to define their own narratives. While news outlets have deemed this relocation of artefacts as a rupture in the history of Bihari heritage and identity formation, I argue that it is continuous with a longer tradition of museum building and collecting practices long present within the region. Since the 1950’s, museum-making efforts in Bihar have led both to the formation of numerous district and site museums, and to the conversion of private collections into state-governed museums. The Bihar Museum thus brings together an already existing movement of placemaking and regional identity formation with hypernationalist claims to Indic civilizational history, the global Buddhist revivalist movement as well as UNESCO’s authoritarian heritage discourse present in the inscription of historical sites of Bihar into its World Heritage List. Combining field observations with photo-documentation and analysis of museum accession registers, I reposition the Bihar Museum within a longer history of museology in postcolonial India and situate public discourses of rupture and continuity within the politics of the present-day.

A key feature of twentieth-century Hindu devotionalism has been the central role played by mass-produced religious prints, known as God-posters, calendar-prints, and bazaar art. The proliferation of these prints has made a profound impact on Hindu visuality and on religious practices over the past one and a half centuries, as scholars like Smith, Inglis, Pinney, Uberoi, Jain, and others have documented. But where did this form of popular imagery originate? Best known is the major role played by Ravi Varma and the press he founded in 1894 near Bombay. He was certainly the most influential of all God-print artists, in terms of the dissemination and impact his renderings of Hindu deities and myths have made on Indian viewers and on later print-artists. Yet he was not the first: in Maharashtra and especially in Calcutta, there were earlier practitioners and presses. Compared with those of Ravi Varma, these prints are far less well-known. Working with two print collectors (Mark Baron and Elise Boisante), I have been studying the earliest prints produced in Calcutta in the second half of the nineteenth century. These early prints demonstrate unusual experimentation with various artistic media and printing technologies. They reflect a distinctive Bengali regional iconography, quite distinct from the more intentionally pan-Indian imagery promulgated by Ravi Varma and the twentieth century print industry. These prints also raise important questions about reception and ritual deployment of two-dimensional prints, available for the first time to Hindu consumers on a broad basis.

The essay explores how non-textual, physical constructs of space, objects, and image—what I refer to as “materiality”—mediated bhakti through the dual pursuits of personal practice and collective organization in the Svāminārāyaṇa community. It historically demonstrates how materiality was deserving of personal worship while it also strengthened the institutional community in western India. These physical materials represented more than the visual effects of sanctification from their association with the founder Sahajānanda; they were non-textual records of the past. The nineteenth-century framework generated a historically-oriented perception colored by an enchanted lens. The essay then traces materiality’s conditions and relationship to devotion into the twenty-first century. It discloses the passionate but unobvious ways that branches of the expanded Svāminārāyaṇa tradition pursue materiality for their institutional sustenance. By invoking the past two centuries later, materiality signifies unprecedented authority. I analyze the tremendous undertaking of the 2011, Ahmedabad Gādī’s, Shree Swaminarayan Museum’s archiving of the early community’s materiality. It reveals how interpretations of materiality and its audiences shifted to accommodate secular perspectives. Compounded in its claims, the Museum allowed the Gādī to achieve distinction on its strength of the past, and to signal a complex kind of authority, internal and external, to the tradition. The history of materiality’s orientation and production, distribution and afterlife, makes vividly apparent that its sustained appeal over two centuries rests on a value it explicitly embodies but often implicitly expresses: an intertwined notion of devotion and history.

In the academic fields of comparative literature and religious studies, the life and words of Kabīr, one of the most popular devotional poets of South Asia, have been translated and examined at length. However, scholarship has predominantly focused on Kabīr using Hindi sources, while a vast reservoir of Indo-Persian primary material remains untapped. Additionally, there are no studies dedicated to early modern depictions of Kabīr as found in north Indian schools of miniature painting. This oversight is a curious one given that Kabīr and his son Kamal were popular subjects in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Mughal painting. Using an interdisciplinary approach, my essay specifically aims to investigate the hitherto overlooked half of his legacy: the reception of Kabīr in early-modern Muslim India. In the essay, I examine artworks from north India made for Muslim patrons, as well as Persian literature—including hagiography and poetry—written by members of Indo-Sufi orders. Using these key visual and literary primary sources, I discuss how one of the most important Indic devotional poets was understood and imagined within the framework of Islamic devotional culture. Some overarching questions central to the essay are: Why Muslim communities cared so much about Kabīr? And what was the role of his illusive son Kamal?

In 2007, a Hindu temple opened in Columbus (Delaware), Ohio, for the Tamil guru Paramahamsa Nityananda, who had recently won world-wide recognition through his retreat courses in Life Bliss Meditation and Nithya Yoga in India and abroad. During my initial tour, the local Indian donor of the temple explained to me how Nityananda had finalized the carving of the images in worship at this temple, even coming to the U.S. to inaugurate them and those found at his main U.S. temple-ashram in Los Angeles (Montclaire). Unusually, most of the sculpted images at Nityananda’s temples have his oval face and distinctive square-jawline, suggesting they are divine self-portraits of him in a Chola-esque style. The main image in worship at Nityananda’s temples today is a large stone Shiva with the Goddess Parvati seated on his lap that substantiate the guru’s own divinity by being named as “Anandeshvara and Anandeshvari” while other divinities go by “Ananda Ganesh” and “Ananda Murugan,” and a separate guru picture or sculpture of Nityananda appears in the cross-legged posture of Dakshinamurti (Shiva as the ‘Southern Sage’) that draws out iconographic parallels to Nityananda’s own appearance and life story. In addition, numerous promotional videos of Nityananda dressed as Shiva, Murugan, or Ardhanarishvara, sometimes shooting mandalas and luminous rays (i.e., “cosmic energy”) from his body, appear online that define his self-proclaimed divinity through modern visual medias. As a consequence, this paper addresses Nityananda’s guru bhakti conveyed through his imagery and philosophy of self-divinization that invigorate the Hindu tradition through his materialized reuse of Tamil portraiture’s visual multiplicity. 

The paper presents novel research findings in the ancient estuary of the Ulhas River in Konkan, shedding light on the late development of Buddhist centers at Sopara, Kanheri, and Kalyan. Sopara, an ancient port dating back to the time of Ashoka Maurya, became a legendary Buddhist site with its early stupa reconsecrated in the 8th-9th century, and the renowned Sandalwood vihara which found replication across South-East Asia. Kanheri, a Buddhist cave monastery, gained prominence as a leading center for tantric training, establishing numerous North Indian and Himalayan connections that persisted until the 11th century. Kalyan, an ancient emporium, with its sacred center at Lonad, flourished throughout the 11th century with its Buddhist and Shaiva centers. The presentation will map the growth of these sites in relation to one another thanks to the reconstruction of the ancient fluvial landscape that enhanced their interconnectedness. Emphasis will be placed on their distinctive patronage base, long-distance connections, and their pivotal role in shaping networks of religious transmission. The presentation particularly delves into the later phases of Buddhist activity in the region (8th-11th c.), hitherto unexplored, offering a fresh viewpoint into the late development of Buddhism in South Asia.

On temples of the Bhonsles of Nagpur, a branch of the Marāṭha polity established around 1739 in eastern Maharashtra, representations of saṃnyāsīs and sādhus are decidedly popular. This reflects a wider trend that becomes especially visible in temple architecture and iconography from the sixteenth century onward, when the term “Dasasnāmī” (as well as “Nāth” and other ascetic order names) appear in the literature; it is from this time that these orders emerge in a form that is recognizable to us. The political context of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spurred the formation of a consciously Hindu identity among saṃnyāsīs and yogis and the amalgamation of ascetic lineages into the Dasasnāmī orders. The crystallization of Dasasnāmī saṃnyāsī identity and their increasingly visible and significant role in secular matters as well as spiritual ones correlates with an increase in the appearance of saṃnyāsīs, especially in the performance of haṭha yoga, in temple architecture. In surviving Bhonsle temples carvings of saṃnyāsīs in a variety of yogic postures occur widely. This paper explores the iconography of religious men in the temples of the Bhonsles of Nagpur from the period between 1772-1842, when Bhonsle rule was at its height. In these temples, images of ascetics, yogis, and gurus often supersede in number those of the gods themselves and are more visible in their placement. I consider the role of holy men in Bhonsle temples, in relation to the role of saṃnyāsīs and yogis in economic and political life of the Nagpur state.

During the late sixteenth century, the Adil Shahi court in Bijapur produced visually stunning full-page paintings of powerful female Hindu goddesses and ascetics, or Yoginis, that have since become iconic for symbolizing the multiple religious practices in Indo- Islamic courts. Yoginis were known to Persian and Arabic readers from the fourteenth century due to the popularity of translations of Sanskrit texts on Yoga and Tantric practices. However, when Bijapur’s Yogini portraits entered contemporary royal Mughal and Qutb Shahi ateliers, album makers pasted verses around them, transforming their meaning completely; instead of citing Persian Yogic texts, they hand-picked canonical Persian poetry which likened the Yoginis to beloveds according to Perso-Islamic ideals. Not only were calligraphed lines by tenth-century Gorgani, twelfth-century Onsori, and at least four well-known Timurid poets collaged around these paintings, the chosen verses responded to the Yoginis’ specific physical features; her attenuated form, rosy cheeks, perfumed mouth, and curled locks were praised using stock Persian allegories. Such allegorical descriptions turned attention away from the Yoginis’ potency, which had been the thrust of tantric and yogic texts, toward her physical beauty. Through word-image analysis across Yogini portraits and comparable Safavid album pages depicting male youths, I show how Mughal and Deccan courts used canonical poetic texts to meet the challenge of a novel image that lay outside the Perso-Islamic vocabulary and produced a “type” of the beautiful beloved that was specific to early modern South Asia.

The 1743 illustrated manuscript of Nusrati’s 1657 Gulshan-i Ishq at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is considered a masterpiece of eighteenth-century Deccan painting. It is also acknowledged as a copy of an earlier (circa 1710) manuscript, of which several dispersed folios survive in different institutions. What has gone unnoticed is that an undated manuscript of a second Dakhni romance, the 1655 Phulban of Ibn Nishati, has 16 illustrations which are almost identical in composition to illustrations in the Philadelphia Gulshan. Furthermore, a nineteenth-century illustrated Gulshan held in the Free Library of Philadelphia is almost identical to an undated Gulshan in the British Library. While their execution is rougher, the compositions of these manuscripts’ illustrations, and the scenes selected for illustration, demonstrate a clear debt to the Gulshan-Phulban model. My paper offers several hypotheses for conceptualizing the relationship between these manuscripts. I also situate the copying of set-piece illustrations within the proliferation of shared generic plot devices in the Dakhni romance genre. I suggest that the patron-centric model often used to analyze Mughal and Deccan sultanate cultural production (both vernacular romances and illustrated manuscripts) is inadequate for explaining this phenomenon and propose employing comparative cases from standardized illustrated manuscripts elsewhere in the Islamic world, alongside Sheldon Pollock’s concept of “script mercantilism.” I argue that rather than a court context dictating the form of a manuscript, the “a la carte” workshop-produced manuscript served to standardize modes of textual consumption across space, training reader-viewers to anticipate and respond to the romance genre’s conventions.

From a certain distance it may seem perfectly obvious why we witness a sudden efflorescence of Sursagar paintings in Udaipur from 1670-1730. It was then—1672—that Shri Nathji, fleeing Braj, found protection from Maharana Raj Singh of Mewar and settled in the town later to be renamed Nathdvara. Surdas was the most important of the principal eight poets (astachap) of the Pushtimarg. No wonder a string of Sursagar paintings emerges at nearby Udaipur in just this period, including images of Krishna Govardhandhari. But there are huge problems. Maharana Raj Singh did take initiation from the Vallabhites, but how exclusive an affiliation was this? The earliest image of a Maharana worshiping Shri Nathji seems to come a century later: Maharana Ari Singh II (r. 1762 to 1782). Furthermore, it is only in about 1730 that we have Udaipuri paintings of the astachap poets worshiping Govardhannathji, and Surdas is not shown among extant paintings in this set. Many Sursagar paintings from Udaipur do reveal the importance of the Govardhandhari motif, but the image is hardly of the Vallabhite Shri Nathji. Thus, from a painting point of view—and perhaps from a textual point of view as well—Surdas appears even more important in Udaipur than at Nathdvara. Any conflation of these two painterly traditions suggesting the newly Mewar-based Pushtimarg was responsible for Udaipur’s Sursagar fascination seems a pious fiction, like the association of Surdas with Vallabha in the first place. We must rethink.

In the 1580s, the Mughal emperor Akbar established an institution of imperial discipleship, or muridi (later rather misleadingly labeled the Divine Faith, or Din-i-Ilahi), and inducted the highest- ranking members of his court into its elite ranks. Though he continued to identify as Sunni and practice Muslim customs, Akbar began to venerate the sun publicly along with members of his muridi. Referencing pre-existing Hindu, Sufi, and Parsi rites, solar veneration seems to have been chosen by Akbar as a form of ceremonial expression for the muridi precisely because of its widespread appeal amid a spiritually diverse populace. The existence of multiple portraits of Akbar engaging in the act of sun worship speaks to the emperor’s personal investment in this public performance of inclusivity and religious tolerance. This paper will demonstrate that European prints collected at the Mughal court provided important visual models for artists crafting these images of solar veneration. Situating this group of portraits within the cultural and political climate of the day, this talk will explore Akbar’s motivations in performing solar rites and documenting them in painted form as well as the role these portraits played in the construction of Akbar’s public persona.

The Mughal painter Daulat was commissioned by Emperor Jahangir in 1609-10 to produce a self-portrait on the colophon page of Emperor Akbar’s celebrated manuscript of the Khamsa of Nizami, originally completed in 1595. Included in Daulat’s painting was a portrait of the esteemed calligrapher ‘Abd al-Rahim Haravi, who was the scribe of the manuscript. My paper interrogates the complex engagements of Daulat’s double portrait with broader contemporary Persianate artistic discourses as well as with concerns around identity and alterity specific to the Mughal court. Daulat structured his Self-portrait with ‘Abd al-Rahim Haravi, I argue, around the “Theory of the Two Qalams”, a construct developed in 1543-4 by the Safavid Iranian poet ‘Abdi Beg Shirazi. ‘Abdi Beg’s theory formulated common origins for calligraphy and painting through their shared instrument, namely the qalam (brush/pen), and was aimed to bestow the great cultural prestige enjoyed by the former form of art on the latter. Daulat’s painting, by depicting the two artists at work using a common set of tools and in a shared space, rigorously embraces and defends the Theory of the Two Qalams, while at the same time confronting the Safavid poet’s idealized construct with the social and cultural asymmetries governing the relations among the various members of the Mughal imperial workshops. As the artist asserts the equivalence of painting and calligraphy, I contend, at the same time he calls for equality between the locally born Indian and the favored émigré members of the court, signaled in the painting in an ambiguous, shifting spatial structure and an uneven communicative relationship between the two portrayed figures.

Despite the horror of his invasion of Delhi in 1739, Nādir Shāh (r.1736–1747) was commemorated in dozens of portraits from across the Indian subcontinent. Contemporary depictions of the Iranian conqueror align with his empire-building rhetoric and the new aesthetic of his Indo-Persian realm. The vast majority, however, were created posthumously from a handful of earlier prototypes. Demand continued among local patrons and East India Company officials well into the nineteenth century. Even more curious is the fact that many of the Iranian invader’s representations were inserted into genealogical series of Mughal emperors, including painting albums and portrait miniature sets, and remarkably, they are prioritized through various visual means. But Nādir did not stay to rule India; he reinstalled Muhammad Shah (r.1717–1748) on the throne under his suzerainty and left Delhi after just two months. Yet, in painting, he was thrust into the Mughal lineage. The foreign body was, borrowing a phrase and concept from Holly Shaffer, “grafted” onto the dynastic tree of the conquered land. The paper explores the motivations behind this singular phenomenon. It focuses on the role of the British in popularizing Nādir’s image, not only in painting but also in biographical writing. It asks whether they saw an opportunity in constructing a lineage of foreign “saviors” as a build-up to their own conquest. The study puts forward a novel consideration of Nādir’s Indian portraits as a measure of the colonial agenda and offers a new art historical perspective on the formative period of British India.

In this paper, I explore the reception of paintings amongst intellectuals in nineteenth century Delhi. Through a study of the commentary on Delhi’s artists in the Asar al Sanadid, an Urdu language printed and illustrated publication authored by Sayyid Ahmad Khan in 1847 in tandem with other commentaries by European officials and visitors, the paper sketches a conceptual framework within which paintings were commissioned, collected, replicated, and circulated in Delhi’s public sphere. At the core, the paper suggests, was an approach to style that underpinned the perception of Delhi’s artists as masters of a distinct Delhi qalam. Analyzing artist biographies in parallel with the painted archive, the paper widens the scope of Late Mughal Art as an inclusive category that folded within it, both the courtly and commercial elements of artistic production.