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Making Kantha, Making Home
"Through richly sensual visual and narrative treatments of textiles, their makers, and their users, Making Kantha, Making Home explores the social worlds created by Bengali kantha that survive from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The first study of colonial-period women's embroidery to situate these objects historically and socially, it brings technique and aesthetic choices into discussion with iconography and regional culture. Kantha typically are created from layers of recycled, soft fabric that are strengthened with running stitches and then further embroidered with colored threads. They have commonly been understood as the work of women, created for domestic use as shawls, b...
Temple to Love
"[A]n excellent analytical study of a sensationally beautiful type of temple. . . . This work is not just art historical but embraces . . . religious studies, anthropology, history, and literature." —Catherine B. Asher "[A]dvances our knowledge of . . . Bengali temple building practices, the complex inter-reliance between religion, state power, and art, and the ways in which Western colonial assumptions have distorted correct interpretation. . . . A splendid book." —Rachel Fell McDermott In the flux created by the Mughal conquest, Hindu landholders of eastern India began to build a spectacularly beautiful new style of brick temple, known as Ratna. This "bejeweled" style combined features of Sultanate mosques and thatched houses, and included second-story rooms conceived as the pleasure grounds of the gods, where Krishna and his beloved Radha could rekindle their passion. Pika Ghosh uses art historical, archaeological, textual, and ethnographic approaches to explore this innovation in the context of its times. Includes 82 stunning black-and-white images of rarely photographed structures. Published in association with the American Institute of Indian Studies
Making Kantha, Making Home
In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use them as shawls, covers, and seating mats. Making Kantha, Making Home explores the social worlds shaped by the Bengali kantha that survive from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first study of colonial-period women’s embroidery that situates these objects historically and socially, Pika Ghosh brings technique and aesthetic choices into discussion with iconography and regional culture. Ghosh uses ethnographic and archival research, inscriptions, and images to locate embroiderers’ work within domestic networks and to show how imagery from poetry, drama, prints, and watercolors expresses kantha artists’ visual literacy. Affinities with older textile practices include the region’s lucrative maritime trade in embroideries with Europe, Africa, and China. This appraisal of individual objects alongside the people and stories behind the objects’ creation elevates kantha beyond consideration as mere handcraft to recognition as art.
Kantha
This first book-length study on kanthas published outside of South Asia focuses on two premier collections, one assembled by the legendary historian of Indian art, Dr. Stella Kramrisch, the other by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, leading proponents of self-taught art. Created from worn-out garments imaginatively embroidered by women with motifs and tales drawn from a rich regional repertoire, kanthas traditionally were stitched as gifts for births, weddings, and other family occasions. Innovative essays by leading scholars explore the domestic, ritual, and historical contexts of the fascinating quilts in these collections--made between the mid-19th and mid-20th century in what is today Bangladesh and West Bengal, India--and trace their reinterpretation as emblems of national identity and works of art.
The Rama Epic
"Exhibition catalogue for The Rama Epic--recounting the struggle of Prince Rama to defeat a powerful demonic king, rescue his abducted wife and reestablish virtuous order in the world. The epic has been a prime subject for visual and performing arts, literature and religious thought in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia for many centuries. A huge number of artworks of all kinds relating to the Rama legends have been made over the course of 1500 years in a dozen countries. This book illustrates some of the most important episodes involving the four primary characters: the hero, Rama; the heroine, Rama's wife Sita; the ally, Rama's faithful monkey lieutenant Hanuman; and the foe, the ten-headed demon king Ravana. The catalogue tells the story in a new light using more than 130 artworks, ranging from paintings to puppets to decorative arts to contemporary works to ephemera, inviting readers to find echoes of their own experiences in the stories and dilemmas of each of the characters"--
Sacred Traces
In his novel Kim, in which a Tibetan pilgrim seeks to visit important Buddhist sites in India, Rudyard Kipling reveals the nineteenth-century fascination with the discovery of the importance of Buddhism in India's past. Janice Leoshko, a scholar of South Asian Buddhist art uses Kipling's account and those of other western writers to offer new insight into the priorities underlying nineteenth-century studies of Buddhist art in India. In the absence of written records, the first explorations of Buddhist sites were often guided by accounts of Chinese pilgrims. They had journeyed to India more than a thousand years earlier in search of sacred traces of the Buddha, the places where he lived, obtained enlightenment, taught and finally passed into nirvana. The British explorers, however, had other interests besides the religion itself. They were motivated by concerns tied to the growing British control of the subcontinent. Building on earlier interventions, Janice Leoshko examines this history of nineteenth-century exploration in order to illuminate how early concerns shaped the way Buddhist art has been studied in the West and presented in its museums.
Nation, Region, Modernity
This volume explores the Indian artist, K. Venkatappa’s life (1886–1965), his works and the political and cultural contexts that influenced and inspired his art. It looks at the artist’s style and examines the question of modernity in Indian art through the interstices of the regional and the national. This richly illustrated book contextualises Venkatappa’s work in the milieu of Calcutta, princely Mysore and later Bangalore in the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when boundaries, horizons, and identities were in great flux. It complicates a unitary history of modern Indian art and, indeed, modernity in colonial India with its engagement with the question of region. The...
The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History
This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions - the museum, the art market - are not only products of colonial legacies but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice - racial, gender, social, environmental, res...
Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition
The authors in this volume explore Indo-Muslim cultures developing in South Asia from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, sharing central themes but showing significant contextual variations by time and place. They focus a much-needed analytical gaze on the rich layers of circulation and exchange of art, architecture, and literature within South Asia and testify to the interaction of Muslims and Islamic traditions with other people and traditions in India for centuries.
Material Culture and Asian Religions
Traditionally, research on the history of Asian religions has been marked by a bias for literary evidence, privileging canonical texts penned in ‘classical’ languages. Not only has a focus on literary evidence shaped the dominant narratives about the religious histories of Asia, in both scholarship and popular culture, but it has contributed to the tendency to study different religious traditions in relative isolation from one another. Today, moreover, historical work is often based on modern textual editions and, increasingly, on electronic databases. What may be lost, in the process, is the visceral sense of the text as artifact – as a material object that formed part of a broader ma...
