Gods Beyond Temples
Contents: 1. Gods beyond temples/Harsha V. Dehejia. 2. The portable Shrinathji/Amit Ambalal. 3. The Odyssey of the Bankura horse/Sumanta Banjerjee. 4. Bejeweled Gods/Nicholas Barnard. 5. Living with the Gods/Monisha Bharadwaj. 6. Small Shaiva bronzes of Maharashtra/Narendra Bokhare. 7. The court of divine Justice: Kumaon\'s Golu Devata/Kusum Budhwar. 8. Itinerant singers: Baul, the dancing mendicants of Bengal/Indranath Chaudhury. 9. Thread, cloth and costume: textiles in the Hindu tradition/Rosemary Crill. 10. The Gods of the warlis/Yashodhara Dalmia. 11. Urban spaces as visual theophany/Harsha V. Dehejia. 12. Kurma: support of the cosmic axis/Devangana Desai. 13. Surya: light to enlightenment/Jasleen Dhamija. 14. Posts, pots and pebbles: aniconic village Goddesses of Orissa/Thomas Donaldson. 15. Landscape as shrine: entering the event Horizon of Tukaram/Ranjit Hoskote. 16. Funeral practices and Paradise symbolism: Islamic art and architecture/Mazhar Hussain. 17. Gods of the thresholds: the liminal arts of Hindu householders/Stephen Huyler. 18. Divinity and pots in South India/Stephen Inglis. 19. The sons of Vishvakarma/Jaya Jaitly. 20. The unknown Sufi/Anees Jung. 21. Svayambhu: the nature icons of Prakriti/Madhu Khanna. 22. Divinity in sound/Ravi Khanna. 23. The rasa lilas of Braj/Sunil Kothari. 24. Devotional objects of the Jains/Lalit Kumar. 25. Utsava Murtis: when Gods go visiting/Nanditha Krishna. 26. Reflections on Benaras/Richard Lannoy. 27. Mobile shrines in India/Cornelia Mallebrien. 28. The bronzes of bastar/Cornelia Mallebrien. 29. The tree of life/Paola Manfredi. 30. The deotas of Himachal/Kirit Mankodi. 31. Divinity in solitude/Ashvin Mehta. 32. Gods of the fabrics: sacred images in Kalamkaris/Jagdish Mittal. 33. Divinity of food/Pushpesh Pant. 34. Ten meditations on the Guru/Makarand Paranjape. 35. Paper Gods/Christopher Pinney. 36. The votive horse of Gujarat/Haku Shah. 37. The God who looks away: Phad painting of Rajasthan/Kavita Singh. 38. The aniconic cult of dharma in Bengal/Jawahar Sircar. 39. The Goddess as a pot/Tulsi Vatsal. 40. Painting the Goddess: folk paintings from the Mithila region/Archana Verma. 41. Sanjhi: a Goddess of Murals/Bimla Verma. About the contributors.
"The sacred in the Indian tradition is more an experience than a concept and goes much beyond the narrow confines of an organised temple or even a shrine. The gods of this tradition, as well as those who hold them sacred, are simple and unpretentious yet dignified and self-assured. Whether it is a tree that is held sacred or a naturally occurring stone that is revered, a river that is the embodiment of divinity itself, an ancestor that is worshipped, a fabric that is simply draped, a road side shrine on a busy street or a votive terracota horse that is lovingly made and offered, a narrative scroll that holds its audience spell-bound; here is religion at work that is as spontaneous as it is intense, charged with faith, fervor and commitment; now private and now shared, that forms an integral part of the lived lives of these common people, be they rural or urban, tribal or traditional. The rituals and practices for these deities are neither scripted nor canonized, but what they may lack in grandeur, erudition and ceremony, they more than make up in the faith and feeling that they generate. In a civilisation which has encountered majestic truths and erected grand temples, these sacred manifestations and expressions of the ordinary people tend to be sidelined or dismissed by scholars as well as the world at large, as minor or lesser gods worthy of curiosity but not of serious study, but it is important to remember that they have a beauty and presence of their own in the pluralistic Indian tradition.
Harsha V. Dehejia leads an international group of scholars to explore this idea which in many ways defines the spirit of India." (jacket)
