Chakshudana or Opening the Eyes

ISBN-13: 9781032207834 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 280 str.

Opis

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.

This volume takes as its focus the process of seeing—to look closely, remaining true to the object, but also to see widely, from multiple subjective stances and diverse bodily engagements from walking to dreaming, from glancing to looking askance, and hypnotic stares, and to see beyond the visible.

Spis treści

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

O autorze

Pika Ghosh teaches South Asian art at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, USA.

Pushkar Sohoni is Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, India.