To curate in the field: archaeological privatization and the aesthetic ‘legislation’ of antiquity in India

Abstract

This paper strives to pluralize notions of taste in relation to the canonized category of the Hindu or Indian temple. I put ‘Hindu’ in italics because I include Jain temples in my discussion and I put ‘Indian’ in italics because the architecture I discuss predates India as a nation-state and in the twenty-first century includes buildings in South and Southeast Asia as well as the Diaspora. Through a discussion of the Archaeological Preservation Aesthetic (APA) and multiple variants of the Ritual Renovation Aesthetics (RRA), new ways of looking emerge. This paper seeks to reconcile the hegemonic assumptions about art historical taste and the temple within an increasingly global environment. The main argument is predicated on temple users’ practice as a form of curatorial practice in the field and provides a deep description of the multiplication of aesthetics due to increasing privatization of temple administration in India. The tenth-century cluster of temples from the Medapata region (Southern Rajasthan) serves as case study for a widespread phenomenon of putting ancient temples ‘back’ into worship during the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• heritage
• temple architecture
• India
• aesthetics

Notes

 1. Carol Henderson first brought the Adopt-a-Monument programme to the attention of the Rajasthan Studies group in 2005 (email communication to Listserve, 31 May 2005). A paper the following year mentions the adoption of a monument in Jaipur by a bank. The bank, in turn, acquires the rights to use the monument as a logo (Hindu Business Line 2006). Hardgrove (2007) discusses various modes of ‘adoption’, including a ‘heritage army’ of school children as example of one such adoptive patron. The Ambika temple, which I will discuss below, is listed as no. 214 under the Adopt-a-monument programme offered by the Rajasthan government (Rajasthan Foundation n.d.).

 2. AAM: ‘Project that is sponsored’ (Government of Rajasthan n.d.).

 3. ‘Benefits to donors under the AAM scheme’ (Government of Rajasthan n.d.).

 4. This area is known for the architectural stylistic idiom called ‘Maha-Gujara’, which is characterized by architectonic buildings with fewer images and perfected placement of those images (Dhaky 1975, 148).

 5. More famous examples of APA ancient Vaishnavite temples include the Gupta-era sites of Deogarh, Eran and Udaigiri.

 6. In Jagat, elaborate eight-day installation rites were held for a new twenty-first-century marble deity (which wasn't even original or mediaeval). On the other hand, the Ganesha sculpture in the same temple was gated in metal like the ceiling at Tusa. This demonstrates how RRA and APA can co-exist in the same location, even in the same temple sanctum.

 7. Deborah Sutton has recently argued that in the first half of the twentieth-century temple administrative choices in colonial India, reflect the clash of a more reserved ‘Protestant’ taste, rooted in the history of iconoclasm, with a perceived effervescent ‘excess’ imagined as somehow too ‘Catholic’ within a European aesthetic towards religious architecture (Sutton 2010).

 8. I use the term Maharana/CEO because technically after independence the monarchy no longer exists in India's democratic government. Shri Arvind Singh Mewar's current occupation is to manage a large estate of heritage hotels and trust foundations. This form of postcolonial kingship uses tourism as a continuation of the hospitality of court culture and stewardship as a form of postmodern dharma - where ancient kingly duties are performed in contemporary ways.

 9. The most recent Mewar Encyclopedia produced by the House of Mewar identifies Bappa with Kalbhoj (eighth in Guhila dynastic lineage) and more accurately navigates the uncertainties through a description of the relationships between legend and history (Mewar Encyclopedia n.d.).

10. Line five of the Lakulisha temple inscription mentions Bappa and line 15 references Eklingji (Mishra 2000a; Bhandarkar 1905). This 1905 article assumes the 971 inscription as proof of why Bappa remains so important to the Maharana's of Mewar. The Atpur inscription of 977 clearly lists the early lineage of the Guhila line as: (1) Guhudatta, (2) Bhoja, (3) Mahendra, (4) Naga, (5) Syeela, (6) Aparajit, (7) Mahindra, (8) Khalbhoj (associated by some with Bappa), (9) Khoman, (10) Bhirtrpad, (11) Singse, (12) Sri Ullut, (13) Nirvahana, (14) Salvahana, (15) Sectikoomar (Tod II.924; Mishra 2000b). More recently, Tryna Lyons mentions the Bappa debate in her paper (1999).

11. Sircar situates the elevation of Bappa from ‘petty Rawal’ to ‘one of the greatest heroes India ever produced’ in folklore as a response to status earned from ‘the struggle with the Mughals in the sixteenth century A.D.’ (Sircar 1965, 30).

12. Meister, personal conversation, 1 April 2005; and Lawrence A. Babb, John E. Cort, and Michael Meister, Building Temples, in Desert Temples: Sacred Centers of Rajasthan in Historical, Art-Historical, and Social Contexts (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2008), 72–76.

13. The statue was probably installed in 1965 or 1966, given that a photograph of the stolen statue, undressed, exists on the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) photo archive website and was taken in December 1966 (see also Vandana Sinha, AIIS director, personal communication, 26 November 2009).

14. See Note 12.