A Historiographical Journey

Anisha Saxena

INDIAN ART HISTORY: CHANGING PERSPECTIVES

Edited by Parul Pandya Dhar
D.K. Printworld and National Museum Institute, New Delhi, 2011, pp. x+279, Rs.1600.00

VOLUME XXXVI NUMBER 3 March 2012

This collection of essays on changing perspectives in Indian art history is based on the
proceedings of a seminar on 'Historiography of Indian Art: Emergent Methodological Concerns,'
organized by the National Museum, Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology,
New Delhi in 2006. The volume opens with an introductory essay, 'A History of Art History:
The Indian Context' by Parul Pandya Dhar and is followed by fourteen essays on varied aspects
of ancient and medieval Indian art historical methodologies. The thirty-two page introduction by
Dhar will soon become compulsory reading for students of Indian art history. The sheer breadth
and detail of updated information on Indian art historical discourse that Dhar shares and
discusses critically is commendable. She has meticulously mapped the historiographical journey
of ancient and medieval Indian architecture, sculpture and painting. Beginning with the
documentation and collection phase of Indian art history during the early colonial period, she
proceeds to analyse the colonial formative period of the discipline as seen in the works of James
Fergusson, Alexander Cunningham and others, and next, analyses the writings of 'nationalist' art
historians such as Ananda Coomaraswamy and Stella Kramrisch, bringing the reader gradually
to later developments right up to the present. What is special about Dhar's essay is her analysis of
the art historian's approach in its specific historical setting and with the relevant socio-political
meanings attached to their writings. Dhar is also particularly attentive to the most recent
methodological trends that have emerged in studying Indian art history such as regional studies,
gendered readings, and social interpretations of art, and rightly emphasizes the need to adopt a
more interdisciplinary approach to the study of Indian art, which is a primary focus of the book.
Two further essays also dwell on interdisciplinarity in Indian art historical studies: the first by
Kapila Vatsyayan, 'The Discipline of Art History: Its Multidimensional Nature' and second, by
Himanshu Prabha Ray, 'Questioning Art History: Locating Religious Identities'. Vatsyayan's
essay stresses the multidimensional nature of art history as a discipline: 'It is the art piece or art
expression which has the in-built capacity of polyvalent multilayered meaning and significance.
The artistic expression thus, although situated in specific time and place, is the symbiosis of the
historical, social, ideational, symbolic, and natural skill and technique' (p. 33). Vatsyayan in her
essay charts a well-developed trajectory of various methodologies adopted by art historians from
the early nineteenth century to the more recent works of Devangana Desai, B.N. Goswamy and
S.Settar. While stressing the need to study Indian art from a multi-dimensional perspective, she
discusses some of the interdisciplinary initiatives in Indian art history. Ray’s essay, while
essentializing the role of archaeology in studying art history, focuses on art historical and
historical studies related to religious sites. Ray urges for a more integrated Asian approach in the
study of religious sites, rather than repeating the Western/colonial approach: “Colonial
intervention in terms of ‘discovery’ of Indian art and the establishment of the discipline of art
history thus had far-reaching implications for the cultural life of Asian countries… Perhaps it is
time to question and rethink this legacy” (p. 206).

While the primary focus of these two essays is to emphasize the need for interdisciplinarity and
for adopting more integrated methodologies, the impact of the colonial legacy and the works of
early nationalist writers are difficult to ignore. Three biographical essays in this volume
underline the importance of their works in Indian art history: Upinder Singh’s “Archaeologists
and Architectural Scholars in Nineteenth Century India,” Gautam Sengupta’s “Rajendralala
Mitra and the Formative Years of Indian Art History,” and Ratan Parimoo’s “Stella Kramrisch’s
Approach to Indian Art History.” These papers engage in depth with the writings of Alexander
Cunningham, Rajendralala Mitra and Stella Kramrisch respectively, and effectively locate their
unique position in Indian art historiography.

The paper by S. Settar, “Early Indian Artists, c. 300BCE - 200CE” and the one by R.N. Misra,
“Ancient Indian Artists: Organizations in Lieu of Guilds,” highlight a paradigm shift from the
study of the ‘art’ to the ‘artist’ of ancient India. Analyzing inscriptional records - script and
language, textual evidence and the location of an art work or inscription of the Mauryan and the
post-Mauryan periods, Settar’s paper explores the identities, migration patterns, patronage and
status of these artists. Misra engages with inscriptional records and texts to understand the
groupings of artists in ancient and early medieval India, concluding that ancient Indian artists
worked in loosely-knit collectives and migrated or travelled depending upon the patterns of
patronage rather than being organized in professional guilds.

Among the contributions concerning thematic and region-specific art, are essays by Mandira
Sharma (“Disquisitions on Paintings of Ajanta”), Parul Pandya Dhar (“Understanding ‘Jaina Art’
of Karnataka: Shifting Perspectives”), Christian Luczanits (“Approaches to Historic Indian and
Indo-Tibetan Sculpture”), Ursula Weekes (“Rethinking the Historiography of Imperial Mughal
Painting and its Encounters with Europe”) and M.K. Dhavalikar (“Text and Context: Harappan
Art in Archaeological Perspective”). Sharma’s essay on Ajanta paintings is a critical survey of
scholarly work on the subject from the early nineteenth century to recent times, including details
on the history of conservation. Dhar’s essay provides an excellent historiographical narrative of
the Jaina art of Karnataka, wherein she discusses methodological shifts from the earliest
documentation/cataloguing phase to more text-based, iconographical, stylistic and ritualistic
readings, and the gradually expanding object-domain of Jaina art.
Luczanits in his paper on Indo-Tibetan sculptures discusses important methodological issues in
the study of Indian art: “…we are asking ourselves if there is a modern art historical
methodology that is inherently Indian or if Indian art needs a distinctively Indian art historical
methodological approach. This question is not only informed by the methodological discussions
that gained new ground in recent years but also conforms to India’s new self-consciousness
visible in, for example, politics and economics” (p. 153). While raising pertinent questions about
methodology, Luczanits also discusses the problems of studying art still in worship, in this case,
the Indo-Tibetan clay sculptures at the Tabo Main Temple (Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh).

Ursula Weekes’ essay is on the historiography of Mughal miniatures from its earliest encounters
with Europe, as seen in the writings of European travellers to the most recent methods adopted
by art historians to study Mughal miniatures. She also emphasizes the role of Persian sources.
M.K. Dhavalikar discusses developments in archaeological method and theory in the West and
correlates studies in Harappan art to those paradigms. Seema Bawa’s essay (“Gender in Early
Indian art: Tradition, Methodology, and Problematic”) critically investigates the gender-neutral
stance of existing art historical writings, which she suggests are due to an “inadequate analysis of
gender and power relations in the social history of India…” (p. 112). She feels that a gendered
methodology “is based on three co-axial coordinates of discourse, viz. religion, text, and images”
(p. 114) and is interdisciplinary in nature involving the disciplines of art history, history,
women’s studies, anthropology, sociology and psychology. Bawa employs formulations from
ancient Indian geometry, Ksetraganita, to introduce the reader to a gendered reading of two
jataka medallions from Bharhut and Amaravati.

The photo-essay by Joachin K. Bautze re-creates the lives of the monuments by correlating two
contemporaneous sources – textual and visual. He uses, for example, the personal notes in the
diary of Mrs. Coopland, who, following her husband’s death stayed at the Red Fort in Delhi. He
then reads these alongside photographs of the fort taken before September 1857 (as per Bautze’s
observation). Juxtaposing contemporary textual and visual narratives, Bautze presents a vivid
picture of the representation and reception of Mughal monuments during the colonial period.

As Dhar observes, “There still remain a staggering range of themes, fundamental issues, key
concepts, and theoretical and methodological formulations, which await the focused attentions of
the historians of Indian art” (p. 22). This historiographical journey then is well-timed and much-
needed. One may add that it is perhaps the first comprehensive and updated work on the
historiography of ancient and medieval Indian architecture, sculpture and painting to have
appeared in a very long time. The book presents a number of new issues and methodologies in
studying various aspects of Indian art and will soon become an invaluable resource for all those
engaged with Indian art historical studies.