Chakshudana or rituals of opening the eyes are practiced across multiple South Asian communities by artists, sculptors and priests. The ritual offers gods access to the mortal world, this practice applied to the study of art offers a distinctive perspective to interrogate the complex engagements with paintings, sculptures, found objects, fragments, built environments, and ecologies. This volume takes as its focus the process of seeing—to look closely, remaining true to the object, but also to see widely, from multiple subjective stances and diverse bodily engagements from walking to dreaming, from glancing to looking askance, and hypnotic stares, and to see beyond the visible. It examines art history through nuanced considerations of materiality, aesthetics and regional specificities. The essays emerge from current research building on the contributions of Michael W. Meister, W. Norman Brown Distinguished Professor of History of Art and South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, whose works laid the foundations for the study of South Asian visual and material culture. The essays in this book underscore methodological resonances rather than privileging conventional categories of media or chronology exploring artistic media including temples and paintings, as well as Bengali quilted textiles, manuscript ‘lozenges,’ and metal repousse. This volume, part of the Visual Media and Histories Series, will be of interest to students and researchers of history of art, religious studies, history, as well as the allied disciplines of anthropology and folklore studies.

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use them as shawls, covers, and seating mats. Making Kantha, Making Home explores the social worlds shaped by the Bengali kantha that survive from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first study of colonial-period women's embroidery that situates these objects historically and socially, Pika Ghosh brings technique and aesthetic choices into discussion with iconography and regional culture. Ghosh uses ethnographic and archival research, inscriptions, and images to locate embroiderers' work within domestic networks and to show how imagery from poetry, drama, prints, and watercolors expresses kantha artists' visual literacy. Affinities with older textile practices include the region's lucrative maritime trade in embroideries with Europe, Africa, and China. This appraisal of individual objects alongside the people and stories behind the objects' creation elevates kantha beyond consideration as mere handcraft to recognition as art.

" A]n excellent analytical study of a sensationally beautiful type of temple.... This work is not just art historical but embraces... religious studies, anthropology, history, and literature." Catherine B. Asher

" A]dvances our knowledge of... Bengali temple building practices, the complex inter-reliance between religion, state power, and art, and the ways in which Western colonial assumptions have distorted correct interpretation.... A splendid book." Rachel Fell McDermott

In the flux created by the Mughal conquest, Hindu landholders of eastern India began to build a spectacularly beautiful new style of brick temple, known as Ratna. This "bejeweled" style combined features of Sultanate mosques and thatched houses, and included second-story rooms conceived as the pleasure grounds of the gods, where Krishna and his beloved Radha could rekindle their passion. Pika Ghosh uses art historical, archaeological, textual, and ethnographic approaches to explore this innovation in the context of its times. Includes 82 stunning black-and-white images of rarely photographed structures.

Published in association with the American Institute of Indian Studies"