Chakshudana or Opening the Eyes: Seeing South Asian Art Anew

Chakshudana rituals of opening the eyes are practiced across South Asian communities, offering gods access to the mortal world. This volume examines art history through nuanced considerations of materiality, aesthetics, and regional specificities, exploring artistic media such as temples, paintings, Bengali-quilted textiles, manuscript 'lozenges, and metal repousse. It is part of the Visual Media and Histories Series and is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 20 September 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Chakshudana, also known as rituals of opening the eyes, are practiced across multiple South Asian communities by artists, sculptors, and priests. This practice offers gods access to the mortal world and provides a distinctive perspective to interrogate the complex engagements with paintings, sculptures, found objects, fragments, built environments, and ecologies. This volume takes the process of seeing as its focus, examining art history through nuanced considerations of materiality, aesthetics, and regional specificities. The essays emerge from current research that builds 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, and history as well as the allied disciplines of anthropology and folklore studies. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Weight: 680g
Dimension: 246 x 189 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032207834