How secular is art? : on the politics of art, history, and religion in South Asia

As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of 'art' and 'secular' in their theoretical and historical implications It questions the temporal, spatial, and cultural binaries between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. Thinking from the south, all the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region – one fissured by histories of partition, state formations, and religious nationalisms but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art's deep entanglements with the politics of the present? 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 Exploring the secular credentials and religious redesignations of art, this book is anchored in a conception of a region. Fissured by partitions, state-formations and religious nationalisms, this idea of a region still stands here as a collective site for interrogating the secularity of art, its histories and its politics