Book review: R. Mahalakshmi,ed.,Art and History: Texts,Contexts and Visual Representations in Ancient and Early Medieval India

Historians of art tend to focus on its stylistic and aesthetic dimensions often in isolation from broader historical issues, while the mainstream historians working on society and polity, treat it as an appendage of dynastic history. This has led to a gap between the former and the latter—a gap which the book under review seeks to fill.

The Art and History is an anthology of papers presented at a workshop organised by R. Mahalakshmi at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. They deal with the interface between art and a variety of visual representations, on the one hand, and the parallel historical developments, on the other. In a content-wise rich and substantive introduction, the editor R. Mahalakshmi begins with a survey of the work done in the nineteenth century by scholars like James Ferguson and Alexander Cunningham who were pioneers in the documentation of art objects and monuments in India, and goes on to deliberate on issues of spirituality in Indian art and on types of artists classified on the basis of the specific material on which they worked such as workers in stone (shilakara), ivory (dantakara) and in wood (vardhaki) and the changing pattern of patronage they received in early India. She also draws attention to the Shilpashastra texts like Brihat Samhita (fifth/sixth century), Vishnudharmottara Purana (seventh century), Manasara (twelfth century) and several others which belong to the early medieval period and form the prescriptive corpus laying down norms for artistic and architectural production.

Given this background, the book is divided into five sections, each of them having a cluster of papers. In Section I, Suchandra Ghosh analyses the coins found in the Indo-Iranian borderlands during the early centuries before and after Christ. She shows how the Bactrian Greeks, Indo-Greeks and Kushanas used coins to project their might by portraying on their coins the gods who represented symbols of royal power. Dev Kumar Jhanjh, concentrating on the same time period and region, examines the established views on the Abhiraka coins found in the north western part of India. Niharika Sankrityayan then shifts the focus to the early medieval period which saw the rise of the Chalukyas in western Deccan. The temple construction under them was a manifestation of state power as is evident from the fact that symbols from the iconography in the cave and structural temples were used to draw parallels between the king and the deity; the image of the dancing Shiva from Ravana Phadi cave at Aihole, for example, has been viewed as a parallel to the Chalukya king Mangalesha. Devoting considerable space to the discussion of both Vaishnava and Shaiva deities in Chaluya temples, she takes their royal patronage as a form of display of state power. R. Mahalakshmi, however, concentrates on only one icon, that of Shiva as Gangadhara (bearer of the river Ganga)—which was a prominent and fairly widespread icon in early medieval south Indian temples. She discusses the ‘theoretical, mythic, iconographic and inscriptional evidence’ of the importance of water and, in this context, touches upon the issues of water management, ideas of ‘hydraulic society’ and the notion of the Asiatic Mode of Production, a notion much debated among historians which she seems to partially support.

In Section II, the papers by Sneha Ganguly, Megha Yadav and Virendra Singh Bithoo deal with philosophical and symbolic content in the visual representations of the goddesses in different religious traditions. Thus, the various aspects of Kali are discussed with reference to the Puranic texts. The transformation of the philosophical concept of Prajnaparamita into a prominent deity is analysed on the basis of Buddhist texts and the Sixteen Mahavidya (Jaina) in the Bhilwara temple of Rajasthan are examined in terms of the changes taking place within Jainism.

In Section III, there are three papers, two of them taking into account the archaeological material. While V. Selvakumar pays attention to temples and icons discovered away from the village settlements and, delineates the patterns of worship and iconography in what he calls ‘fringes’ of early medieval Tamil Nadu, Sayanti Pal investigates the socio-economic background of donors at Kurkihar monastery in Bihar where the earliest donations were made by Buddhist monks. Another paper, written by Umakanta Mishra, draws our attention to the epic and Puranic references to Jajpur/Viraja ksetra in Odisha and traces its evolution as a Vaishnavite centre by the fourteenth century.

The two papers in Section IV look at the early medieval period from a gender perspective and throw light on the gendered hierarchies and relationships. Neha Singh takes up for analysis a divine icon of Kalyanasundaramurti, found from the sixth century onwards in the Brahmanical temples in the south western part of India. From this icon, which refers to the marriage of Shiva with Parvati, she gleans the Brahmanical notions of patriarchy in which the husband is ‘the taker and controller of woman’. Sujata Raksit, however, discusses the women outside the institution of marriage known as nayika, surasundari and alasa, who represent eroticism and beauty. Malavika Binny’s paper presents a survey of hero stones across south India from a gender perspective.

The last section consists of two papers which present an art historical perspective on the motifs and theories of representation. The first one by Anisha Saxena, tracing the origin of the decorative motif Kirtimukha from the fifth century, discusses its transformation from a mythical character into an architectural motif. In the last article in the volume, Y.S. Alone analyses the ideas of representation with reference to Buddhist texts.

The running theme of these papers is the reflection of historical developments in early Indian art, a theme on which very little work has been done so far. They present ‘a contextual analysis of society, economy, political structure and religious culture as gleaned from visual representations’. In short, the work provides many fresh insights into the interpretation of visual representations and the writing of history.