Arts and Aesthetics in Hindu Studies

Abstract

After decades of textual fixation, the study of Hinduism has taken a ‘visual turn’, which is unfolding to view a much wider map than the one which earlier scholars had held in their hands. Scholars looking for manuscripts in India have found themselves suddenly awakened to the omnipresence of performed transmissions and visual texts that speak, beyond the limitations of dialect, to all who have eyes to see. There is an increasing interest in the window that the arts, in all their forms, open onto the more pervasive, popular forms of Indian religious life, as opposed to the elitist preserves of the written text. From dance to sculpture, song to architecture, craftwork to poem, myth, or sacred history, the arts present a range of cultural artefacts in which ever-fresh provinces of the imagination are laid bare before the eye of the scholar. Yet these arts present various problems; they require new hermeneutic sensitivity, while stirring hornets’ nests of tense debate about the boundary between the ‘safe’ secular arts and their politically loaded religious equivalents. But their potential for expanding our understanding of Hindu cultures is vast – filling hitherto unrecognised demographic gaps in Hindu Studies, while forcing scholars to critically examine their own frameworks for interpreting arts and seek ‘indigenous’ modes of aesthetic appreciation. Perhaps this is because, although arts are typically seen as subsidiary and derivative modes of intellectual discourse, their proper aesthetic understanding nevertheless brings foundational questions of history, method, and metaphysics into view. The very possibilities entailed in ideas of ‘object’ and materiality are reconsidered, to consider ‘notions of vision and visuality that are specific to South Asia’. An increasing focus on the arts demands an increasing awareness of the workings of beauty and appeal, reality and appearance, taste and genre – in a word, aesthetics in Hindu culture. Aesthetics is too often seen as a peripheral field of theory, subsidiary to the works themselves and the ideas they convey. But without a hermeneutic key artworks will remain closed to us, or, worse, we will read and interpret them wrongly as in a distorted mirror. Not only nineteenth century, but also modern scholars are still trying to solve ‘the great difficulty of coming to terms with Hindu art’.