Gods in the Time of Democracy
Kajri Jain
(Author)
Description
In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the "infrastructures of the sensible."
Product Details
Price
$35.59
Publisher
Duke University Press
Publish Date
March 12, 2021
Pages
360
Dimensions
5.9 X 9.0 X 0.9 inches | 1.25 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781478011392
BISAC Categories:
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Kajri Jain is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto and author of Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, also published by Duke University Press.