This book breaks new ground by bringing together a variety of regional perspectives and linguistic backgrounds. The book opens up new perspectives on Muḥarram as a social practice widely shared by South Asians in South Asia and the diaspora. A key resource to scholars and students of South Asian Studies, Asian religion, in particular rituals and religious practices, and Islamic Studies.

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.

Taming the Oriental Bazaar examines the public market-hall as a key architectural feature of colonial South Asia. Representing a transition in the architectural programme, these buildings were meant to be monuments and markers of modernity in South Asia. The book: * Explores how market-halls became an essential feature of colonial settlements from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries; * Discusses public health policies and legislations central to the concerns of market-hall sanitation; * Reviews the elements of modernity, including institutions and systems established in the nineteenth century as India went from Company to Crown; * Studies the specific circumstances and histories of market halls in the towns and cities of Bangalore, Baroda, Bombay, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Karachi, Lahore, Madras, Poona, and others. A key text in the study of colonial architecture, this book will be of interest to students, researchers as well as general readers of architecture, colonialism, history of architecture, history of medicine, public health, urbanism, and South Asian studies.

This book breaks new ground by bringing together a variety of regional perspectives and linguistic backgrounds. The book opens up new perspectives on Muharram as a social practice widely shared by South Asians in South Asia and the diaspora. A key resource to scholars and students of South Asian Studies, Asian religion, in particular rituals and religious practices, and Islamic Studies.

The Deccan sultans left a grand architectural and artistic legacy. They commissioned palaces, mosques, gardens and tombs as well as decorative paintings and coins. Of these sultanates, the Nizam Shahs (r. 1490-1636) were particularly significant, being one of the first to emerge from the crumbling edifice of the Bahmani Empire (c. 1347-1527). Yet their rich material record remains largely unstudied in the scholarly literature, obscuring their cultural and historical importance. This book provides the first analysis of the architecture of the Nizam Shahs. Pushkar Sohoni examines the critical relationship between architectural production, courtly practice and royal authority in a period when the aspirations and politics of the kingdom were articulated through architectural expression. Based on new primary research from key sites including the urban settlements of Ahmadnagar, Daulatabad, Aurangabad, Junnar and the port city of Chaul, Sohoni sheds light on broader Islamicate ideas of kingship and shows how this was embodied by material artefacts such as buildings and sites, paintings, gardens, guns and coins. As well as offering a vivid depiction of sixteenth-century South Asia, this book revises understanding of the cultural importance of the Nizam Shahs and their place in the Indian Ocean world. It will be a vital primary resource for scholars researching the history of the medieval and early modern Deccan and relevant for those working in Art History, Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies and Archaeology.