Pub Date : 2021-11-25DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.2001250
A. Kanungo
Since mid-second millennium BCE, glass bangles have been an item of mass consumption throughout South Asia. The archaeological community has spent considerable time and energy reconstructing ancient cities with evidence of glass making and/or glass working workshops and has formulated many hypotheses. The functional use of the kiln and the ways that different kinds of glass products, including bangle were produced is still shrouded in uncertainty. Jointless bangles have been considered as auspicious and they dominate the archaeological bangle assemblages. At times, glass bangles are used as one of the criteria to hypothesise ancient demographics. Their usage patterns of glass bangles and their relation to socio-cultural milieu, continuously create more broken pieces than intact bangles in cultural deposit. The fact that glass bangles are given as offerings in lieu of wellbeing and that broken bangles are recycled present challenges for any archaeological reconstructions and inferences. Notwithstanding these challenges, examination of the traditional jointless bangle production centre in western Uttar Pradesh facilitates a more insightful understanding of the nature of meaningful socialistic and technocratic affordances constitutive to bangles. This paper records ethnographically the production cycle and the functional use of bangles. The evolution of bangle making furnaces is also discussed.
{"title":"Glass Bangles in India: Antiquity, Functional Use and Traditional Production","authors":"A. Kanungo","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2021.2001250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2021.2001250","url":null,"abstract":"Since mid-second millennium BCE, glass bangles have been an item of mass consumption throughout South Asia. The archaeological community has spent considerable time and energy reconstructing ancient cities with evidence of glass making and/or glass working workshops and has formulated many hypotheses. The functional use of the kiln and the ways that different kinds of glass products, including bangle were produced is still shrouded in uncertainty. Jointless bangles have been considered as auspicious and they dominate the archaeological bangle assemblages. At times, glass bangles are used as one of the criteria to hypothesise ancient demographics. Their usage patterns of glass bangles and their relation to socio-cultural milieu, continuously create more broken pieces than intact bangles in cultural deposit. The fact that glass bangles are given as offerings in lieu of wellbeing and that broken bangles are recycled present challenges for any archaeological reconstructions and inferences. Notwithstanding these challenges, examination of the traditional jointless bangle production centre in western Uttar Pradesh facilitates a more insightful understanding of the nature of meaningful socialistic and technocratic affordances constitutive to bangles. This paper records ethnographically the production cycle and the functional use of bangles. The evolution of bangle making furnaces is also discussed.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82288260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-17DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.1991635
S. Gunasekaran
The paper aims at tracing the genealogy of modern Tamil sexual literature in the medieval/early modern prostitutional texts written with the patronage of local landlords and rulers, namely Pāḷaiyakkārars, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries AD. Ruling as feudatories of the Nayaka, the courts of these local rulers emerged as major centers for literary patronage and production. In the history of Tamil literature, this period also witnessed the growth of many new literary genres, often classified into the category of minor genres (cirrilakkiyam), composed aiming at an altogether new category of consumers beyond the usual courtly circles. Now, in the erotic textual representation, the sacredness or hubris associated with eroticism gradually reduced. Instead of narrating God’s or the King’s sexual encounters with the courtesans, ordinary men’s relationship with a prostitute became a major theme. Viṟaliviṭu Tūtu was one such popular literary genre of this time. The article discusses the social context of the texts produced under this genre and brings forth a ‘colonial debate’ held in favor of/or against classifying them as ‘obscene’. This colonial intervention created a tension and rethinking among Tamil scholars. With the advent of print, when these texts were reproduced from the original palm-leaf manuscripts, the Tamil scholars (editors) were haunted by an ethical dilemma, which forced them to give a cautionary note requesting the text should not be read for sexual pleasure. The article ends with a survey of twentieth century Tamil sexual literature. Some of them reproduced the Viṟaliviṭu Tūtu in prose form with ‘obscene’ photos/drawings of women, while others narrated stories of prostitutes and their business, claiming to give a moral message to the society. In this context, whether these late medieval texts were composed to ‘educate or to arouse’ their readers/listeners is a question which finds no convincing answer.
{"title":"Pornography Pre-modern: Viṟaliviṭu Tūtu and the Genealogy of Tamil Sexual Literature","authors":"S. Gunasekaran","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2021.1991635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2021.1991635","url":null,"abstract":"The paper aims at tracing the genealogy of modern Tamil sexual literature in the medieval/early modern prostitutional texts written with the patronage of local landlords and rulers, namely Pāḷaiyakkārars, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries AD. Ruling as feudatories of the Nayaka, the courts of these local rulers emerged as major centers for literary patronage and production. In the history of Tamil literature, this period also witnessed the growth of many new literary genres, often classified into the category of minor genres (cirrilakkiyam), composed aiming at an altogether new category of consumers beyond the usual courtly circles. Now, in the erotic textual representation, the sacredness or hubris associated with eroticism gradually reduced. Instead of narrating God’s or the King’s sexual encounters with the courtesans, ordinary men’s relationship with a prostitute became a major theme. Viṟaliviṭu Tūtu was one such popular literary genre of this time. The article discusses the social context of the texts produced under this genre and brings forth a ‘colonial debate’ held in favor of/or against classifying them as ‘obscene’. This colonial intervention created a tension and rethinking among Tamil scholars. With the advent of print, when these texts were reproduced from the original palm-leaf manuscripts, the Tamil scholars (editors) were haunted by an ethical dilemma, which forced them to give a cautionary note requesting the text should not be read for sexual pleasure. The article ends with a survey of twentieth century Tamil sexual literature. Some of them reproduced the Viṟaliviṭu Tūtu in prose form with ‘obscene’ photos/drawings of women, while others narrated stories of prostitutes and their business, claiming to give a moral message to the society. In this context, whether these late medieval texts were composed to ‘educate or to arouse’ their readers/listeners is a question which finds no convincing answer.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88589404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-27DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.1967610
Sarah Keller
The introduction of the underground cistern in South Asia, through Western India, offers a fascinating case study of knowledge migration and technological transfers between West and South Asia. It addresses the question of past hydraulic technologies used in the Western Indian cities and the modalities of a fundamental shift in the relationship to water during the 16th century. The present paper is based on my surveys and architectural studies of underground cisterns (tānkā) in Ahmedabad, urbs prima of Gujarat from 1411 onwards. It describes the tānkā system and its archaeological characteristics, with a special focus on the early reservoir of the Shāh Vajihudin Alvi khānqāh. This study, compared with evidences in other urban centres of Western India, brings to light the emergence of underground cisterns in the urban context from the late 16th century onwards. It also shows the pioneering role played by the large cistern built in the Shāh Vajihudin Alvi khānqāh. Beyond this archaeological work, the paper discusses the causes of this radical technological change, and addresses the issue of cultural and religious continuity.
{"title":"Cloistering Water: Technological Rupture, Religious Continuity in Sixteenth Century Western India","authors":"Sarah Keller","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2021.1967610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2021.1967610","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction of the underground cistern in South Asia, through Western India, offers a fascinating case study of knowledge migration and technological transfers between West and South Asia. It addresses the question of past hydraulic technologies used in the Western Indian cities and the modalities of a fundamental shift in the relationship to water during the 16th century. The present paper is based on my surveys and architectural studies of underground cisterns (tānkā) in Ahmedabad, urbs prima of Gujarat from 1411 onwards. It describes the tānkā system and its archaeological characteristics, with a special focus on the early reservoir of the Shāh Vajihudin Alvi khānqāh. This study, compared with evidences in other urban centres of Western India, brings to light the emergence of underground cisterns in the urban context from the late 16th century onwards. It also shows the pioneering role played by the large cistern built in the Shāh Vajihudin Alvi khānqāh. Beyond this archaeological work, the paper discusses the causes of this radical technological change, and addresses the issue of cultural and religious continuity.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88818249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.1997495
Anuja Joshi
The article explores a unique set of sculptural panels illustrating the stages of kuṇḍalinīyoga on c. thirteenth-century CE temple in Maharashtra, India. The panels depict stages of awakening and rise of kuṇḍalinī by using the imagery of a serpent which is commonly employed in texts for describing the nature and the form of kuṇḍalinī. The article deciphers these panels with the help of Śaiva tantric, haṭhayogic and Nātha texts in Sanskrit as well as the literary works in Marathi including those of the Maharashtrian saint poets and the Līḷācaritra. These panels constitute an important archaeological source for understanding the nature of yoga traditions of the early second millennium CE. They stand at a cusp of a period when the kuṇḍalinī-based yoga was becoming a dominant paradigm of bindu-oriented haṭhayogic traditions. The presence of the panels illustrating kuṇḍalinīyoga on the exterior of a temple body highlights the provenance of this concept in the public domain, i.e. beyond the confines of the esoteric, ascetic traditions. The analysis of the panels also underlines their relevance for understanding regional currents within the traditions of kuṇḍalinī-based yoga.
{"title":"A Unique Sculptural Illustration of Kuṇḍalinīyoga at Jogeśvara Temple, Devalane, Maharashtra","authors":"Anuja Joshi","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2021.1997495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2021.1997495","url":null,"abstract":"The article explores a unique set of sculptural panels illustrating the stages of kuṇḍalinīyoga on c. thirteenth-century CE temple in Maharashtra, India. The panels depict stages of awakening and rise of kuṇḍalinī by using the imagery of a serpent which is commonly employed in texts for describing the nature and the form of kuṇḍalinī. The article deciphers these panels with the help of Śaiva tantric, haṭhayogic and Nātha texts in Sanskrit as well as the literary works in Marathi including those of the Maharashtrian saint poets and the Līḷācaritra. These panels constitute an important archaeological source for understanding the nature of yoga traditions of the early second millennium CE. They stand at a cusp of a period when the kuṇḍalinī-based yoga was becoming a dominant paradigm of bindu-oriented haṭhayogic traditions. The presence of the panels illustrating kuṇḍalinīyoga on the exterior of a temple body highlights the provenance of this concept in the public domain, i.e. beyond the confines of the esoteric, ascetic traditions. The analysis of the panels also underlines their relevance for understanding regional currents within the traditions of kuṇḍalinī-based yoga.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87648177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.2019409
Niharika Dinkar
As the Delta variant ravaged through Indian cities in the summer of 2021, the glossy sheen on the Indian economic success story appeared to be coming apart. Viewers were confronted with photographs of crowded crematoriums on the front pages of newspapers and videos of breathless patients shared with trigger warning signs made their way as the lead story on international news programs. Just a few months earlier, images of the mass migration of workers on foot and crowded on trucks, buses and trains had exposed the shadow workforce that kept the economy afloat. For a governing dispensation that had astutely exploited the power of the media image, the diseased and dying bodies on screens were stubborn reminders of the fickle indeterminacy of images that refused to be subsumed under the sunny airbrushed optimism of the ‘achhe din’ promised by the government in slick advertising images. The official response was evasive, seeking to clamp down on the circulation of images and grossly underreport the number of the dead, even as its supporters sought to distract viewers by targeting the photographers and journalists instead for their reporting with accusations of sensationalizing Covid deaths. Meanwhile, photographs and videos competed in bringing more and more distressing sights to viewers’ screens, drawing their gaze towards the suffering. In this clash between a deluge of images propped up by news business models clamoring to attract eyeballs with ever more lurid pictures, and an attempted proscription of these potent images by state authorities and institutions through tactics of evasion and distraction, questions of what we see and how we see were starkly laid out as sites of power. As visual culture assumes greater agency in national and international affairs, the essays in this issue ask for a closer examination of practices of seeing and spectatorial positions available to viewers in their engagement with media and visual culture. While film and media scholarship has engaged productively with questions of spectatorship in examinations of contemporary media, this issue asks how we may historicize debates in visual culture by paying closer attention to the politics and practices of seeing. Historical scholarship on the gaze in South Asia has remained wedded to the powerful narrative of darshan, the reciprocal gaze between the deity and the devotee, that has displayed a protean power to adapt to new technologies. We suggest however that a simplistic reliance on darshan has flattened the heterogeneity of the visual landscape in South Asia and obfuscated other ways of seeing that populate the teeming visuality of its multitudes. By taking up under-explored practices of seeing, this collection parses open the visual archive to tease out alternative genealogies of vision and visuality that resonate with contemporary concerns around the politics of sight, misrecognition and the formative role of vision in the constitution of subjects. The papers here fol
{"title":"Tirchhi Nazar: The Gaze in South Asia beyond Darshan","authors":"Niharika Dinkar","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2021.2019409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2021.2019409","url":null,"abstract":"As the Delta variant ravaged through Indian cities in the summer of 2021, the glossy sheen on the Indian economic success story appeared to be coming apart. Viewers were confronted with photographs of crowded crematoriums on the front pages of newspapers and videos of breathless patients shared with trigger warning signs made their way as the lead story on international news programs. Just a few months earlier, images of the mass migration of workers on foot and crowded on trucks, buses and trains had exposed the shadow workforce that kept the economy afloat. For a governing dispensation that had astutely exploited the power of the media image, the diseased and dying bodies on screens were stubborn reminders of the fickle indeterminacy of images that refused to be subsumed under the sunny airbrushed optimism of the ‘achhe din’ promised by the government in slick advertising images. The official response was evasive, seeking to clamp down on the circulation of images and grossly underreport the number of the dead, even as its supporters sought to distract viewers by targeting the photographers and journalists instead for their reporting with accusations of sensationalizing Covid deaths. Meanwhile, photographs and videos competed in bringing more and more distressing sights to viewers’ screens, drawing their gaze towards the suffering. In this clash between a deluge of images propped up by news business models clamoring to attract eyeballs with ever more lurid pictures, and an attempted proscription of these potent images by state authorities and institutions through tactics of evasion and distraction, questions of what we see and how we see were starkly laid out as sites of power. As visual culture assumes greater agency in national and international affairs, the essays in this issue ask for a closer examination of practices of seeing and spectatorial positions available to viewers in their engagement with media and visual culture. While film and media scholarship has engaged productively with questions of spectatorship in examinations of contemporary media, this issue asks how we may historicize debates in visual culture by paying closer attention to the politics and practices of seeing. Historical scholarship on the gaze in South Asia has remained wedded to the powerful narrative of darshan, the reciprocal gaze between the deity and the devotee, that has displayed a protean power to adapt to new technologies. We suggest however that a simplistic reliance on darshan has flattened the heterogeneity of the visual landscape in South Asia and obfuscated other ways of seeing that populate the teeming visuality of its multitudes. By taking up under-explored practices of seeing, this collection parses open the visual archive to tease out alternative genealogies of vision and visuality that resonate with contemporary concerns around the politics of sight, misrecognition and the formative role of vision in the constitution of subjects. The papers here fol","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89172561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2022.2030945
A. Malhotra
{"title":"Amritsar1984: A City Remembers","authors":"A. Malhotra","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2022.2030945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2022.2030945","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74745733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.1988245
M. Sehdev, Piyel Haldar
In this essay, we investigate the aesthetic and material qualities of South Asian paper, and paper-like mediums including leaves, scrolls, and cloth – and the means through which they invite the gaze. The very materiality of paper, we suggest, structures the reception and interpretation of what is written upon it. In Western bureaucracy, the transition from oral to print culture, during the 15th – 16th centuries, made use of the empty page as a surface upon which to create chart-based forms that could reduce the mediations of narrative, thereby increasing legibility and directing the gaze in an economical and forensic manner. While similar acts of transposition have taken hold in South Asian bureaucracies, largely in consequence of Western colonial practices, we claim that South Asian material practices persist in giving contemporary paper documents a different significance. Our essay considers the artifice enabled by paper and its precursors – not through abstract demonstrations of sovereignty, but through the immanent capacities of paper for rolling, folding, and covering. That legal authority can be represented through the grand symbolism of office (coats of arms; state emblems) has been analysed by recent scholars. Our concern, however, is with the corporeal and visual, with handling and viewing, and with way documents can be manipulated in ways that betray their power. Picking up paper from the ancient, medieval, colonial and contemporary periods, across South Asia, we investigate the palm-leaf printed manuscript, calligraphic documents, and other paper forms, while also attending to the present-day documentary practices of litigants in the Indian lower courts.
{"title":"The Folded Gaze: Looking at Legal Documents in South Asia","authors":"M. Sehdev, Piyel Haldar","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2021.1988245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2021.1988245","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, we investigate the aesthetic and material qualities of South Asian paper, and paper-like mediums including leaves, scrolls, and cloth – and the means through which they invite the gaze. The very materiality of paper, we suggest, structures the reception and interpretation of what is written upon it. In Western bureaucracy, the transition from oral to print culture, during the 15th – 16th centuries, made use of the empty page as a surface upon which to create chart-based forms that could reduce the mediations of narrative, thereby increasing legibility and directing the gaze in an economical and forensic manner. While similar acts of transposition have taken hold in South Asian bureaucracies, largely in consequence of Western colonial practices, we claim that South Asian material practices persist in giving contemporary paper documents a different significance. Our essay considers the artifice enabled by paper and its precursors – not through abstract demonstrations of sovereignty, but through the immanent capacities of paper for rolling, folding, and covering. That legal authority can be represented through the grand symbolism of office (coats of arms; state emblems) has been analysed by recent scholars. Our concern, however, is with the corporeal and visual, with handling and viewing, and with way documents can be manipulated in ways that betray their power. Picking up paper from the ancient, medieval, colonial and contemporary periods, across South Asia, we investigate the palm-leaf printed manuscript, calligraphic documents, and other paper forms, while also attending to the present-day documentary practices of litigants in the Indian lower courts.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85863827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.1980284
Niharika Dinkar
In colonial India, the elephant was embraced by the British as a military asset, as well as for the symbolic value it held as an insignia of royal power, drawing upon a body of cultural practices sustained by the ruling elite. At the same time, the circulation of elephants along imperial circuits as they began to be traded and exhibited in menageries and traveling circuses brought them into a different exhibitionary order, that nevertheless kept alive an element of Oriental pageantry. Ubiquitous in colonial imagery of nineteenth century India, the elephant also featured prominently in parables of vision such as the widely circulated folktale of the ‘blind men and the elephant’ or the phrase ‘seeing the elephant’, which acquired traction in the mid-nineteenth century, as a sight worth beholding. This paper explores the visual consumption of the elephant in an economy where it was exhibited to be seen, and the spectacle of the animal, both dead and alive predominated. It identifies a repertoire of visual practices fashioned around ‘elephant seeing’ that negotiated attitudes to the animal world and spoke to an imperial subject who saw in the animal, a representation of the colonial world and its resources serve at its disposal.
{"title":"Seeing the Elephant: Animal Spectatorship and the Imperial Gaze in Colonial India","authors":"Niharika Dinkar","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2021.1980284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2021.1980284","url":null,"abstract":"In colonial India, the elephant was embraced by the British as a military asset, as well as for the symbolic value it held as an insignia of royal power, drawing upon a body of cultural practices sustained by the ruling elite. At the same time, the circulation of elephants along imperial circuits as they began to be traded and exhibited in menageries and traveling circuses brought them into a different exhibitionary order, that nevertheless kept alive an element of Oriental pageantry. Ubiquitous in colonial imagery of nineteenth century India, the elephant also featured prominently in parables of vision such as the widely circulated folktale of the ‘blind men and the elephant’ or the phrase ‘seeing the elephant’, which acquired traction in the mid-nineteenth century, as a sight worth beholding. This paper explores the visual consumption of the elephant in an economy where it was exhibited to be seen, and the spectacle of the animal, both dead and alive predominated. It identifies a repertoire of visual practices fashioned around ‘elephant seeing’ that negotiated attitudes to the animal world and spoke to an imperial subject who saw in the animal, a representation of the colonial world and its resources serve at its disposal.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78943007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2022.2034337
Venugopal Maddipati
{"title":"Obituary for Frederick Asher","authors":"Venugopal Maddipati","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2022.2034337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2022.2034337","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77626803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-07DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.1922208
Rebecca M. Brown
In 1963, the Chennai-based artist KCS Paniker shifted his mode of painting from ethereal, floating, sketchy bodies to a series entitled Words and Symbols that occupied him until his death in 1977. These paintings combine writing, symbols, geometry, equations, charts, rivers, trees, and a multitude of birds and animals. The text – in English, Malayalam, and Sanskrit – cannot be read beyond a word or two, the diagrams hint at astrology and birth charts, and the symbols echo ancient linear drawings and math textbooks. Paniker’s use of paint enhances the experience of nearly understanding: he works in layers, ending with a thin cream of pigment, painting over symbols or even his own signature. The invitation to gaze, only to deflect it elsewhere into a fragmented and shifting experience of looking, is perhaps most pointed in the works he paints on anodized aluminum. In these, the surface of the metal peeks through, not enough to provide a clear reflection, but enough to create productive misreadings, confounding surface and ground, color and light, or line and unmarked space. Paniker’s Words and Symbols works allow entry only through a sideways glance; they deflect the gaze, thereby questioning the solidity of seeing, reading, and knowing.
{"title":"KCS Paniker’s Painterly Deflections","authors":"Rebecca M. Brown","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2021.1922208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2021.1922208","url":null,"abstract":"In 1963, the Chennai-based artist KCS Paniker shifted his mode of painting from ethereal, floating, sketchy bodies to a series entitled Words and Symbols that occupied him until his death in 1977. These paintings combine writing, symbols, geometry, equations, charts, rivers, trees, and a multitude of birds and animals. The text – in English, Malayalam, and Sanskrit – cannot be read beyond a word or two, the diagrams hint at astrology and birth charts, and the symbols echo ancient linear drawings and math textbooks. Paniker’s use of paint enhances the experience of nearly understanding: he works in layers, ending with a thin cream of pigment, painting over symbols or even his own signature. The invitation to gaze, only to deflect it elsewhere into a fragmented and shifting experience of looking, is perhaps most pointed in the works he paints on anodized aluminum. In these, the surface of the metal peeks through, not enough to provide a clear reflection, but enough to create productive misreadings, confounding surface and ground, color and light, or line and unmarked space. Paniker’s Words and Symbols works allow entry only through a sideways glance; they deflect the gaze, thereby questioning the solidity of seeing, reading, and knowing.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78078127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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