Following general reflections on the relations between global media, local and oral history, this paper addresses the paradoxical constraints imposed by language specialization, which focuses Western historians on particular regions and languages at the expense of demotic and oral cultures. Taking up the idea that translation is never an ideologically innocent act, Stein addresses the ambiguous status of English in the Indian context, both as the language of British imperial power, but also as a vehicle for challenging and “writing back” against colonial discourse. To illustrate the linguistic pitfalls that accompany research on South Asian art, the paper investigates the relations between temple art, iconoclasm, and the zinc smelting industry in Jawar, Rajasthan.
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 I…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…