Session 201: Religious Patronage, Artistic Production, and the Making of Multi-Cultic Centers in Premodern India

Organizer and Chair: Tamara I. Sears, Florida State University

Discussant: Pika Ghosh, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The religious diversity of the Indian subcontinent is never as clear as it is at sacred centers, where the sanctity of place carries across sectarian boundaries. Yet, studies often focus on monuments associated with single groups, ignoring their relationship to others. This panel examines the dynamic interactions among religious communities through the development of multi-cultic centers in pre-modern India. It follows recent scholarly reconsiderations of agency and patronage that resituate patrons and religious leaders as active agents, consciously remaking their world through the institutionalization of new religious systems. While historians draw arguments primarily from texts, this panel demonstrates the utility of art historical methodology for the re-writing of political and religious histories.

The papers span a wide geographic and chronological range, documenting India’s rich history of religious pluralism, a particularly relevant task in today’s climate of heightened communal tension. Lisa Owen addresses the relationship between Hindu and Jain caves in ninth-century Ellora, arguing that the diversity of patronage belies assumptions of royal dominance at the site. Kimberley Masteller, by contrast, analyzes the royal hegemony of the tenth-century Kalachuri king Yuvarajadeva I, whose patronage of Śaiva, Vaisnava, and Kaula monuments was critical to the construction of his political identity. Anna Sloan turns to the agency of artisans, focusing on the vital role that local non-Muslims played in the stylistic development of mosque architecture at Jaunpur. Finally, Deborah Stein links the growth of Jawar as a religious center in the fifteenth century to the political importance of its zinc industry.

Excavating a Multi-Religious Site: Ellora in the 8th–9th Centuries

Lisa Nadine Owen, University of Texas, Austin

The cave-temples of Ellora are perhaps some of India’s most renowned rock-cut monuments. Created during the late sixth through tenth centuries, Ellora is noteworthy not only for its large number of excavations, but it is also the only rock-cut site to contain cave-temples for three of India’s indigenous religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. While Ellora’s multi-religious nature has been recognized by scholars, it has been considered primarily as a means to examine and divide the site into separate phases of artistic, religious, and dynastic activity. Such isolated studies of Ellora’s caves have deleterious results in terms of understanding the expansion and internal dynamics of the site. In my paper, I examine a select group of Hindu and Jain cave-temples that were excavated in the mid-eighth through ninth centuries. Although these monuments are commonly considered to be the products of kingly (specifically Rashtrakuta) patronage, my analysis of the visual and epigraphical evidence of the Jain caves suggests that other types of donors participated in the site’s creation, thereby expanding our understanding of patronage patterns in early medieval India. Through a careful linking of the Jain caves to their Hindu counterparts, this paper not only sheds light on issues of patronage, but also on the religious and artistic interactions that occurred in the ninth century. It is only through this comparative approach, which is concerned more with the local history of the site rather than an over-arching dynastic history that we can begin to understand how Ellora functioned as a multi-religious center.

Constructing Kalachuri Hegemony: New Sects and Architectural Programs in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Central India

Kimberly Masteller, Harvard University

At the turn of the first millennium, the religious landscape of India constituted a complex network of diverse sectarian traditions. Many of these new movements found expression in the plastic arts, in the form of sculpture and temple programs supported by highranking, often royal, patrons.

Monuments created under the Eastern Kalachuri Dynasty bear witness to this expanding soteriological field through their increasingly elaborate, and in some cases syncretic iconographies. At the height of their rule, the Eastern Kalachuris controlled the lands between the Narmada, Son, and Ganges Rivers in eastern Madhya Pradesh, known then as Chedi Mandala. Their regional presence was felt through their military campaigns, religious patronage, and temple building activities.

This paper examines artistic remains from three Kalachuri sites: the northern complex at Gurgi, the hill fortress of Bhandavgarh, and the Yogini temple at Bheraghat near the capital of Tripuri. All three are connected with the tenth-century monarch Yuvarajadeva, who built a massive Śiva temple at Gurgi, whose Vaisnavite minister executed the rockcut monuments at Bandhavgarh, and whose reign saw the initial foundation of the Kaula temple at Bheraghat. However, these monuments exhibit strikingly different iconographies, reflecting a divergence rather than a coalescing of sectarian concerns. I argue that each of these monuments presents a particular method for constructing Kalachuri royal identity. I further suggest that the fabric of Kalachuri religion was pliable enough to accommodate the complex layering of sectarian traditions and patron’s interests, even when they appear to be at philosophic odds with each other.

Building on India’s New Sultanate "Frontier": The Role of the Artisan, Architect, and Patron in the Kingdom of Jaunpur

Anna Sloan, Independent Scholar

The demise of the longstanding centralized rule of the Delhi Sultanate and the concurrent rise of independent regional kingdoms in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries had significant cultural implications. Among these was a radical reshaping of building practices in a series of north Indian regions formerly ruled as provinces of the Delhi Sultans. In each of a handful of newly independent kingdoms, distinctive regional styles emerged, conditioned by complex collaborations among craftsmen and architects drawn from both local populations and other parts of the Islamic world.

This paper will explore one of these, the kingdom of Jaunpur, as a case study in the process of building, revealing the effects of such collaborations on the formation of a new architectural idiom. It will suggest ways that visual and inscriptional evidence may be used together to illuminate activities that otherwise evade art historians due to the scarcity of texts, plans, and other documentary evidence of architectural practices from the pre-modern world.

At sites like Jaunpur, evidence embedded in the physical fabric of structures—including mason’s marks, inscriptions, metrology, masonry techniques, and ornamentation—points to the multiple origins of their makers. In particular, the hybrid nature of Jaunpur’s architecture reflects the convergence of differing aesthetic, conceptual, and regulatory systems. And, under close scrutiny, it may also suggest the distinct roles played by members of this diverse work force.

Divine Resources: Smelting Zinc and Housing the Gods at Jawar

Deborah L. Stein, University of California, Berkeley

The archaeological remains in the mining town of Jawar present an important record of the interaction between industry, religion, and political power in Southern Rajasthan. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Northern India was being solidified into an empire with its seat at Delhi. In contrast to other Rajput states, the active resistance of Mewar’s Maharanas necessitated both refuge and resources. It was about this time that the little-studied village of Jawar became important not only for its zinc industry, but also as a religious center.

Local legend has it that the smelting of zinc was invented at Jawar in the fourteenth century. This is corroborated by the archaeological remains of ancient zinc smelting. Jawar’s location on the periphery together with its natural resources made it politically strategic as a good hiding place and a source of raw materials for weapons. Its rise in industrial and economic importance was followed by the erection of eleven temples and a tank by a variety of religious communities—Jains, Śaivas, Śākti worshippers, and Vaisnavas.

The temples of Jawar attest to the relationship between politics, industry, and religion in fifteenth and sixteenth century Rajasthan. During this period, the Rajput kingdom of Mewar was holding out from Emperor Akbar’s encroaching power, refusing daughters in marriage, and retreating from their capitals to tribal areas, such as Jawar, for protection. The religious monuments at Jawar functioned as sites where power was staged in the periphery by those who sought to control vital industry during a politically tumultuous time.