How Secular Is Art?: On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia

Cover
How Secular Is Art?
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Images
1 Introduction
	Luminescence: In Situ with Dissent
	Contours: Drawing from Indian Secularism
	Co-habitations: Reconfiguring the Secular Habitus of Art
	On the Secular State of Art
	Porous Boundaries of the Sacred and the Secular
	Secularization and Its Discontents
	Itineraries through a Pandemic
	Notes
Part 1 Secularity and Its Art
	2 Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis
		A Distinction and a Definition
		Modern Indian Art and the ‘Secular’
		Art and ‘Secularism’
		Art and the Sectarian Politics of Identity
		Notes
	3 Art and the Secular in Contemporary India: A Question of Method
		Art after Ayodhya
		How Can We Understand This Work as Secular Practice?
		Performance as a Medium
		Traces of Secular Practice
		What Does the Art-Historical Method Give Us, So Far?
		When Are Exhibitions the Site of Secular Practice?
		Notes
	4 In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History
		Thesis 1: South Asia Is Neither Here nor There (and Both)
		Thesis 2: Visual Culture Is a Red Herring That Turns Art into a Sacred Cow
		Thesis 3: Art History Is a Zombie Discipline, or, Beware the Spirits of Religion and Art!
		Thesis 4: Religion Is Not a Thing—or at Any Rate Not One Thing
		Thesis 5: Religion and the Secular in Art Are Both Mutually Opposed and Form Circuits with Each Other
		Thesis 6: Heterochrony Includes Linear Temporality (‘Culture’ Is Spirit by Another Name)
		Thesis 7: Art and Art History May Be Secular, but Art History’s ‘Objects’ Need Not Be
		Notes
Part 2 Boundaries of Secular Nationalism
	5 Displacements of Secularity: Decapitations and Their Histories
		Displacements
		A Spiritual Crisis
		Postcolonial Archive
		To Be Parted from Oneself
		The Hullaballoo of 1976
		Secular Lines of Sight
		Notes
	6 Modern Art and East Pakistan: Drawing from the Limits
		Looking from East Pakistan
		Fragmentation and Creation
		Dilemmas of Postcolonial Pedagogies
		Dialectical Affiliations
		Arts of Rupture
		Notes
	7 Making Place for People?: Geeta Kapur, Secular Nationalism, and ‘Indian’ Art
		Categorical Imperatives
		Secular Cycles; Sufi Circles
		Mother Issues and Difficult Births
		Concluding Conundrums
		Notes
Part 3 Art and Its Gods
	8 Shivaji’s Portrait and the Practice of Art History
		Finding Shivaji’s Portrait
		A Tension between Typology and a ‘Realistic Effect’
		A Portrait to Incite Revolution
		Conclusion: A Hero-Icon
		Notes
	9 Can a Festival of a Goddess Be ‘Secular’?
		The Political Present of the Festival
			The Goddess under the Shadow of the National Register of Citizens
			Performing the Secular: The ‘Azaan’ Controversy
			The Migrant Worker and the Goddess
		The Dissembling Place of Art
		Notes
	10 A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India
		The Goddess of Language Devotion
		The Goddess and the Nation
		The Goddess and Geo-piety
		The Goddess and English Enchantment
		The Goddess of Great Things
		Coda: Life Interrupted—A Pandemic Goddess
		Notes
Part 4 Architectures of Devotion
	11 Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture: A Critique of the Secular Disenchantment of India’s Past
		Political Modernism and Secularism
		The Limits of Art-Historical Critique
		Secularity and Enchantment in Today’s Study of Islamic Monumentality
		Mughal Architecture as Enchanted Spaces of Future Scholarship and Nationhood
		Notes
	12 Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century: Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and Discourses of Inclusivity in Gwalior’s Birla Temple
		The Birlas in Gwalior
			The Design of the Temple
		Nationalist Visions and the Longer History of Birla Temples
		Conclusions
		Notes
	13 For the Love of God: Conservation as Devotion in Tamil Nadu
		Venkadu
		Conservation as Devotion
		Preserving the Monument’s Body
		Maintaining the Spirit of the Temple
		Religious Management by the Secular State
		REACH’s Code-Switching
		An Archaeology of the Psyche
		Spectres of the Ruined Temple
		Deauthorizing the Secular
		Conclusion: Desecularizing the Monument
		Notes
About the Contributors
Index