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InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia

Bombay (and editor of its journal). She has received a Homi Bhabha Fellowship, Silver Medal of the Asiatic Society, and Dadabhai Naoroji Memorial Prize, and serves as an Hon. Professor at the Ananthacharya Research Institute, University of Mumbai. Her first essay in this collection, ‘Social Dimensions of Art in Early India’, still a valuable prolegomenon, was first given as the Sectional Presidential Address (Ancient India), Indian History Congress 50 Session, in 1989. The sixteen essays collected here have partly been modified to fit this volume, but originally served a multitude of purposes. Some were used to summarize horizons of a particular theme; some to address single objects; a few to probe questions of social reconstruction; others to provide personal satisfaction (‘The Symbolism of Kūrma in Art and Myth’). For the sake of this volume, these have been clustered in eight sections: ‘Approaches’, ‘Terracotta’, ‘Iconography’, ‘Iconology’, ‘Eroticism’, and ‘Narrative’. Of these, ‘Art and Eroticism’ is essential Devangana, bringing us from ‘Erotic Literature’ and ‘Tantrism and Erotic Temple Sculpture’ to ‘Beyond the Erotic at Khajuraho’. I find Desai’s two articles on ‘Terracotta Art’ a methodological touchstone to how her sociological approach may suggest important and original – if not fully verifiable – arthistorical results. The section ‘Iconology and Meaning in Art’ again challenges interpretive frameworks, containing the Fifth Srimati Nabadurga Banerjee Endowment Lecture (1995), reprinted from the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay, ‘The Temple as an Ordered Whole – The Iconographic Scheme at Khajuraho’, which again digs deeply into Desai’s interpretive skills and devotion to Khajuraho. The subject of the second essay, ‘Śālabhañjikā and Surasundarī – Auspicious Figures in Art’, is alaṅkāra (essential ornament) effectively interpreted; that of the third, the centering kūrma (tortoise) of the world. This book is not a textbook, but a pleasure to browse. It defines a lifetime of service and thought. It can stimulate our minds, footnotes, and ambition. When I first met the author, in Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s bungalow in Baroda, where she had been invited to speak about her dissertation research and its publication, young artists may have snickered at her technical language used to discuss ‘cunalingus’ and ‘fellatio’, but they respected her seriousness and vitality, fully alive, as have all who have encountered her interventions since, whether about Śiva the Great Lord or kūrma. Truly a book of public record.