This article seeks to rediscover and contemporise the importance of using the shastras, Sanskrit technical treatises, as a standard of critique to analyse Indian art. The applicability and interpretative value of this approach for the study of Indian art history is exemplified by a case study of the miniature paintings representing the image of Shri Nathji in Nathdvara. Analysing the image of Shri Nathji as it appears in Nathdvara miniature paintings from different shastric points of views, including the theories of measurement and proportion, postures, mudras and rasa theory, the article proposes to include in the definition of shastra not only canonical textual sources but also practical/visual and oral/verbal transmitted knowledge. While textual concepts are used as a methodology for the reading of the image of Shri Nathji, the canonical shastric theories are considered side by side with such oral and practical knowledge in an attempt to redefine the concept of ‘text’ for Indian tradition, and especially to further our knowledge on the relationship between text and image in Indian art.
This article highlights the importance of a prominent festival, the Saptasvarupa Annakutotsava celebrated in Nathdwara in 1822, through an iconographic analysis of a miniature painting dated to 1822–1850 in the lacma collection. First, the essay delimits the area of investigation by briefly introducing the sect of Puṣṭi Mārg, its icons or svarūps, and the installation of its most important deity, Śrī Nāthjī, at Nathdwara in 1672. Secondly, it analyzes the festival of 1822 as depicted in the painting. The final part of the study underlines the significance of the celebrations in the history of the sect by contextualizing the event with information drawn from secondary literature: it introduces some well-documented issues, such as the absence of the svarūp of Bālkṛṣṇajī in the celebrations; it mentions some of the problems that Dauji, the head priest of the temple, had to overcome in the coordination of the festival, such as settling the disputes among the gosvāmīs of the sect; and it concludes with a comparative analysis of the Saptasvarupa Annakutotsava with two similar festivals held in Nathdwara in 1739–1740 and 1966 to emphasize the preeminence of the event of 1822 in the history of Puṣṭi Mārg.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.