Description
Book SynopsisKajri Jain examines how the monumental statues erected in India following its economic reforms in the 1990s became a favored religious and political form with which to assert cultural, political, religious, and caste power.
Trade Review“Instead of lamenting the lack of a progressive secular spirit, Kajri Jain offers a rich, complex, and thoroughly fascinating account of how religiosity itself is being transformed in contemporary India into a public arena of democratic politics. Combining capitalist ambition with electoral competition, the proliferation of religious statuary brings together sacred texts, technology, automobility, and numerology into a new political aesthetic of monumentalism and spectacle. Jain argues persuasively that aesthetics is constitutive of politics, often in unexpected ways.” -- Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University
“Kajri Jain's extraordinary book on monumental statuary cuts across art history and visual culture. Gods and leaders are together framed within what she startlingly calls ‘the aesthetics of democracy.’ Here aesthetics as a redistributive principle generates her premise of
emergence: counter-positioning of the oppressed majority, their appropriation of image, material structures, and publics within India's severely stratified society increasingly subject to fascistic Hindutva. The rise of right-wing regimes worldwide will position Jain's brilliant discourse within complex contestations on what is the aesthetics of democracy today.” -- Geeta Kapur, author of * When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India *
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Gods in the Time of Democracy is a complex and challenging attempt at reframing the discussion around monumental iconography in India and its diaspora.... The book is a valuable contribution to contemporary art history and religious studies.” -- Manasvin Rajagopalan * Reading Religion *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction. Emergence 1
1. Statues and Sculptors 29
2. Democracy 81
3. Iconopraxis 120
4. Cars and Land 181
5. Scale 220
Notes 259
Bibliography 307
Index 323
