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Gods in the Time of Democracy
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Kajri Jain
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2021
About this book
Kajri Jain examines how the monumental statues erected in India following its economic reforms in the 1990s became a favored religious and political form with which to assert cultural, political, religious, and caste power.
Author / Editor information
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.
Reviews
“Instead of lamenting the lack of a progressive secular spirit, Kajri Jain offers a rich, complex, and thoroughly fascinating account of how religiosity itself is being transformed in contemporary India into a public arena of democratic politics. Combining capitalist ambition with electoral competition, the proliferation of religious statuary brings together sacred texts, technology, automobility, and numerology into a new political aesthetic of monumentalism and spectacle. Jain argues persuasively that aesthetics is constitutive of politics, often in unexpected ways.”
-- Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University
“Kajri Jain's extraordinary book on monumental statuary cuts across art history and visual culture. Gods and leaders are together framed within what she startlingly calls ‘the aesthetics of democracy.’ Here aesthetics as a redistributive principle generates her premise of emergence: counter-positioning of the oppressed majority, their appropriation of image, material structures, and publics within India's severely stratified society increasingly subject to fascistic Hindutva. The rise of right-wing regimes worldwide will position Jain's brilliant discourse within complex contestations on what is the aesthetics of democracy today.”
-- Geeta Kapur, author of When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India
“Gods in the Time of Democracy is a complex and challenging attempt at reframing the discussion around monumental iconography in India and its diaspora.... The book is a valuable contribution to contemporary art history and religious studies.”
-- Manasvin Rajagopalan Reading Religion
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 8, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9781478012887
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
400
eBook ISBN:
9781478012887
Audience(s) for this book
Professional and scholarly;
