3368a8a0-3911-496b-a1b6-350583d55b3520260429143809Depositor Namedepositor_email@address.comRUA Metadata ExporterDeborah L.SteinUniversity of California, Berkeleyhttps://ror.org/01an7q238Ritual and the Record in StoneThe Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan—the Ambikā Temple in Jagat and the Śri Ékliṅgjī Temple Complex in Kailāshpurī—the author looks beyond their divergent sectarian affiliations and patronage structures to underscore many aspects of common practice. This book offers new and extremely valuable insights into these important monuments, illuminating the entangled politics of antiquity and revealing whether a monument’s ritual record is affirmed as continuous and hence hoary or dismissed as discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies. The Hegemony of Heritage enriches theoretical constructs with ethnographic description and asks us to reexamine notions such as archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra.“Makes visible the multiple methodologies that can be mobilized to write nuanced histories of Hindu temple architecture. The author’s approach is both refreshing and new. Skillfully weaving in postcolonial theory, object ontologies, and affect theory, among other approaches, the book opens up an exciting paradigm in the study of South Asian art and architecture.” SUGATA RAY, Assistant Professor of South Asian Art and Architecture, University of California, BerkeleyThe Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan—the Ambikā Temple in Jagat and the Śri Ékliṅgjī Temple Complex in Kailāshpurī—the author looks beyond their divergent sectarian affiliations and patronage structures to underscore many aspects of common practice. This book offers new and extremely valuable insights into these important monuments, illuminating the entangled politics of antiquity and revealing whether a monument’s ritual record is affirmed as continuous and hence hoary or dismissed as discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies. The Hegemony of Heritage enriches theoretical constructs with ethnographic description and asks us to reexamine notions such as archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra.“Makes visible the multiple methodologies that can be mobilized to write nuanced histories of Hindu temple architecture. The author’s approach is both refreshing and new. Skillfully weaving in postcolonial theory, object ontologies, and affect theory, among other approaches, the book opens up an exciting paradigm in the study of South Asian art and architecture.” SUGATA RAY, Assistant Professor of South Asian Art and Architecture, University of California, Berkeley05042018978-0-520-29633-6978-0-520-96888-2978-0-520-96888-2978-0-520-96888-2University of California PressCaliforniahttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/10.1525/luminos.46https://www.luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1525/luminos.46https://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/e84971cf-17e4-4a3c-9364-21395d20c8b0.pdfhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/e84971cf-17e4-4a3c-9364-21395d20c8b0.pdfThe “Hindu” Temple in Diachronic Context introduces the idea of how early medieval Indian temples and archaeological sites are put back into use today. Multi-sectarian architecture, ?aiva, ?akta, Vai?nava, and Jain serve an increasingly diverse set of people in the twenty-first century. Many temples and sites across India serve as active catalysts of ritual activity, but few articulate as clear a set of diachronic histories as those found in the kingdom of Mew?r. This book compares two key tenth-century sites in southern R?j?sthan to reveal very different sectarian foci and histories of religious use.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.ahttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.ahttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/f9ed8d89-8686-42ff-aeec-f8f9603fe6f7.pdfChapter 1: Temple as Geographic Marker remaps the tenth century temple landscape of Mew?r, Chhapan, and Vagada along fluvial routes. Rather than relying on dynastic or stylistic categories alone, clusters of temples with iconographic, sectarian, and artistic affinities across Uparam?la and M??apa?a reveal groups along the Banas and the Som Rivers. Some temples share tenth-century dynastic links to the Guhilas, or sectarian links to the Pa?upata ?aivas, others reveal no specific inscriptional link to dynasty or sect. This chapter introduces the core temples of this study, including sites previously unknown, unphotographed, and/or unpublished in English such as ?a? found near Jagat in 2002, and Hita found on the road between Bambora and Chitt?r in 2009. New sites change our understanding of tantra, mantra, and routes beyond dynasty and sect alone.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.bhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.bhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/ecfdd6ae-9485-4c44-a3bc-0bfefc33923e.pdfChapter 2: Temple as Catalyst forms the core of this original work. Predicated on the premise that the temple serves as a spark to ignite all of the human action that radiates out from it’s numinous and architectural core, this chapter examines renovation and religious merit in the field. Is a beautifully carved silver gate installed at Ékali?gj?, somehow more valuable than the gold and silver paint used to paint the inter sanctum of the tenth-century Ambik? Temple in Jagat? Using a diverse range of theorists from Adorno and Kant to R. C. Agrawala and Derrida, the reader has a chance to begin this book with an examination of the fraught idea of taste. How do conflicting notions of taste impact the aesthetic present, future, and ideological pasts of the early medieval monuments we study in Northwestern India? The tension between preservation and use is contextualized more broadly within the category of World Heritage at large, with sites such as Angkor Wat.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.chttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.chttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/148d8296-5dae-4e7d-b1ba-4eddf140eeb3.pdfChapter 3: Temple as Royal Abode explores the origin myths of Mew?ri glory across a backdrop of archaeological evidence in Southern Rajasthan. With a focus on kirttistambha, we see for the first time the interior sculpture of an eight story tower, which can be considered as one of India’s earliest museums, or visual archives. Encased in this impressive monument misunderstood as a victory tower, the sculptural program of the tower of glory reveals what the “entire cosmos” looked like in the minds of the patrons, architects, and sutradharas of King Kumbha’s era. The chapter concludes with a myth and image look at women as both agents in their own right and as the personification of ideals. The mythic poet M?rabai in Mew?r, the daughter of Kumbha named Ramabai who lived in J?war, and the infamous Queen Padmini of Chitt?r give us three different examples of how fifteenth century architecture and ideas reflect different roles of Mewari women as architectural patron, as a saint, and as a queen.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.dhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.dhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/19bc136f-5b2c-43ef-813c-58b78c39b069.pdfChapter 4: Temple as Palimpsest examines the diachronic historical record left in the “Sultanate Period” through inscriptions on early medieval temples. This period between the Sisodia glory at Chitt?r, and the Guhila hegemony from N?gad?/ Ékali?gj? is particularly interesting in a region that was in a triangle of power in Malwa, Delhi, and Gujarat. Protected by the Aravelli Mountains, we find monastic networks, and not dynastic ones, were the most powerful connections leaving their record in stone across the landscape of what is now Southern Rajasthan. A period often ignored by historians in this region, the collection of archaeological sites, paintings, monasteries, and important places begin to tell alternative stories rooted in non-dynastic trade networks, dynastic conflict, and local multi-sectarian patronage of monuments.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.ehttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.ehttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/8b5e831b-440b-4c7a-bb76-039c957d6994.pdfChapter 5: Temple as Ritual Center returns to the “period of origin” to focus closely on a core cohort of temples from M?dap??a, during the time when they were built in the second half of the tenth century. The Guhila dynasty is referenced in an inscription that records multisectarian debates held at ?ri Ékali?gj?/N?gad? in 971 CE. Parallel visual forms of icons, such as the li?ga, provide records in stone that complement textual references such as the Soma?ambhupaddhati, leading to a search for new sites including previously unpublished temples of ?a?, known prior only from inscriptions in Hindi history books by Ojha. At Unv?s and Jagat, some of the earliest goddess temples in regional style reveal tantric evidence in the programmatic approach to iconography, myth, and story telling left in the record in stone. Goddesses such as K??ma?kar?, Durg?-Mahi?amardin?, and C?mu??? lend new visual evidence to a growing body of knowledge about medieval tantra and mantra through literature and translation of texts.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.fhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.fhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/bd6454e8-ae02-4ff1-836e-0d60066cf67c.pdfChapter 6: Temple as praxis examines local Rajasthani rituals in the twenty-first centuries at early medieval temple sites. Myth and Ritual studies methods from anthropology and folklore illuminate the tantalizing parallels between medieval iconography and contemporary ritual. Is there such a thing as a portrait of a deity? What is the role of photography? This chapter includes ethnographic fieldwork accounts of holidays such as Da?a M?t? P?j?, ??talasaptami, Mah??ivr?tri, and the annual Tailor’s Fair to highlight the important role of these medieval monuments in contemporary praxis.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.ghttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.ghttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/e27f86b5-5c5a-449a-9d48-0fa3eee332c1.pdfChapter 7: This chapter examines the Temple as Legal Body to determine how modern post-independence laws impact the aesthetic future of temples in India. With a special consideration of tax law since the 1970s, the nature of temple trust administration, and the comparative study of public state departments and private administrative bodies this chapter starts to explain why some of the archaeological sites studied in the book may look the way they do, and/or enter the sensorium through particular modes of praxis. The postcolonial specter of the field of archaeology itself haunts this chapter.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.hhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.hhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/fd7d64b1-27ff-4174-9b09-db7b03ee23ca.pdfThis conclusion situates this book in relation to a growing field of heritage studies by contextualizing the importance of praxis at archaeological monuments. The reader discovers their own preferences for one set of data over another in the chapters that precede the conclusion. Diachronic methods set different periods of history into dialogue with each other to highlight what we choose to remember and what we forget. This chapter concludes with a revelation of the author’s subjective position in relation to both theory and praxis, and then invites the reader to depart from the author’s subjective position, to see the video of performance that local people wanted the researcher to record instead.0504201810.1525/luminos.46.ihttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.46.ihttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/53/files/a26269a4-e313-459e-bf6d-9dca607bae2f.pdf