Reviewed by: Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 by Sugata Ray Melanie Barbato Sugata Ray. 2019, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pp. 264. $70.00. This book is highly recommended for scholars, practitioners, and artists with an interest in the interplay of aesthetics and the environment, in material culture and non-human agency, and in South Asian art and religion. From the term "climate change" in the title, some readers may expect the book to present responses to the current environmental crisis. This is, however, not the case. The subtitle clarifies that the book focuses on a historical climatic change, the period between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries that is known as "the little ice age." Throughout the book, Ray uses terms like "climate upheaval" rather than "climate change," probably in part because this little ice age was a temporary crisis rather than the onset of a long-term climatic trend. Nevertheless, the book speaks to the current era of climate change because at its heart lie the timely issues of the environmental elements' agency and their interconnectedness with human art and religion, especially in times of crisis and rapid transformation. The impact of the little ice age on European art is well documented. Pieter Bruegel's famous winter scenes appear idyllic only at first sight. A closer look reveals them as products of a time in which people tried to come to terms with the terrible beauty of unprecedentedly harsh winters, both artistically and religiously. Ray's book offers a much needed non-Western perspective on this era of climatic catastrophe. The drop in temperature witnessed in the Alpine areas also affected the sea surface temperature, which led to a disruption of the El Niño events and thus also to droughts and famine in many parts of the world. Ray shows that the artistic and religious responses to these phenomena in the East were just as profound as in European art, but very different. He focuses on Braj, an region of northern India known for its rich devotional tradition, particularly in veneration of the Hindu deity Vishnu. Vishnu is believed to have appeared in different incarnations, and the [End Page 222] most popular of these is Krishna, a playful and handsome young man who spends his days in amorous play with the female cowherds, particularly Radha. In Braj, countless natural sites, such as rock formations or groves, are venerated as places where certain events of Krishna's life took place. Ray shows how this superposition of natural and spiritual landscapes coalesced to form an organically interrelated sacred ecosystem. The main part of the book is structured around four environmental elements: water, land, forest, and ether. The chapter on water focuses on the river Yamuna, which is considered a site of spiritual purification. Ray discusses a sixteenth-century watercolor of Krishna bathing playfully in the flowing stream. In this image, which also appears on the book's cover, much attention has been paid to depicting the varied dynamics of the water through intricate patterns of fine white lines on the deep blue background. Ray argues that this innovative artistic representation could be linked to new ways of seeing water in an age of droughts and water scarcity. However, he does not want this interconnection to be understood in a deterministic or reductionist way. Rather, hydroaesthetics should be considered a "relational field" that brings together the "political, social, theological and aesthetic imperatives of seeing water" (p.47). A mineral-rich sandstone ridge serves as the focal point of the second thematic part. This ridge, called Govardhan, is venerated as Krishna's own form embodied in stone. It is said that Govardhan started bleeding when workers attempted to remove a stone, and even the reddish dust of Govardhan is experienced by worshippers as a physical manifestation of the divine. Ray argues that during the climatic catastrophes in the epoch under discussion, the people of Braj experienced land not merely as an object for human cultivation but as a life form with its own agency, often...
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Mar 20, 2022
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