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Across the Threshold of India - Art, Women, and Culture (Hardcover)
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Across the Threshold of India - Art, Women, and Culture (Hardcover)
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In the Hindu world-view, threshold is a profoundly important
concept: it represents a passage between one space and place and
another, with emphasis placed on creating a visual bridge between
the secular and the sacred. Accordingly, the literal threshold a
person crosses when entering and exiting a home or business
symbolizes the threshold one crosses between the physical and
spiritual realms of existence. Hindus have long believed it is
possible to affect a person's well-being by using diagrams to
sanctify the "threshold space." The diagrams do so by "trapping"
ill will, evil, bad luck, or negative energy within their colorful
and elaborate configurations, thereby cleansing those who traverse
the space and sending them on their way with renewed spirit,
positive energy, and good luck and fortune.The creation of the
threshold drawings, or diagrams, is steeped in Indian history and
culture, going back thousands of years. Practiced by women, it was
long considered a vernacular art. But, as this innovative book
reveals, it turns out that the diagrams represent highly
sophisticated mathematical and cosmological underpinnings that have
been unknowingly handed down from one generation of women to the
next. As India has modernized and rapidly become more urban
however, more Indian women have acquired more complicated lives,
allowing less time to continue the practice of threshold drawings.
And so a long-standing and critically important expression of
Indian life, religion, and culture is becoming less common to the
point that the tradition is threatened."Across the Threshold of
India" is a pioneering new book that presents the story of the
threshold drawings for the first time. In Volume I, the reader is
presented with an insightful history of how the threshold drawings
evolved, what they have meant and represented in Indian and Hindu
culture, and how the practice became a high form of vernacular art
for religious and everyday life. In Volume II, we are able to enjoy
and admire Martha Strawn's original duotone and color photographs
of the threshold drawings that she made throughout India during
decades of work and travel, most of which are in the permanent
collection of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the
nation's foremost research center for Indian culture and art. By
presenting the most recent scholarship on the history and art of
the threshold drawings and combining that engaging tale with her
wonderful fine-art and documentary photographs, Martha Strawn has
given the world a unique and enduring gift: a work of visual
ecology that perceptively portrays one of India's and the world's
longest and least-known religious practices: the art of sanctifying
space through threshold drawings." Martha Strawn s photographs
reveal an ancient tradition unfamiliar to most outside of India.
The intricate patterns of the rangoli diagrams, rendered in lyric
detail, connect these Hindu women with others throughout millennia
who have sought to find the divine within sacred geometries. Strawn
effectively demonstrates how this inherited custom has evolved from
a religious necessity into a fascinating and enduring form of
cultural expression. This two-volume work is a welcome addition to
the growing literature about Indian art and culture, with Strawn's
timeless photographs at its center. " -- From the Introduction by
Mark H. Sloan, Director and Senior Curator of the Halsey Institute
of Contemporary Art at the College of CharlestonPublished in
association with the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the
College of Charleston."
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