On and Beyond the Surface

This special issue “On and beyond the surface: South Indian temple walls as text, object, and experience“ developed out of a panel that I organized at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX, in 2016. Since that meeting, our group of panelists have been in continuous dialogue and are now delighted to present a collection of articles that propose fresh approaches to interpreting signs, murals, and inscriptions that are ubiquitous in South Indian religious spaces. The Hindu temple is a place of religious expression, experience, and exchange. Known as a home or palace for its god, or the god’s body itself, these structures feature accommodations fit for royalty. Grand stone temples built in the medieval period throughout southeast India boast long pillared halls, ornamental sculptures, and imposing gates that mark its entrances. In addition to soaring towers that punctuate its skyline, the South Indian landscape is also famous for being utterly packed with stone inscriptions, over a third of the total number of inscriptions known in India today. These tens of thousands of epigraphic “texts“ planted in the southern landscape have long been a rich field of study for historians of religion, politics, and economics in South Asia. Until the very recent past, inscriptions have been analyzed primarily if not exclusively for the denotative content of their texts as records of the past. In fact, most scholars of these sources encounter them as they are printed and published in the South Indian Inscriptions volumes produced by the Archaeological Survey of India. In this form, the inscriptions appear on a smooth page in blocks of text resembling narrative paragraphs. This type of reproduction erases a multitude of information that this special issue argues is essential to their interpretation. In situ, such texts might wrap around a slim slab of stone at the base of a shrine. They might be installed on a pillar set directly into the ground. In some cases, text is painted and illustrated. When these mostly stone writings are collected and printed on flat paper, unfortunately we scholars of inscriptions thereby inflict significant penalties on ourselves — erasures that are further replicated in these articles as we struggle with communicating the color, texture, and shape of billboards and murals in the virtual or printed form, which admittedly have their own aesthetic qualities. Over time, inscriptions and other temple texts have traveled and transformed in their material characteristics. Scholars who try to work back to the stone, to match printed inscriptions to their sites, are intently aware that over time combinations of renovations, cleanings, environmental forces, and preservation efforts have led to the damage and deterioration of sources. Some inscriptions have been relocated, recopied, buried, interrupted, or sandblasted away. In some cases, stone inscriptions are painted or lacquered over or have recently been hidden by hung signs. In the case of contemporary signs that appear in colorful plastic or painted wood, there is a sense of vividness and vitality that is generative, proposing future forms of devotion. Nevertheless, these billboards are also deeply tied to centuries of receipts and reports that are carved into the walls and incorporated into murals. These dynamic facets of the life of temple walls have led the authors of this issue to address the evident tension between visibility and legibility. In some case, neither are possible! Our collective discussion about the understudied relationship between text and image as it occurs in murals, in particular, drove each of us to revisit similar tensions between text and iconography in engraved inscriptions that are typically analyzed solely as text. Through the process of reconsidering legibility and visual meaning, we have aimed to develop more holistic interpretations of the inscriptions that include