Full Description
Chakshudana or rituals of opening the eyes are practiced across multiple South Asian communities by artists, sculptors, and priests. The ritual offers gods access to the mortal world. This practice, applied to the study of material and visual culture, offers a distinctive perspective to interrogate the complex engagements with paintings, sculptures, found objects, fragments, built environments, and ecologies.
This volume takes the process of seeing as its focus—to look closely, remaining true to the object, but also to see widely—from multiple subjective stances and diverse bodily engagements such as walking to dreaming, glancing to looking askance, hypnotic stares, and to see beyond the visible. It examines art history through nuanced considerations of materiality, aesthetics, and regional specificities. The essays emerge from current research that builds on the contributions of Michael W. Meister, W. Norman Brown Distinguished Professor of History of Art and South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, whose works laid the foundations for the study of South Asian visual and material culture. The essays in this book underscore methodological resonances rather than privileging conventional categories of media or chronology, exploring artistic media including temples and paintings as well as Bengali-quilted textiles, manuscript 'lozenges,' and metal repousse.
This volume, part of the Visual Media and Histories Series, will be of interest to students and researchers of history of art, religious studies, and history as well as the allied disciplines of anthropology and folklore studies.
Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Preface by Monica Juneja
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Reading Monuments and Seeing Texts: Michael W. Meister and the Opening of Eyes
PIKA GHOSH AND PUSHKAR SOHONI
PART I Seeing and Knowing
2 Region, Style, Idiom, and Ritual in History: Michael W. Meister on the Study of Jain Art
JOHN E. CORT
3 Conversations with Michael Meister
ROMILA THAPAR
4 Churning the Object: Michael W. Meister as Manthāna
DARIELLE MASON
5 Reminiscence
GIEVE PATEL
PART II Style and Idiom: Classification and Complexity
6 Meister Purana in Modern Indian Art
AJAY SINHA
7 Squaring a Circle: Design and Construction in the Temple of Anwa
PUSHKAR SOHONI
PART III Formal Metamorphoses and Mutability of Meaning
8 Liberating Migrations: On the Trail of Jaina Temples in Medieval Central India
TAMARA I. SEARS
9 Paper Prāsādas
NACHIKET CHANCHANI
PART IV Vernacular Craft and the Rhetoric of Re- Making
10 On Jaidev Baghel's Practice: Casting Aside the Art / Craft Divide
KATHERINE HACKER
11 Chamba and the 'Painterly' Vision
MANDAVI MEHTA
PART V Image Iconopraxis and Iconoplasty
12 Nonhuman Animals on Unlabelled Sculptures of the Bharhut Stupa Railing
CHANDREYI BASU
13 Stitching Spectacles: A Visual Culture of Bodily Prowess and Muscular Nationalism in Colonial Bengal
PIKA GHOSH
Michael W. Meister's Publications
Chakshudana (Opening the Eyes)
Index
