South Asian Art Research Articles

The Offering of Begging Bowls by the Four Lokapālas: Its Literary and Visual Representations in South Asia

Abstract This research paper aims to analyze a selection of visual representations regarding the offering of begging bowls to the Buddha by the four Lokapālas and their relationship to literary sources in South Asian art and discuss the significance of the story. This article reveals that these representations have always been popular in Gandhāra. The important components of this story relevant to the depictions include (1) the tree where the Buddha sat, (2) offering of the four bowls, (3) merging of the bowls, (4) presence of the two merchants, and (5) presence of other deities. However, a close one-to-one text-image relationship cannot be established due to multiple variants. The story is significant in emphasizing certain important Buddhist concepts, such as, the “transcendental virtue” of the Buddha as a supreme deity and a universal monarch (cakravartin); donative practice; usage of the bowl according to the Vinaya (Discipline), and the veneration of bowls.

Queen Maya & Yasodhara in Gandhara Buddhist Sculptures

The aim of the research was to study at the female representation in Buddhist Gandhara's sculptural history. It is a genuine revelation that the subject matter of Gandhara sculptures is the Buddhah life story, as depicted in the stone panels. We began to collect Queen Maya and Yashodhara images from Peshawar, Texila and Mardan Museum. As a result, the Gandharan perception of the female was complex: female images frequently signified prosperity, fertility, and nurture, but they also embodied seduction, disease, and death at other times. The Gandharan woman is dichotomous and replete with vigour, a synthesis of various religious, aesthetic, and political ideas. This research will contribute to the existing information about female portrayal in Buddhist and South Asian art forms, thereby advancing the work on women's roles and representation in the South Asian region.

Symbolic Significance of Star Motifs in Islamic Geometric Decoration and Contemporary Trademark Design in Pakistan

Geometric decoration in Islamic art has a special significance having symbolic meanings. Star motif is one of the most prominent shapes employed in these geometric decorations. These motifs, as they originated with spiritual essence in Persia around nineth century, were carried on as an influential factor in South Asian art, particularly Mughal art. The surface embellishments of the Mughal monuments are flooded with geometries having various types of star motifs. Interestingly, the contemporary trademark design in Pakistan reveals great influence from these geometric star motifs. Having a symbolic significance, these designs create a profound visual impact in communication. This research puts forth the symbolic meaning behind the star used in Islamic geometric decoration, and presents its influence on contemporary visual communication design in Pakistan. The designs studied for this research are the trademarks of banks, universities, government departments, and other private companies and brands. The research, after examining the formal quality of the star motifs with reference to the respective meanings, establishes the significance of star motif in visual communication.

The Remains of the Day: Re-tracing Archival Art through Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim

The history of modern South Asian art has been fast-moving, but art that is about modern South Asian history is still in its infancy. While the art of the post-Independence era continues to wrest with the legacies of colonisation, fractured nationhood, majoritarian politics, and weakening secular legacies, there is a strain of this art preoccupied with the historical gaze. In relation to works of art by Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim, the aesthetics of representing archives and archiving can be examined in order to explore the politics of nationalism and historical change, as well as the global neoliberal economies of institutional archiving practices. The tendency to look back constantly over the region's past raises questions about whom these artistic interventions address and the archival logics at work within this distinctive field of contemporary art.

Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 by Sugata Ray

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...

Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and popular and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally.

Productive failure: Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories, written by Alpesh Kantilal Patel, (2018)

Productive failure: Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories, written by Alpesh Kantilal Patel, (2018)

Ananda Coomaraswamy: Anarchizing Performance, East and West

Ananda Coomaraswamy:Anarchizing Performance, East and West Kimberly Croswell (bio) Ananda Coomaraswamy (1866–1947) was a Sri Lankan born, English-raised anarchist, art historian, critic, and activist whose work spanned South and Southeast Asia, England, and America during the first half of the twentieth century (fig. 1).1 He mobilized South Asian performance traditions to inject the Western imagination with anarchist social, political, and cultural values. Coomaraswamy challenged the modern Western notion of "progress" to disrupt the colonialist assumptions of Western superiority; instead, he regarded the relationship between Eastern and Western cultures as potentially complementary. Rejecting capitalist-industrialism, he theorized a decolonizing "post-industrial" revolution that would liberate pre-industrial cultural and economic forces of the East and deindustrialize the West (Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, 128–31). Post-Industrial societies would be founded on the rejection of stated-based social organization in favor of economic and political self-management rooted in arts and crafts traditions (127). To foster the necessary social consciousness to overthrow capitalism and oppression and create a world in which the arts would permeate all aspects of everyday life, Coomaraswamy looked to spiritual and cultural values he encapsulated in the term "Idealistic Individualism" (134). For Coomaraswamy, "Idealistic Individualism" was anarchistic consciousness emergent in the Western philosophies of Nietzsche, Whitman, and Blake, as well as modern art. But, first and foremost, it already existed in Asian cultures because they were rooted in a craftsmanship ethos that unified the arts within the living spiritual traditions from which they developed (134). Fomenting a revolution against industrial capitalism in the West [End Page 467] compelled him to work tirelessly in his role as educator to sensitize Westerners to the Idealistic Individualist "core" of Eastern art traditions. While he contested the forces of industrial-capitalism and colonialism from an anarchist perspective, he simultaneously developed a social-historical narrative in which Eastern Idealistic Individualism resonated with Western parallels.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Ananda Coomaraswamy, ca. 1909. Photographer unknown. Private collection. Coomaraswamy first articulated his anarchist vision in an address to vocational arts students at the Newcastle-under-Lyme School of Art, which was published in the internationally acclaimed Modern Review Journal in June of 1913. In this speech, [End Page 468] Coomaraswamy explicitly states, "It is only by means of art that a permanent revolution can be achieved."3 The foundations of this revolution, according to Coomaraswamy, are located in the calling of the artists and craftspeople, whose "sincere and purposeful" work will ensure the "re-education of the sense-sensitiveness" of individuals living under the conditions of industrialism—conditions under which "our daily environment" has been "sacrificed to the purposes of trade, empire and priesthood" (Coomaraswamy, "The Purposes of Art," 606). Here, Coomaraswamy calls for European cultural revitalization as political activity. Furthermore, the revolutionary purpose of the arts offered cross-cultural transformations: Coomaraswamy believed if Westerners were exposed to South Asian art forms and educated as to their significance, they might realize a critical understanding of European modernity (Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Śiva, 1–3, 113–14). As such, his goal in promoting the arts was to foment a dynamic cultural revolution. Revolutionizing Performance West to East In this endeavor, he had a key ally: Ratan Devi (Alice Richardson). Coomaraswamy first met Richardson in England in 1907 when she was part of an ensemble performing English folk songs and dance.4 By 1911, Richardson and Coomaraswamy were married and traveling together to northern Kashmir where they lived on a houseboat at Shrinagar.5 There, Richardson studied with Ustad Abdul Rahim of Kapurthala. She mastered thirty traditional songs from the region which she would perform in England, adopting the persona Ratan Devi. During performances, Coomaraswamy assumed the role of educator, explaining various aspects of the music to the audiences. In keeping with their "sense-education" campaign, they co-produced Thirty Songs from the Panjab and Kashmir (1913), which included Ratan Devi's notations with commentaries and an introduction by Coomaraswamy. Coomaraswamy explained Ratan Devi's training in Shrinagar: "The songs were first learned by imitation and studied until they could be sung to the Ustad's satisfaction, no easy matter, by reason of the extraordinary elusiveness of Indian...

Contributors

Previous article FreeContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCarlos Garrido CastellanoCarlos Garrido Castellano is Lecturer of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork. He has taught widely on Spanish, Lusophone and Latin American visual culture. His research interests focus on visual culture, critical theory, activism and collaborative artistic practices in postcolonial contexts.Daria GhiuDaria Ghiu lives and works in Bucharest. She wrote a book on the history of the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (IDEA Publishing House, 2015) and is an art critic and radio author. Since 2016 she is an associate professor at the University of Bucharest.Vasif KortunVasif Kortun is a curator, writer and teacher in the field of contemporary art – its institutions and spatial practices. He was the founding director of Research and Programs of SALT, Istanbul. A recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excellence from Bard College, he is the chairman of the board of the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.Ana LongoniAna Longoni is a writer, researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires and teaches in the Independent Studies Program of the MACBA, Barcelona. She studies the intersections between art and politics in Argentina and Latin America from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Currently, she is the director of public activities for Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.Michael A. MelMichael A. Mel is of the Mogei tribe in the Mt Hagen area in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). He completed a PhD at Flinders University, Adelaide and was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Goroka, PNG. He is currently a manager for Pacific and international collection at the Australian Museum, Sydney.Serubiri MosesSerubiri Moses is an independent writer and curator. His curatorial work, writing and research has been presented internationally in Kampala, Hong Kong, Cali, Nairobi, Accra, Johannesburg and Berlin. He was on the curatorial team for the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, ‘We don’t need another hero’, in 2018.Vijay PrashadVijay Prashad is director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He first wrote about Naeem Mohaiemen’s work for journal TAKE on art (New Delhi) in 2010 and appears in Mohaiemen’s film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017).Filipa RamosFilipa Ramos is editor-in-chief at art-agenda, and lectures at Kingston University, London and Institut Kunst, Basel. Ramos is co-curator of Vdrome, was associate editor of Manifesta Journal and contributed to dOCUMENTA 13 and documenta 14. She edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2016) and curates ‘Animalisk’ at Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden in 2019.Jerssi Esperança Restino PauloJerssi Esperança Restino Paulo is an Angolan student in African Studies at Universidade de Lisboa. In the future, she would like to work with NGOs that support Africa’s development or in matters related to African history.Charles StankievechCharles Stankievech is an artist and Director of Visual Studies, Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto. From 1996 to 2004 he worked as a licensed atomic energy technician for the world’s largest materials engineering firm that did forensic analysis on architectural, industrial and military assets. He is a contributing editor to Afterall.Nora A. TaylorNora A. Taylor is Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian art at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii, 2004/NUS Press, 2009) and numerous articles and co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Southeast Asia Program Publications, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2012) among other edited volumes.Reiko TomiiReiko Tomii is an independent art historian who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in global and local contexts. She is co-director of PoNJA-GenKon (www.ponja-genkon.net), a scholarly listserv. Among her latest publications is Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016).Clare VealClare Veal is a lecturer in the MA Asian Art Histories programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore where she conducts research on Southeast Asian photography, art and visual culture with a focus on Thailand. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Sydney in 2016.Kaelen Wilson-GoldieKaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer based in New York and Beirut. She is contributing editor for Bidoun and writes regularly for Artforum, Bookforum, Aperture and Frieze. Her first book, Etel Adnan (Lund Humphries), on the paintings of the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, was published in 2018. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Afterall Volume 47Spring/Summer 2019 Published by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704207 © 2019 by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism

AbstractIn Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism, Urmila Mohan explores the materiality and visuality of cloth and clothing as devotional media in contemporary Hinduism. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the global missionizing group “International Society for Krishna Consciousness” (ISKCON), she studies translocal spaces of worship, service, education, and daily life in the group’s headquarters in Mayapur and other parts of India. Focusing on the actions and values of deity dressmaking, devotee clothing and paraphernalia, Mohan shows how activities, such as embroidery and chanting, can be understood as techniques of spirituality, reverence, allegiance—and she proposes the new term “efficacious intimacy” to help understand these complex processes. The monograph brings theoretical advances in Anglo-European material culture and material religion studies into a conversation with South Asian anthropology, sociology, art history, and religion. Ultimately, it demonstrates how embodied interactions as well as representations shape ISKCON’s practitioners as devout subjects, while connecting them with the divine and the wider community.

Everyday Partitions

This article analyses two exhibitions of contemporary South Asian art ‘My East is Your West’ (Palazzo Benzon, Venice, 2015) and ‘This Night-Bitten Dawn’ (24 Jor Bagh, New Delhi, 2016) that took up Partition as an everyday effect rather than a historical event. Departing from the national art survey model that has dominated museum and international exhibition venues such as the Venice Biennale since the early 2000s, both exhibitions focused on the complex afterlives of the Partition of 1947 and highlighted its recursive character. In so doing, they presented a critique of contemporary nationalism and globalisation through the trope of Partition, enacting what Gayatri C Spivak has called a critical regionalism against ‘identitarianism’. This regionalism is not a regional style, but an analytic mode, critical stance, and historically-informed approach to the region and its borders, nations and partitions. ‘My East is Your West’ and ‘This Night-Bitten Dawn’ imagined a region across shifting sites and scales, and claimed belonging to Partition, that is, to division and dislocation as the basis of identity, territory, community and society in South Asia.

Infrastructure as Form

The South Asian Network for the Arts (SANA), established in 2000, facilitated artistic exchanges across the highly contested borders in the region. SANA was made up of Khoj in India, Vasl in Pakistan, Teertha in Sri Lanka, and Britto in Bangladesh, which are all member organisations of the UK-based Triangle Network. The principal goal of these organisations was the development of cutting edge art practice in each country, but the signature gesture of the network was the pan-regional international workshop. SANA and aligned projects should be understood as the infrastructure – the institutions of patronage, material structures of transmission or travel, and frameworks of thought – for a South Asian art world that developed or was reconfigured to be regionally inclusive after 1997. This article builds upon the anthropology of infrastructure, which articulates the ‘politics and poetics’ of what seem to be largely matters of engineering. Examining art infrastructure requires the opposite operation: an integration of the materiality of artistic networks into a discourse preoccupied with their aesthetic and, to a somewhat lesser extent, political significance. For while the immaterial aspects of artist networks are of course important, conditions in the South Asian region, with its legacy of state opposition to the movement of both people and things across national borders, provide ample evidence for how equally important material networks can be for art and its circulation.

Exhibiting Music

Museums have long been thought of as “quiet” spaces, in which visitors walk slowly through galleries to look at material cultures in glass cases. Music and sound have begun to pervade the quiet spaces of museums in the forms of aural installations and performance-based programs. They are no longer galleries for solely visual engagement, but loud spaces in which visitors and audiences listen to recordings, experience live performances, and participate by themselves singing and playing in workshops, classes, installations, and impromptu demonstrations. This article explores three case studies in exhibiting music. The first is the exhibition Ragamala: Garland of Melodies, which was on display at the Royal Ontario Museum and sought to demonstrate the fluidity between the South Asian arts. The second is an investigation of some of the formal and informal performance-based programming at the Aga Khan Museum. The last case study focuses on a future project, in which collectors of Indian audio cultures will submit contributions to help construct a history of sound in India. Each case study is motivated by a series of central questions: what constitutes “exhibiting music”? What are the broader implications of and consequences for exhibiting music in each case? How does exhibiting music in a museum impact a visitor’s experience? What kinds of new stories are told in exhibiting music and sound? The three case studies respond to these questions and provoke issues and possibilities for further critical inquiry. They show that museums are dynamic spaces with incredible potential to inspire multi-experiential engagement.

What ‘value’ South Asian arts in Britain?

This article examines the historical and contemporary articulation of the ‘value’ of South Asian Arts in Britain. Having examined the development of minority arts in Britain and in particular ‘South Asian Arts’, I examine how South Asian arts organisations have presented the ‘cultural value’ of these arts to funders and participants. Taking ‘cultural value’ to refer to the value associated with engaging with and participating in art and culture (Crossick and Kaszynska, 13) this article examines how South Asian arts in the British cultural and creative industries have been impacted by the ‘value’ agenda. I find that even though South Asian arts forms play an important role in enabling audiences who may rarely engage with the cultural industries to participate in relevant arts, South Asian arts organisations continue to be required to articulate their value primarily as part of a commitment to ‘diversity’.

Buddhist Landscapes in Central India: Sanchi Hill and Archaeologies of Religious and Social Change, c. Third Century B.C. to Fifth Century A.D. by Julia Shaw (review)

Buddhist Landscapes in Central India: Sanchi Hill and Archaeologies of Religious and Social Change, c. Third Century B.C. to Fifth Century A.D. Julia Shaw. London: The British Association for South Asian Studies, 2007. 359 pp. ISBN: 978-0-9553924-4-3. Hardcover: $99.00. For the scholar of South Asian art history, a visit to the Buddhist site at Sanchi in central India is akin to an encounter with a movie star. As the scholar circumambulates the main stupa (a domed structure designed to hold the relics of the Buddha or other esteemed members of the Buddhist community) and wanders among the other remains within the larger complex of this UNESCO World Heritage Site, the initial pleasure of recognition mingles with marvel at the great beauty and affective presence of these material remains. Lovely stone tree goddesses dangle from the first-century B.C.E.-first-century C.E. sandstone gateways. Crisply carved relief sculptures on these gateways invite the viewer to discover familiar stories, such as the Buddha's renunciation of the comforts of courtly life. Stone images of the Buddha from the fifth century A.D. quietly sit along the base of the much earlier stupa. The star-struck visitor encounters the polished remains of the famous stone pillar erected in the third century B.C.E. by the Emperor Asoka and the fifth-century C.E. Temple 17--perhaps the earliest extant freestanding temple in India! The ubiquity of Sanchi in introductory lecture courses and textbooks on South Asian art primes the art historian for such a visual experience of delight in recognition. Although the much-studied and well-known Buddhist remains at Sanchi occupy a prominent place within multiple fields of study, Julia Shaw shifts our gaze from the beloved artistic remains of this site to the landscape surrounding Sanchi and the nearby city of Vidisha in order provide a broader perspective on how this familiar monument functioned within the religious and social life of this region over a span of more than one thousand years. Shaw states that the primary aim of her fieldwork to achieve a less fragmented picture of Buddhist by combining the methods of landscape archaeology, and art and architectural history, while drawing on debates generated within religious studies and ancient Indian history (20). Begun in 1998, Shaws Sanchi Survey Project (SSP) mapped roughly 720 sq km of countryside and in the process revealed some 35 Buddhist sites, a network of dams, and numerous habitation settlements. Featuring almost 70 maps, charts, and tables and another 231 plates--including several never-before published photographs of sculptural remains --along with extensive appendices, this publication documents and analyzes many of the findings of the SSP. Indeed, Shaw has collected an enormous amount of data and clearly wrestled with how to include as much of that data as possible in this book while still presenting her overarching conclusions in a fashion that might be accessible to scholars across multiple disciplines. In her preface, Shaw mentions plans for a web-based version of the extensive database she has created, but at the time of this review, this website was not yet available. Nevertheless, the importance of the information gleaned through Shaw's fieldwork cannot be overstated. As she notes in her introduction, Shaw's intention to evaluate the underpinnings of religious change required her to reconsider certain conventional approaches to the study of ancient South Asian religions. Most notably, Shaw rethinks the emphasis on monumental sites that has colored much of the archaeology and art of ancient South Asia. By selectively drawing on new methodologies from the broader field of landscape archaeology, Shaw charts how she employed several approaches--including systematic village-to-village surveys and the analysis of satellite imagery--to expand the lens of previous archaeological investigations in this region. In particular, Shaw considered smaller, previously ignored sites and even non-sites, such as caves or the remnants of natural shrines, which have eluded earlier scholarly notice. …

The Camera Work of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and Alfred Stieglitz

In the 1920s art museums in the United States began to collect and display photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and other leading photographers as works of art. Previous scholars have acknowledged this movement's significance in Stieglitz's struggle for the institutional recognition of photography. They have, however, scarcely queried the conditions under which this movement began. This article scrutinises the circumstances under which the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, accepted prints from Stieglitz and other practitioners of the medium. It posits that the Boston Museum's decision to accept these prints was motivated by its protean curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy's interest in pictorialist and photo-secessionist photography's creative and political possibilities as well as in Stieglitz's life and work. Stieglitz's pictures appealed to Coomaraswamy because he recognised in them ways in which the American photographer was referencing strands of classical South Asian aesthetics to develop more inclusive and more symbolic works of American art. One of these filaments was Stieglitz's absorption of a codified language of hand gestures assumed by dancers and deities that Coomaraswamy was concurrently documenting and interpreting in his writings, photographs and films to elevate maligned traditions of South Asian sculpture and performance as Art. In recovering this narrative of Coomraswamy and Stieglitz's overlapping lives and works, this article begins to disentangle histories of collecting, of modernist photography and of the crystallisation of South Asian art history as a scholarly discipline.

Reading Visually: Can Art Historical Reading Approaches go Digital?

As the field of digital humanities grows, scholars are translating and adapting their investigative processes to suit the digital environs. Questions about how digital technologies will enhance and transform historical scholarly reading practices have arisen, but they have not been extensively considered from the perspective of visual culture historians and less so from those working on select non-Western cultures. This paper approaches these questions from an Islamic and South Asian art historical perspective, mapping out the particularities of reading historical texts when conducting visual cultural research and considering the implications for the development of future digital research tools.

The politics of performance and the creation of South Asian music in Britain: Identities, transnational cosmopolitanism and the public sphere

The identities of the various South Asian communities are shaped and recognized not only by their place of origin and their specific contexts of migratory history, but also by very diverse post-migratory adaptive strategies and practices taken up by these South Asians. The complexities and debates that surround the roles and positions of music in British South Asian communities and their specific contexts are indicative of these adaptations and re-appropriation of South Asian transnational cultures in the British context. Using the Liverpool-based South Asian arts promoter Milapfest as a case study, this article critically examines the significances and implications of the development of new forms of South Asian music in Britain and how they relate to the broader issues of production and reproduction of South Asian cultures and identities in transnational and global contexts. It also argues that their musical practice and the associated politics of participation is necessarily located in the dialogic nexus between religious and secular, public and private, homeland and diasporas.

Translating the Year 1299: On Reading Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic in English

Following general reflections on the relations between global media, local and oral history, this paper addresses the paradoxical constraints imposed by language specialization, which focuses Western historians on particular regions and languages at the expense of demotic and oral cultures. Taking up the idea that translation is never an ideologically innocent act, Stein addresses the ambiguous status of English in the Indian context, both as the language of British imperial power, but also as a vehicle for challenging and “writing back” against colonial discourse. To illustrate the linguistic pitfalls that accompany research on South Asian art, the paper investigates the relations between temple art, iconoclasm, and the zinc smelting industry in Jawar, Rajasthan.

Communities, audiences, and multi-functions: British cultural politics and the showcasing of South Asian art

The development of South Asian arts in the UK has gone from using typical colonial and ‘high culture’ showcases to using particular but still far more ‘mainstream’ formats, and has been publicly subsidised in a number of ways, including through community projects. In many respects, South Asian arts is not a ‘niche product’ any more due to the (mainly political) tension towards creating a distinctively ‘British Asian’ (or BrAsian) rather than a strictly ‘South Asian’ product. This paper draws upon two case studies of South Asian ‘cultural producers’ (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 223) in Northern England to argue that showcasing South Asian art in Britain is a peculiar endeavour, the existence of which must account for multiple functions, multiple audiences and even international politics. The paper argues that recognising this fact has profound implications for the future of British Asian identities and for the negotiation between popular culture and politics.