The conquest of Delhi in 1739 shook India and stunned the world. Despite the horror of his invasion, Nadir Shah (r. 1736–47) was commemorated in dozens of portraits from across the subcontinent. Contemporary depictions of the Iranian conqueror align with his imperial rhetoric and the new aesthetic of his Indo-Persian realm, but the vast majority were created posthumously between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. More curious is the fact that many of them are inserted into dynastic portrait series of Mughal emperors even though Nadir Shah did not stay to rule. Why did local painters continue to glorify a foreign invader and plunderer for another century after his death? The motivations are further complicated by two very different groups of patrons and collectors—local and British elites in India. Nadir Shah’s defeat of Delhi empowered regional rulers and emboldened British imperialist ambitions. Their divergent perspectives and the roles they played in the viral circulation of Nadir Shah’s image across India form the core of this investigation.

For the past two decades, scholarship has made great strides uncovering the multifaceted ways in which Buddhist objects provide insights into the beliefs, practices, and worldviews of the people who used and viewed them. Having moved past iconographic analysis as the sole lens with which to evaluate Buddhist art, scholars have demonstrated, for instance, how the religion’s visual and material culture served as conduits between the physical world and the intangible, and operated as nodes linking networks of people and places. This article adds another perspective to the study of Buddhist art objects by considering how their physical condition prompted new forms of engagement in religious practice in premodern Japan. In particular, it investigates differences between three ways to preserve images—to copy, to repair, and to re-create—and demonstrates that while both copying and repair kept objects in a good and presentable state, repair could additionally serve as a means for the production and diffusion of Buddhist cultural knowledge. Re-creation combines the practice of copy and repair and reveals how an object’s material properties, an aspect of any conservation effort, could also transmit information about associated miracles or numinous qualities.

Building a pagoda mobilizes durable materials into architectonic form. But a pagoda may also incorporate likenesses of images and objects wrought in ephemeral materials, thus becoming a nexus of textual, pictorial, and formal transfer and intermedial preservation. This essay examines how, in the Zhenguo pagoda 鎮國塔 (lit. “Defender of the State Pagoda”) at the Kaiyuan temple in Quanzhou, Fujian, rock—covered with the imagery of paper (and other fugitive media) by means of scissors (or, more precisely, the carver’s knife)—preserved traces of evanescent forms. Specifically, it: articulates the relationship of paper-based editions of the Buddhist canon to the pagoda’s stone-carved narrative program; asserts the influence of logographic schema of printed-paper primers and locally known, silk-based court painting styles to the pagoda’s imagery; and contends that carved images of small, free-standing bronze (and stone) pagodas link the Zhenguo pagoda to overlapping local (Quanzhou), regional (Min-Yue/Fujian), imperial (Song-dynasty), and maritime (Indian Ocean) object networks. To test the hypothesis that the Zhenguo pagoda serves as a repository of, and lexicon for, now lost forms, this essay concludes by using the imagery of the Zhenguo pagoda to recover the iconography of a type of Quanzhou-specific Buddhist monument, the Stone Shoot (Shisun 石筍).

The worship of Śiva in early South and Southeast Asia offered devotees a fully realized “religious ecology,” i.e., a system of mutually beneficial relationships between human communities, natural systems, and the nonhuman or more-than-human worlds in which they operated. Within this religious worldview, the Śaiva guru functioned as a critical terrestrial intermediary. In canonical early Śaiva texts, the guru was celebrated as an ecological agent capable of alleviating suffering and nurturing community. In material culture, the guru’s iconographic attributes (e.g., waterpot, trident, and lotus) signaled his ability to offer devotees emotional, social, and environmental benefits. Using the figure of the Brahmanical sage and Śaiva guru Agastya as an entrée, this study initiates a comparative analysis of the cultural connections between gurus, Śiva worship, and the power of the natural world as expressed through iconographic programs and architectural spaces from northern India, Vietnam, and Java. Since Agastya is both a personification of Brahmanical cultural authority and a transregional emblem of the Śaiva tradition, he provides a fertile ground from which to explore the role of the guru in early South and Southeast Asia. Agastya’s mythic biography also features two significant environmental interventions: subduing the Vindhya Mountain when it threatened to block out the sun, and drinking the ocean’s waters to reveal hidden demons threatening a divine order. His ecological agency, expressed in narratives as the power to neutralize potential threats in the natural world and manifest beneficence, is materialized in images that express the socially supportive values of prosperity and fertility.

The Government Museum and Art Gallery of Chandigarh was established to fill a cultural vacuum in post-partition Punjab. It received the seed of its collection from Lahore and the rest was amassed by M. S. Randhawa (1909–1986), an Indian Civil Service officer with a love for painting that at the time was identified as “Kangra” for its style and association with the eponymous region and kingdom. In the 1950s, he spent considerable time traveling in the western Himalayas, tracking down paintings and acquiring them for the museum. The many volumes of correspondence that he later bequeathed to the museum reveal how collections of early modern Pahari paintings were rapidly dispersing to form new collections elsewhere. Through the lens of the bureaucrat-collector Randhawa, this article sheds light on the complex history of collecting in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. In tracing the movement of paintings from private royal collections to a public government museum, the article approaches provenance as biography with the goal to contribute to collective efforts of mapping networks that connect collections and collectors.

This article reexamines a wall painting discovered in 1925 and 1929 by Ernst Herzfeld in the Painted Gallery of the great Parthian-Sasanian temple complex at Kuh-i Khwaja in Iran (Sistan-Baluchestan province). The painting subsequently disappeared and today it can be studied only from Herzfeld’s photographs (hardly usable), sketch, and watercolors, kept at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. It shows a royal or aristocratic couple standing in a schematic architectural setting. No interpretation has so far been attempted. It is proposed that the couple is standing at the entrance of a fire chamber (such as the real one that exists at the back of the temple) and that the man holds a written scroll (already identified as such by Herzfeld according to a scribbled note), which probably contains a deed of endowment. The costumes are Sasanian but not royal Sasanian, while the type of the woman’s crown is documented in Kidarite-Hephtalite Bactria. A date is proposed in the fourth or fifth century. The man could belong to the vassal dynasty of the Sagānshāhs or be a later Sasanian governor.

Charles Lang Freer’s purchase of the Henry Bathurst Hanna collection of Indian paintings in 1907 can seem an anomalous, almost incidental acquisition in the career of a collector whose interests for the most part lay elsewhere. Its peculiarity makes it an intriguing episode, and one that but for the presence of some remarkable pieces might arguably be relegated to a footnote in the annals of Freer’s wide-ranging and more extensive areas of collecting. A clearer picture of his motivations comes into focus, however, by considering his pursuit of the collection within the broader range of his own experiences, his milieu, and the prevailing cultural context. This article situates Freer’s interest in a particular collection of Indian art—understood narrowly at the time as concomitant with Mughal painting—against the background of the long presence of India in the United States, the growth of interest in Eastern culture and spirituality in late nineteenth-century New England, the beginnings of the appreciation of the aesthetic value of objects from India in the early twentieth century, and the burgeoning market and place for non-Western works in art museums in metropolitan cities, including the one that Freer had committed to establishing. In so doing, one may better understand the importance he placed on the acquisition of the collection, which would be a singular step that initiated a place for India within fine art museums in the United States.