Gods in the Time of Democracy
Seiten
2021
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-1034-0 (ISBN)
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-1034-0 (ISBN)
Kajri Jain examines how the monumental statues erected in India following its economic reforms in the 1990s became a favored religious and political form with which to assert cultural, political, religious, and caste power.
In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”
In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”
Kajri Jain is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto and author of Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, also published by Duke University Press.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Emergence 1
1. Statues and Sculptors 29
2. Democracy 81
3. Iconopraxis 120
4. Cars and Land 181
5. Scale 220
Notes 259
Bibliography 307
Index 323
Erscheinungsdatum | 19.03.2021 |
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Zusatzinfo | 124 illustrations, incl. 14 in color |
Verlagsort | North Carolina |
Sprache | englisch |
Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
Gewicht | 726 g |
Themenwelt | Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile |
Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik | |
Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie | |
Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie | |
ISBN-10 | 1-4780-1034-7 / 1478010347 |
ISBN-13 | 978-1-4780-1034-0 / 9781478010340 |
Zustand | Neuware |
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