South Asian Studies最新文献

{"title":"Multiple Audiences of a History from Sixteenth-Century Malabar: Zayn al-Dīn al-Maʿbarī’s Gift of the Strugglers for Jihad","authors":"Meia Walravens","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1645981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1645981","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the readership of a major primary source for the early modern history of South Asia, the sixteenth-century Arabic work Tuḥfat al-Mujāhidīn fī baʿḍ Akhbār al-Burtughāliyyīn (Gift of the Strugglers for Jihad in some Accounts of the Portuguese) by Zayn al-Dīn al-Maʿbarī. This work has frequently caught the eye of scholars trying to explain political, social and cultural developments in Malabar, not least because of its jihadic content. An understanding of its (intended) readership is therefore crucial for drawing meaningful connections between text and historical developments. On the basis of (the absence of) the dedication in the manuscripts of the work and indications in the text itself about the author’s interest in particular sections of society, this article breaks a lance for an understanding of the text as an address to multiple elite audiences.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"59 1","pages":"226 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79183653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Biographies of South Indian Temple Inscriptions","authors":"L. Orr","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1641972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1641972","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is a preliminary investigation of South Indian temple inscriptions from the perspective of their production and of their physical character – as material objects and as documents produced for particular purposes, making history and having histories of their own. I explore this topic through several case studies of groups of inscriptions engraved on the walls of Hindu temples in Tamilnadu, at different points in medieval history, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. I consider the oral, material and performative processes that resulted in the production of inscriptions and investigate their ‘afterlives’. This paper tries to make sense of the mixed functions and statuses of South Indian temple inscriptions – as both objects and texts, as authoritative yet often illegible or ephemeral, as highly local yet engaged with cosmopolitan (royal, professional, legal) and even transcendental realms – to explore the intersection of material culture and religious life.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"73 1","pages":"193 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75984757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On and Beyond the Surface","authors":"Leah Elizabeth Comeau","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1641966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1641966","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue “On and beyond the surface: South Indian temple walls as text, object, and experience“ developed out of a panel that I organized at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX, in 2016. Since that meeting, our group of panelists have been in continuous dialogue and are now delighted to present a collection of articles that propose fresh approaches to interpreting signs, murals, and inscriptions that are ubiquitous in South Indian religious spaces. The Hindu temple is a place of religious expression, experience, and exchange. Known as a home or palace for its god, or the god’s body itself, these structures feature accommodations fit for royalty. Grand stone temples built in the medieval period throughout southeast India boast long pillared halls, ornamental sculptures, and imposing gates that mark its entrances. In addition to soaring towers that punctuate its skyline, the South Indian landscape is also famous for being utterly packed with stone inscriptions, over a third of the total number of inscriptions known in India today. These tens of thousands of epigraphic “texts“ planted in the southern landscape have long been a rich field of study for historians of religion, politics, and economics in South Asia. Until the very recent past, inscriptions have been analyzed primarily if not exclusively for the denotative content of their texts as records of the past. In fact, most scholars of these sources encounter them as they are printed and published in the South Indian Inscriptions volumes produced by the Archaeological Survey of India. In this form, the inscriptions appear on a smooth page in blocks of text resembling narrative paragraphs. This type of reproduction erases a multitude of information that this special issue argues is essential to their interpretation. In situ, such texts might wrap around a slim slab of stone at the base of a shrine. They might be installed on a pillar set directly into the ground. In some cases, text is painted and illustrated. When these mostly stone writings are collected and printed on flat paper, unfortunately we scholars of inscriptions thereby inflict significant penalties on ourselves — erasures that are further replicated in these articles as we struggle with communicating the color, texture, and shape of billboards and murals in the virtual or printed form, which admittedly have their own aesthetic qualities. Over time, inscriptions and other temple texts have traveled and transformed in their material characteristics. Scholars who try to work back to the stone, to match printed inscriptions to their sites, are intently aware that over time combinations of renovations, cleanings, environmental forces, and preservation efforts have led to the damage and deterioration of sources. Some inscriptions have been relocated, recopied, buried, interrupted, or sandblasted away. In some cases, stone inscriptions are painted or lacquered over or have recently been hidden by hun","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"08 1","pages":"165 - 167"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88143598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Motivated Reading: Text and Image in the Expanded Temple","authors":"A. Seastrand","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1641980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1641980","url":null,"abstract":"While generations of scholars have recorded the rock-cut inscriptions found on the walls of southeast Indian temples, not until recently has attention been given to the inclusion of text in murals of the same region and locations. Epigraphists and historians of all stripes have focused mainly on the semantic content of text, largely ignoring the materiality, placement, and legibility of the inscriptions themselves. However, a more recent turn to the study of materiality has refocused attention on these issues. Emerging from an art historical perspective, this essay argues that the study of murals can methodologically enrich a reading of inscriptions, no matter their medium. This essay argues that the images and texts that adorn temple walls, both carved in stone and painted in murals, may be best understood within a larger matrix of aesthetic experience that neither reduces them to their materiality nor removes them from a contextually-specific reading.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"84 1","pages":"206 - 219"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76342775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Looking the Other Way: Inscriptions, Murals, and Signs in South Indian Temples","authors":"Archana Venkatesan","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1667641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1667641","url":null,"abstract":"In my response to four papers on the south Indian inscriptions, I explore the tension between visibility and legibility, and the ways in which inscriptions and murals construct a devotee’s experience of a sacred site.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"29 1","pages":"220 - 225"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77741270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Viewing Telugu Inscriptions at Ahobila","authors":"S. Adluri","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1641968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1641968","url":null,"abstract":"One of the important pilgrimage centers (tīrtha) in South India, dedicated to the incarnation (avatāra) of Viṣṇu as Narasiṃha, the man-lion, is located at Ahobila, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. This site was important for the Vijayanagara kings as attested by numerous Telugu inscriptions dated to the 16th century. While their textual content provides valuable information on the social, political and economic cultures of sixteenth century South India, this paper investigates their meaning as visual signs within the contexts that comprise a pilgrimage site rather than as texts read by pilgrims. Additionally, given the paucity of scholarship on Telugu inscriptions, it also contributes to this understudied field.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"168 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76244550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","authors":"R. Aquil","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198081685.001.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198081685.001.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Religions in South Asia have tended to be studied in blocks, whether in the various monolithic traditions in which they are now regarded—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and Christian—or indeed in temporal blocks—ancient, medieval, and modern. Analysing Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Islamic, and Christian traditions, this volume seeks to look at relationships both within and between religions focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries. The chapters explore not only the diversity and the multiplicity within each block, but also the specific forms of their coexistence with each other, whether in accord or in antagonism. The volume also views the interaction between ‘reformed’ and non-reformed branches within each of these purported monoliths. In going beyond existing debates on religious reform movements, the authors highlight the new forms acquired by religions and the ways in which they relate to each other, society, and politics.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"218 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73229646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mughal Tilework: Derivative or Original?","authors":"B. o'kane","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1614730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1614730","url":null,"abstract":"Although concentrating on Mughal tilework, this paper also discusses its predecessors elsewhere in the Islamic world, particularly in Iran, Central Asia, and Sultanate India. A brief survey of the development of the main techniques, namely monochrome-glazed tiles, sgraffito, tile mosaic, underglaze-painted and cuerda seca, both in Sultanate India and in other parts of the Islamic world, precedes the discussion of Mughal examples in the body of the paper. The paper highlights the initial links with Sultanate tilework, whether underglaze-painted, as in the Punjab, or with tile mosaic, in northern India. The development of Mughal tile mosaic is emphasized, as this was the medium most frequently used for tile decoration. Changes in the colour palette and in the introduction of new patterns are examined, highlighting the extensive use of figural imagery at the Lahore Fort and the simultaneous introduction of naturalistic vegetal panels. The less-frequent Mughal use of underglaze-painted and cuerda seca tiles is also examined. The conclusions summarize the characteristic features of Mughal tilework and suggest areas for future study.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"25 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88206307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘In the Centre of the Map…’: Reflecting on Marshall Hodgson’s Ideas about Conscience and History in the Architectural Experience of Humayun","authors":"J. Wescoat","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1605576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1605576","url":null,"abstract":"To resituate early Mughal architecture within a Persianate context, this paper considers the three axes of geography, scale, and meaning. After introducing this conceptual framework, we turn to historian Marshall Hodgson’s essay, ‘In the Center of the Map: Nations See Themselves as the Hub of History’, as a starting point for geographical analysis. We survey historiographic perspectives on Mughal architecture as Indian, Islamic, Timurid, and Persianate. These cultural geographic perspectives involve a broad range of architectural scales from buildings to gardens, cities, regions, and empire. To address questions of meaning, the paper examines Hodgson’s concept of Persianate culture in relation to his ideas about conscience and history in his three-volume work titled The Venture of Islam. Hodgson’s ideas about conscience raise interesting questions about the moral dimension of early Mughal architectural experience. The final section of the paper rereads early Mughal sources leading up to the exile of Humayun in Persia and his return to Delhi. These events begin with Babur’s visit to Herat in 1506 and culminate with the construction of Humayun’s monumental tomb-garden, which can be read as expressions of moral as well as religio-political meaning in a dynasty that came to see itself as a ‘hub of history’.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"72 1","pages":"24 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82222229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Garden of Nobility: Placing Ali Mardan Khan’s Baradari at Peshawar in the Context of Mughal Architecture","authors":"A. Rehman","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1605577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1605577","url":null,"abstract":"Ali Mardan Khan, one the most important Persian nobles of Shah Jahan’s reign, was a significant contributor to the field of architecture and landscape design. His life history has been adequately documented, but his contributions in the context of Mughal architecture have not received adequate attention by scholars. His garden in Peshawar was one of Ali Mardan Khan’s most important projects, briefly mentioned by British-era travellers, but lacking an in-depth study. The baradari and the garden were occupied by the Sikhs and the British in the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, respectively, and later by the Pakistan Army; during these periods, alterations were made to the garden and baradari. While not open to the public because the site is still utilized by the Pakistan Army, in 2006, the author was permitted to undertake thorough documentation and archaeological investigations. This paper analyses Ali Mardan Khan’s baradari and places it in the context of Mughal architecture in the light of historical texts and field research carried out by the author.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"129 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88418113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}