Making and Knowing in South Asian Art offers a fresh way of understanding the visual and material cultures of South Asia by bringing the acts of making, seeing, using, and knowing into a single field of inquiry. Moving beyond approaches that locate the meaning of art primarily in texts, iconography, artists, or patrons, Ajay Sinha asks what becomes visible when the material object itself is treated as an active participant in the production of meaning.At the heart of the book is the idea of “crafts thinking”: a form of knowledge generated through the interaction of hands, tools, materials, environments, bodies, and images. Drawing on the concept of “iconopraxis,” Sinha explores how religious meaning is not merely imposed upon objects but emerges through material practices and encounters. Stone, wood, metal, clay, fragrance, photographs, film, tools, trees, and sacred images become part of dynamic assemblages through which the sacred is made sensible.Ranging across ancient, medieval, colonial, and modern South Asia, the book brings Hindu and Buddhist image practices into conversation with photography, cinema, performance, architecture, sculpture, and everyday material culture. Its case studies reconsider subjects including the materiality of Hindu temples and images, the sensory presence of the Buddha, the emergence of the Buddha image in Gandhara, practices of darshan, and the transformation of modern technologies such as photography and film within Indian religious and visual worlds.By tracing continuities between the pre-modern and the modern, and between the religious and the secular, Making and Knowing in South Asian Art challenges some of the most persistent assumptions of art history. It presents South Asian art not simply as a field of objects awaiting interpretation, but as a history of material experiments through which people and things together make, test, and transform ways of knowing the world.
Ajay Sinha
Ajay Sinha is Julie ’73 and Helene ’49 Herzig Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art History and Architectural Studies at Mount Holyoke College, USA. A leading scholar of the visual cultures of South Asia, his research spans Indian art and architecture, photography, film, and material culture, with particular emphasis on the intersections of art, religion, politics, and cross-cultural exchange. His scholarship examines how visual practices shape historical memory, cultural experience, and global histories of representation.
He is the author of Imagining Architects: Creativity in the Religious Monuments of India and Photo-Attractions: An Indian Dancer, an American Photographer, and a German Camera, and co-editor of Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. His articles have appeared in leading journals including The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Artibus Asiae, The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. He has co-curated exhibitions of contemporary Indian art and serves on the advisory board of the Center for Art and Archaeology at the American Institute of Indian Studies.
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