Ellora Concept And Style

Drawing on art historical, epigraphical, and textual evidence, this book is the first full-scale reconstruction of medieval Jain artistic and devotional practices at the rock-cut site of Ellora in Maharashtra, India. Created during the ninth and tenth centuries, Ellora's Jain caves are among the best-preserved examples of medieval Jain art in India. While this book briefly addresses traditional art historical issues of date and iconography, it primarily considers the articulation of sacred space within the caves and the role of imagery in shaping devotional practices. Building upon scholarship that examines Jainism within its larger South Asian context, this book also explores connections between the Jain monuments and their Hindu and Buddhist counterparts to reveal a lived religious world at Ellora.

This book explores the manner in which human societies understood and managed scarce water resources. Focusing on the arid, rain shadow region of Marathwada, it documents the panoramic history of this region’s most important resource – water. It shows how water delineates the establishment of political authority, marks the intersection of networks of trade and pilgrimage and is the bearer of identity through community memories. The book foregrounds how, as a material as well as a ritual and symbolic element, water flows across the boundaries of caste, sect and religion, bringing communities together and linking the past with the present. It not only analyses textual and archaeological sources but also focuses on oral narratives and their potential to provide consensual as well as alternative narratives of the historical and cultural landscape of Ellora–Khuldabad–Daulatabad. It also shows how water has been framed in myriad forms in human history – as a ritual, allegorical element present in the myths and cosmology that order the sacred geography of pilgrimage centres, as a physical tangible presence manipulated through human technology to sustain the population and finally, as a subliminal driver for historic agency, its often hidden, underground presence underwriting the region’s vitality over the past millennium. A nuanced history of water over millennia, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of environmental history, historical geography, South Asian studies, heritage studies and environmental studies.

The historical development of Esoteric Buddhism in India is still known only in outline. A few verifiably early texts do give some insight into the origin of the ideas which would later develop and spread to East and Southeast Asia, and to Tibet. However, there is another kind of evidence which can be harnessed to the project of reconstructing the history of Esoteric Buddhist doctrines and practice. This evidence consists of art objects, mainly sculpture, which survive in significant numbers from the 6th to the 13th century.

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This collection of essays, narratives, and philosophical reflections on the interreligious imagination explores key historical and contemporary movements of cross-fertilization among our major spiritual traditions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – as expressed in art, literature, ritual practice, and interfaith dialogue.