Susan Verma Mishra and Himanshu Prabha Ray: The Archaeology of Sacred Spaces: The Temple in Western India, 2nd century bce–8th century ce. (Archaeology and Religion in South Asia.) 283 pp. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. ISBN 978 1 138 67920 7.

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 378-380
Author(s):  
Gethin Rees
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-125
Author(s):  
Ashish Kumar

Susan Verma Mishra and Himanshu Prabha Ray (Eds), The Archaeology of Sacred Spaces: The Temple in Western India, 2nd century bce–8th century ce. London and New York, NY: Routledge, First South Asian edition, 2017, xii+ 283 pp., ₹850 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-138-21964-9.


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 640-659
Author(s):  
Ghulam A. Nadri

Abstract In the Persianate world, a mukhtār-nāma (deed of representation or a power of attorney) was a legal instrument that enabled people to transact business through a representative or agent (mukhtār or wakīl). This is a study of one such document written in Surat in 1821. It analyses the document for its socio-cultural, legal, and commercial significance as well as to explore the transition in the adjudication of commercial disputes and civil cases from Mughal to East India Company courts. It shows that there was a strong tradition of documenting business transactions in early modern South Asia and that such practices have continued into the colonial and postcolonial periods.


Author(s):  
David J. Howlett

This chapter examines the transformation of the Kirtland Temple as a site of interest into a site of contagion, only then to be blessed along with the surrounding land as a place of promise. While the Kirtland Temple still remained an ambiguous site for many Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pilgrims, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints agents on the ground in Cleveland worked out a story that could explain Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' possession of the temple while still embracing it as a holy site. This resanctification of sacred space offers several insights into the study of sacred space that may be “useful to think with.” First, this case study illustrates the power of middling agents in creating and sustaining sacred spaces. Second, it illustrates that the creation and maintenance of sacred space may be one strategy that religious groups use to answer theodical questions, or questions about the presence of evil.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 1664-1691
Author(s):  
FARHANA IBRAHIM

AbstractThis article examines intersections between sexuality, migration, and citizenship in the context of cross-border and cross-region marriage migration in Kutch, Gujarat, to underscore that women's mobility across borders is one site on which national cultural and political anxieties unfold. It argues that contemporary cross-region marriage migration must be located within the larger political economy of such marriages, and should take into account the historical trajectories of marriage migration in particular regions. To this end, it examines three instances of marriage migration in Kutch: the princely state's marriages with Sindh, nineteenth-century marriages between merchants from Kutch and women from Africa, and contemporary marriage migration into Kutch from Bengal. The article asks whether the relative evaluation of these marriages by the state can be viewed in relation to the settlement policies undertaken after partition, where borderlands were to be settled with those who were deemed loyal citizens. Finally, by historicizing marriage—as structure, but also aspirational category—it seeks to move away from the singularity of marriage as framed in the dominant sociological discourse on marriage in South Asia.


Author(s):  
Евгения Михайловна Карлова

Основной комплекс джайнских архитектурных памятников лежит в целом в контексте общеиндийской традиции, представляя собой симметрично-осевые храмы с расположенными друг за другом одной или несколькими мандапами и гарбха-грихой. Оформлены они обычно в едином стиле с памятниками соответствующей эпохи и локализации. Некоторые стандартные для индийского храмового строительства элементы в джайнских памятниках акцентируются или приобретают особое значение. В центральной и западной Индии в раннем Средневековье начинает складываться особый тип центричного джайнского храма - чатурмукха, который достигает наивысшего развития в памятниках периода Соланки. Пик его развития совпадает с взлетом джайнской диаспоры в этот период, сопровож давшимся активным строительством. Тогда же высшей точки достигает своеобразный стиль архитектурной декорации, получивший название «стиль Мару-Гурджара» и прочно ассоциирующийся нынче именно с джайнскими памятниками.Храм типа чатурмукха выражает базовые принципы джайнской космологии и как отдельными частями, так и в целом соотносится с описанным в священных текстах сакральным пространством. Одно из важнейших понятий мистической географии джайнизма, самвасарана, воплощается в архитектуре как часть гарбха-грихи, но может выступать и как отдельно стоящее сооружение в рамках храмового комплекса. В дальнейшем тип храма чатурмукха не получил широкого распространения, в отличие от некоторых декоративных элементов стиля Мару-Гурджара. Их формальное повторение в сочетании со стремлением к воплощению на земле сакральной географии - отличительная черта джайнской архитектуры Нового и Новейшего времени. The main complex of Jain architectural monuments lies in the context of the general tradition of Indian temple architecture, representing symmetrico-axial temples with one or several mandapas and a garbha-griha located one behind the other. They are usually decorated in the same style as the monuments of the respective epoch and localization. Some standard elements of Indian temple construction in Jain monuments are emphasized or take on particular significance. A special type of centric Jaina temple, chaturmukha, originated in central and western India in the early Middle Ages. It reached its highest degree of development in the monuments of the Solanki period. The peak of its development coincides with the rise of the Jain diaspora during this period, accompanied by active construction. At the same time, the original style of architectural scenery, called the “Maru-Gurjara style” and strongly associated with Jain monuments, reaches its highest point. The chaturmukha-type temple expresses the basic principles of Jaina cosmology and, both as individual parts, and as a whole, corresponds with the sacred space described in the sacred texts. One of the most important concepts of the mystical geography of Jainism, samvasarana, is embodied in architecture as part of the garbha-grikha, but it can also act as a separate building within the temple complex. In the future, the type of temple chaturmukha would not receive widespread popularity, unlike some decorative elements of the style of Maru-Gurjara. Their formal repetition combined with the desire to incarnate sacred geography on earth is a distinctive feature of the Jain architecture of the New and Modern times.


Author(s):  
Varuni Bhatia

What role do premodern religious traditions play in the formation of modern secular identities? What relationship exists between regional devotional cultures, key bhakti figures, and anticolonial nationalism in South Asia? What are some of the multiple sites of forgetting and unforgetting that determine how we receive iconic historical figures in the present? Unforgetting Chaitanya addresses these questions by examining late nineteenth-century transformations of Vaishnavism in Bengal—a religious tradition emanating from the figure of Krishna Chaitanya (1486–1533), and articulated in this region through various bodily and artistic practices. Building upon the concept of viraha as longing for the absent one within the Vaishnava worldview, this book argues that educated and middle-class Hindu Bengalis, the bhadralok, (re)turned to Chaitanyite Vaishnavism as a unique expression of excavating their authentic selves. It argues that by searching for literary and historical pasts, discovering long lost sacred spaces, recovering manuscripts, and disciplining Vaishnava practices across sects and castes, the Bengali Hindu middle-class successfully forged a respectable, bhadralok Vaishnavism. The book engages with questions around memory and history, poetics and praxis, and sacred space and print culture in the making of modern Vaishnavism as a devotional and cultural complex, simultaneously. Thus, Unforgetting Chaitanya argues for the methodological relevance of relocating the study of Bengali or Gaudiya Vaishnavism within the historical, intellectual, and cultural context of colonial Bengal, where it assumed its modern form. In doing so, this interdisciplinary book contributes to the fields of both Religion and History of South Asia.


De Medio Aevo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
José María Salvador-González

This article aims to unveil the doctrinal meanings that many Church Fathers and theologians have deciphered in some Old Testament terms such as templum, tabernaculum, domus Sapientiae, arca and other similar expressions related to sacred spaces or containers. In many specific cases, they have interpreted these expressions as metaphors or symbols of the Virgin Mary’s womb and Christ’s human nature. As a consequence, these interpretive approaches are reflected in some images of the Annunciation of the 14th and 15th centuries. So this article will analyze first a selected set of patristic, theological, and liturgical texts, and secondly, will examine eight paintings of the Annunciation with a temple-shaped house to see if there is an essential relation between those exegetical texts and these pictorial images. Based on that double analysis, it seems reasonable to conclude that the temple depicted in these Annunciations is a visual metaphor that illustrates the doctrinal meanings decrypted by the Fathers and theologians in their interpretations of the textual metaphors mentioned above.


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