Reenchantment- Masterworks of Sculpture in Village Temples of Bihar and Orissa

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

About the Book Reenchantment: Masterworks of Sculpture in Village Temples of Bibar and Orissa is book of more than 250 photographs of sculptures and shrines within 57 chapters, each accompanied by explanatory texts (300 to 2000 words each) introducing village temple sites with 8th-13th century sculptures.

The book is introduced with an 8500 word essay entitled "Reenchantment & Divinity's Identity Liquidity" on Buddhist imagery in contemporary Hindu contexts and vice versa, issues of Buddho-Brahmanical iconographic exchange, and historical examples of appropriation or re-identification.

The villages included are in south Bihar around Gaya, Bodh Gaya, Nalanda and Rajgir, as well as a selection of rarely documented village shrines of north Bihar (Mithila), in Begusarai, Darbhanga and Madhuvani districts. In Orissa, village sites represented are in Puri, Cuttack, Jajpur, Baleswar, Mayurbhanj, and Khorda districts.

The majority of the photographs were taken by the author in 2016-17 while conducting research in eastern India, along with a supplementary group of comparative photographs taken at some of the same sites in 1989-90.

About the Author Rob Linrothe is Associate Professor and current Chair of the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, USA. He earned a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. A version of Linrothe's dissertation became Ruthless Compassion: Wrathful Deities in Indo-Tibetan Esoteric Buddhist Art (1999). In 2016-2017 Linrothe received a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies to do fieldwork in eastern India on 8 to 13th century sculpture in Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha. His recent books are Seeing Into Stone: Pre-Buddhist Petroglyphs and Zangskar's Early Inhabitants (2016); Visible Heritage: Essays on the Art and Architecture of Greater Ladakh, edited with Heinrich Pöll (2016); and Collecting Paradise: Buddhist Art of Kashmir and its Legacies (2015, with contributions by Melissa Kerin and Christian Luczanits). Recent essays include: "Thirty Years On: Revisiting the Chuchikzhal Complex in Karsha," Orientations 51 no. 6 (2020); "Photography, painting, and prints in Ladakh and Zangskar: Intermediality and Transmediality," Etudes mongoles et siberiennes, centrasiatiques et Tibetans 51 (2020 online); "Art Historical Evidence for a Cult of the Triloknath Lokesvara in Zangskar," Journal of Tibetology 21 (2020); "Deeply Rooted Ritual: The Plurality of Sponsor Couples in Eastern Indian Sculpture, Ca. Eighth to Thirteenth Century, and an Explanatory Hypothesis," Journal of Bengal Art 24 (2019); and "Utterly False, Utterly Undeniable': The Akanistha Shrine Murals of Takden Phuntsokling Monastery," Archives of Asian Art (2017).

Introduction The word enchantment and such variants as T disenchantment and reenchantment have had a range of definitions, stemming from Max Weber's influential If controversial concept of "the disenchantment of the world" with the rise of so-called scientific rationality. These terms often have social, political, and/or economic connotations, such as those of Akeel Bilgrami,' but also have cultural resonance, as in Suzi Gablik's reenchantment reclamation project after modernism's rejection of the spiritual in art.? I have chosen to use reenchantment in this book's title for two reasons. First, for the most part the objects photographed and presented here were not preserved and transmitted aboveground in an unbroken continuity across the centuries. Rather, most of them were found while digging wells, irrigation canals, and septic tanks, or were uncovered while plowing fields. Many of them resurfaced in the process of dredging tanks and ponds, where for various reasons in the distant past they were abandoned. They are found not through archaeological excavation but by villagers in Bihar and Orissa going about their daily lives. Upon discovery of the sculptures, an immediate and hasty "reestablishment" generally follows, in the sense of setting up shrines around them and then, with a greater or lesser degree of formality, reconsecrating them for worship. By doing so, their original purpose as a deity is restored and they can no longer be treated simply as carved artifact and found object. That is the first, and primary, sense in which I use the term reenchantment here.

**Contents and Sample Pages**