Imaging and Imagining the Ef/feminine Body in the Historiography of Pre-modern Indian Art*

Abstract

The article delves into recent historical discourses that challenge Western colonial scholarship, which constructs Indian history in general and Indian art as ‘inferior’ in technical, aesthetic and even ‘moral’ terms. This informs the ideological and chronological choices of the archaeologists and art historians, who privileged ‘Greek and Buddhist’ art over early medieval art and architecture. This trope within colonial writings relegated Indian civilization to the realm of the feminine, weak, backward and superstitious and thus inferior as compared to powerful, masculine and rational Western ‘White’ counterpart. This socio-sexual hierarchy, represented through art, literature and other cultural forms, reinforces gender norms. Nationalist responses question this discourse by engaging with similar tropes, debating the vitality and masculinity of Indian art. A spiritualist–feminist discourse privileging positive engenderment of sexualized female bodies as symbols of fertility and partially inverting the colonial perspectives also emerged. The article engages with the decolonization process in Indian art and its history, exemplified by V. S. Agrawala’s work and approaches to art that validate the pre-modern Indian worldview of not only dharma [religion] but also artha [political economy] and kama [desire] as coeval. It reinterprets the sexualized figures within this larger ‘Indian’ tradition, questioning the notions about ‘effeminization’ and offering an alternative narrative.