"Hinduism" can be seen as a body of Indian religious and spiritual systems which follow the primacy of the Vedas. These notes attempt a cross-cultural description of this complex field seen as an unified discourse. Aspects covered include productive dualities within Hinduism, textual history of Hinduism, major Puranic gods, Hindu practices and the Hindu temple. ...more

Ever since its discovery by Raffles in 1814, Borobudur has been an object of mystery. Its imposing size and the magnificence of its conception and carving aside, the uniqueness both of its structural design and its iconography among religious monuments, not only in its temporal and spatial proximity, but anywhere in the Indic world, has heightened its aspect of enigma, inviting conjecture on its intention. Who made Borobudur, what was it used for and why was it made the way it was made – these and similar questions arise immediately in connection with the monument. Though more than 150 years have passed since its discovery, none of these questions have been definitively answered, though some important preliminary headway has been made, in establishing the period of its construction and in conclusively identifying the textual sources of the carving. ...more

Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) was a Bengali poet who marks the transition to Bengali Modernist poetry. Necessitated into the career most common to modern poets, he was a teacher of English in Barisal (Bangladesh) and Calcutta and was well-read in Mallarme, Rimbaud, Valery, Pound, Eliot and the like, whom he often references in his prose writings. Jibanananda relies largely on imagistic and symbolical means to express in his poems a complexity which grapples with the subjective realities of modern urban life. The range of Jibanananda's poems far exceeds the scope I have outlined in this essay, but my purpose here was only to touch on some important repeating themes and concerns in his work. I believe that in work of this kind, new directions towards the Future Poetry announced by Sri Aurobindo were taken, directions that have added to the store of approaches that might be utilized in the climb to a higher utterance, which yet recognize the range and complexity of consciousness in its engagement with modern existence. ...more

Abanindranath Tagore presented three paintings for the 1903 Delhi Durbar organized by Governor General, Lord Curzon to commemorate the coronation of British emperor Edward VII. By looking st these three paintings based on the Orientalist fantasy of the Taj Mahal and the Mughal empire, this article draws out a thinly disguised allegory on the relationship between imperialism and artistic subjectivity and points to the hybrid constitution of the nation and the work of art as a response to colonialism. ...more

The "Krishna Lila" series represents Abanindranath Tagore's point of departure initiating his engagement with colonialism and modernity. In this article, I locate Abanindranath Tagore within the regional cultural history of Bengal, the larger cultural context of the Bengal Renaissance and the local history of the Jorasanko Tagores of Kolkata. The trope of the Krishna Lila as a historical carrier of revolutionary ideas is traced in its semantic transformations through these situated histories leading to its artistic manifestation in the work of Abanindranath as the locus of communitarian messages resistant to modernity and constitutive of an alternate intercultural national space. ...more

This article makes a comparative study of the Japanese ideologue Okakura Kakuzo and the Indian artist Abanindranath Tagore with a view to developing homologous processive structures of colonial-national engagement. Issues of "hybridity" and "cultural purity" are explored along with notions of strategic essentialism and the construction of a national art history as a field of hybrid discourse. A download from ideaindia.com ...more

What has been the relationship between art and power in India? How have patrons authorized art and been authorized by it in turn? What is the status and understanding of artistic authorship and its place in the rituals of authorization? This essay takes up these questions in a consideration which spans medieval Hindu India, Moghul Imperial India and Colonial modern India and sees the shifts of power in these terms and their meanings through Indian history. A chapter in the book project Visual Art of India: History, Theory, Method, being written at present. ...more

This article fleshes out the history of the Western and Indian considerations of Indian art, from early to modern instances and tries thereby to see the shifting location of Indian art within the discipline of art history. Early western consideration of Indian art dismissed it as monstrous, indecent and uninteresting. ...more

This article looks at the way in which Indian painting since the 16th c. has assimilated western art in hybrid forms. In the modern period, it theorizes a vertical and horizontal dimensionality to hybridity in the colonial-national interchange. The art of Gaganendranath Tagore is finally studied in its historical development to demonstrate the operation of both horizontal and vertical forms of hybridity in his paintings. ...more

This essay looks at the early nationalist movement of cultural politics in India which has been called the Bengal Renaissance and tries to contextualize the Bengal School of Art within it. It pays attention to the questions of revivalism and tradition in both these movements and tries to draw out the complex forces at work in fashioning their expressions. ...more