Picturing India's "Land of Kings" Between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and its Environs

Eighteenth-century paintings depicting the courtly culture of Udaipur have been widely described as iconic images representing the decadent "voluptuous inactivity" of Indian princes within idyllic palaces. More recently, scholars have interpreted such paintings as royal portraits constituting meaningful assertions of political and cultural power. Yet scholars have overlooked a topographical genre of painting in which Udaipur artists not only portrayed the ruler's face but also captured the charisma of Udaipur's urban space. This dissertation examines the means by which artists pictured Udaipur and its environs for multiple patrons and mixed audiences, thereby constructing the city's memory and mapping diverse territorial claims of regional kings, courtly elites, and merchants, as well as religious institutions and the emergent British Empire. Central to this account is a corpus of large-scale paintings, scrolls, drawings, and maps made in a time period of transitions in northwestern India, marked by several new courtly and non-courtly alliances, between the decentralization of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700s and the proclamation of British rule at the Ajmer Durbar in 1832. I argue that itinerant artists practiced their arts literally and metaphorically in between empires, and thus formulated their subjective, and, at times, subversive interpretations of urbanity, territoriality, and history as they circulated among various domains. By tracing the critical role played by artistic practices in the British Political Agent James Tod's political and historical creation of "Rajasthan"--the land of kings--this dissertation challenges the dominant narrative that has mediated this region's architecture, landscape, and history. Separate chapters are devoted to shifts in artistic practice, from the painting of genealogical and poetic manuscripts to large-scale topographical paintings, relating them to tropes of praise, pleasure, and commemoration in the court's literary culture, mediation of urban memory, emergent forms of mapping, and spatial practices of processions. Udaipur's artists like Ghasi, who was also a "native" artist-assistant to Tod, the region's first British colonial agent, rendered Tod's explorations in the form of courtly processions while also adapting drafted architectural drawings for the depiction of Udaipur's princely domains. I compare the works of Ghasi and Tod, among several others, with those of artists working for the Jain religious and mercantile community. These little-studied paintings suggest the paradigmatic ways in which local artists reevaluated established pictorial genres and tropes for the purpose of mapping environs in relation to the emerging presence of the British Empire and reconfiguration of regional polities, religious sects, and mercantile communities. The visualization of South Asia's urban environs has largely been understood through the lens of the nineteenth-century British colonial archive of images and maps. Systematic studies of alternate imaginings found in contemporaneous pre-colonial Indian art have been all but absent. Addressing this lacuna, this dissertation cumulatively highlights a largely unknown visual archive of images of pre-colonial Indian cities to examine how both Indian and British artists imagined their urban environs for varied patrons. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the importance of affect in understanding epistemic practices and the nature of political, cultural, and artistic transitions in the long eighteenth century in the Indian subcontinent

Historiography and ldentity IV: The Writing of History Across Medieval Eurasia

The volume extends the mainly European focus of the series 'Historiography and ldentity' to probe into a more global perspective, exploring the historiographical cultures of a number of Eurasian macro-regions: China, Japan, Iran, South Arabia, Syria, Byzantium, Lotharingia, and Spain. The broader, Eurasian perspective can contribute to a deeper understanding of the very different ways in which works of historiography could communicate, promote, and negotiate 'visions of community' and concepts of belonging.Der Band erweitert den Schwerpunkt der Reihe 'Historiography and ldentity' auf eine globale Perspektive. Im Fokus stehen historiographische Kulturen in verschiedenen Makroregionen Eurasiens: China, Japan', Iran, Südarabien, Syrien, Byzanz, Lotharingien und Spanien. Diese breitere, eurasische Perspektive kann zu einem tieferen Verständnis der sehr unterschiedlichen Wege beitragen, auf denen in historiographischen Werken „Visionen von Gemeinschaft" und Konzepte von Zugehörigkeit kommuniziert, verbreitet und verhandelt wurden

Written Stūpa, Painted Sūtra: Relationships of Text and Image in the Construction of Meaning in the Japanese Jeweled-Stūpa Mandalas

This dissertation contextualizes the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries Japanese jeweled-stupa mandalas as some of the most striking examples from the early medieval period of innovative elaborations on sutra transcription. The project proceeds from a methodology grounded in visual analysis and religious studies. I begin with basic questions of semiotic inquiry about the prominence and privileging of sacred text in the form of the central dharma reliquary, a characteristic distinguishing the mandalas from nearly all other paintings made before them. I seek to understand the reasons behind the privileging of scripture on the picture plane and the inventive manipulation of the sutra text into the form of a stupa, both novel choices in the context of their early medieval Japanese production. At their root, the jeweled-stupa mandalas are an elaborate sutra transcription project revealing anxieties about death and power expressed through the belief that devotion to sutra can save souls, cure illnesses, grant tremendous authority, and much more. After investigating the continental origins of the mandalas and the culture of sutra transcription during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries and conducting an analysis into the particular histories and formal qualities, the project approaches the mandalas using a three-part collaborative analysis. The first part examines visual, textual, and archaeological evidence from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, which testifies to the understandings and capabilities of text as well as the power of sacred word expressed repeatedly and profoundly in early medieval Japan. This exploration of sutra text lays the critical basis for the second part's investigation into the notion of body underpinning the innovative construction of the mandalas. The indivisibility of sutra, stupa, dharma, relic, and body in the paintings visually manifests the conflated nature of these seemingly independent concepts in religious practice and doctrine. Combining the first two parts facilitates a reading of the mandalas through what I call a salvific matrix of text and body. The third part concludes the dissertation by returning to an explicit discussion of semiotics, further exploring the construction of meaning in the mandalas through their imbrication of text and image

The Five Great Space Repository Bodhisattvas: Lineage, Protection and Celestial Authority in Ninth-Century Japan

This dissertation explores the protective role of the Five Great Space Repository Bodhisattva (Godai Kokuzo Bosastu) sculptural pentads in Japan during the mid-ninth-century. While existing art historical scholarship regarding these sculptures emphasizes their stylistic features and production methods, the present study seeks to contextualize the images' specific iconographical aspects and ritual functions within the broader multivalent religious environment of early Heian period (794-900) Japan. Sets of these images, the only three known today, were installed in the Esoteric Buddhist temples of Jingoji, Anjoji, and Joganji, each in relation to a different imperial or Fujiwara regent family member, and each under the auspices of a different member from the lineage of Kukai (744-836), the Shingon Buddhist patriarch. These images were placed in conjunction with other groups of Esoteric Buddhist sculptures at the temples to create larger arrangements that associated their patrons with cosmological rule. In addition, the iconography of the Godai Kokuzo Bosatsu pentad resonates with many features of Chinese-based belief elements, as evidenced in the sculptures' color, directional associations, and relations to celestial bodies, features that also connect these imperially-commissioned sculptures to celestial rule and to national protection. This dissertation not only investigates the relatively understudied area of the incorporation of celestial bodies and other features of Chinese-based belief into the iconography of ninth-century Japanese Buddhist sculpture, but also reveals the way in which the imperial family and the Fujiwara regent family utilized the iconographically complex sculptural arrangement of the Five Great Space Repository Bodhisattvas in order to strengthen their political prestige and the authority of their lineages in early Heian period Kyoto. This study first traces the iconographical development of single, independent Kokuzo Bosatsu (Skt. Akasagarbha, Ch. Xukongzang Pusa, Kn. Heogongjang Bosal) images to the more uncommon arrangement of five. It then examines the Chinese-based belief elements present in most depictions of the sculptural pentad, as well as the significance of the configuration at each of the three temples in which it was installed. This dissertation is thus an in-depth study that reveals specific instances of the fluidity between belief systems of early Heian period Japan, and also an exploration of the ways in which different belief systems informed patrons and producers of Japanese religious and visual culture

Rebuilding Nara’s Tōdaiji on the Foundations of the Chinese Pure Land: A Campaign for Buddhist Social Development

This dissertation considers how Chinese models of Buddhist social organization and Pure Land thought undergirded the Japanese monk Chōgen’s campaign to restore the Great Buddha of Tōdaiji, destroyed in the Gempei civil war at the end of the 12th century. While Chōgen’s activities as chief solicitor of the campaign partially owed to his network of social connections earned through a selective Buddhist education, Chōgen’s three pilgrimages to China were crucial for providing much of the knowledge, methods, and technologies that made possible the largest religious and civil engineering project attempted in Japan to that time. Though nominally a Buddhist monk, Chōgen embodied the ideal of a polymath. In order to recreate Japan’s foremost Buddhist symbol, he was compelled to assume a wide range of responsibilities: fundraising among aristocrats and warriors; forming a network of lieutenants, donors, and common devotees; managing temple estates that provided revenues; developing transportation infrastructure to carry materials and supplies; casting the Great Buddha statue; overseeing religious rites; and finally, rebuilding Tōdaiji’s halls. These diverse activities required creative forms of religio-social networking and technologies not extant in Japan. During his travels to the Chinese port city of Ningbo, as well as the religious mountains of Tiantaishan and Ayuwangshan, Chōgen learned of Pure Land halls built by lay confraternities, and adopted them as models for the later sanctuaries he constructed around Japan for proselytization and fundraising purposes. He also borrowed organizational principles from Chinese Pure Land societies from the urban centers of Ningbo and Hangzhou in order to create a massive Pure Land network in his homeland that embraced former militants from the civil war, the imperial family, monastics from a wide range of institutions, and even the common populace – all of whom contributed to the Tōdaiji rebuilding effort. Ultimately, the fields of religion and technology that Chōgen imported from China not only enabled the reconstruction of Japan’s most important Buddhist temple, but also brought Japan into the fold of an emerging East China Sea religious macroculture of the late 12th and early 13th centuries that expanded with the activities of traders and later Japanese pilgrims who would emulate Chōgen’s voyages.East Asian Languages and Civilization

Approaches to Disaster Management

Approaches to Disaster Management regards critical disaster management issues. Ten original research reports by international scholars centered on disaster management are organized into three general areas of hazards and disaster management. The first section includes discussions of perspectives on vulnerability and on evolving approaches to mitigation. The second section highlights approaches to improve data use and information management in several distinct applications intended to promote prediction and communication of hazard. The third section regards the management of crises and post-event recovery in the private sector, in the design of urban space and among the victims of disaster. This volume contributes both conceptual and practical commentary to the disaster management literature

Before American History

Before American History juxtaposes Mexico City’s famous carved Sun Stone with the mounded earthworks found throughout the Midwestern states of the U.S. to examine the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two North American republics usually studied separately. As the U.S. and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent nations—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. These settler-colonial understandings of North America’s past deliberately misappropriated Indigenous histories and repurposed them and their material objects as "American antiquities," thereby writing Indigenous pasts out of U.S. and Mexican national histories and national lands and erasing and denigrating Native peoples living in both nascent republics.Christen Mucher creatively recovers the Sun Stone and mounded earthworks as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, produced by Indigenous people but settler controlled and settler interpreted. Her approach renders visible the foundational methodologies, materials, and mythologies that created an American history out of and on top of Indigenous worlds and facilitated Native dispossession continent-wide. By writing Indigenous actors out of national histories, Mexican and U.S. elites also wrote them out of their lands, a legacy of erasure and removal that continues when we repeat these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settler narratives and that reverberates in discussions of immigration, migration, and Nativism today

HSR Abstracts & Author Index, 2004-2014

As part of the HSR Supplement 26 “Historical Social Research: An International Journal for the Application of Formal Methods to History, 2004-2014” this document contains abstracts of all 671 contributions published in Historical Social Research from 2004 to 2014 inclusive. Furthermore, this collection contains an author index