Images of India

The Dictionary of Art is an awesome effort by Macmillan, but my main impression of its coverage of India is of disappointment at the number, quality and the size of the illustrations. Perhaps a dictionary by definition should be concerned with verbiage rather than with image, but this is not a book about words but about art. More pictures and fewer words would have been preferable.

For instance, let us say students want to learn about the famous site of Ajanta. They can, of course, go to the general index: or they will have to find and hunt through the table of contents of this volume to locate Ajanta under "Architecture" and "Painting". They will be disappointed if they want to get a holistic overview of the only remaining monument in India where painting, sculpture and architectural forms, albeit in sculptured versions, can be seen as an integrated whole. And they will certainly be unable to savour the brilliant colours that are so essential a part of the flavour of the Ajanta murals or, for that matter, of both Mughal and Rajput paintings. (There are only eight colour plates in the volume and predictably they are all devoted to European art.) With a few exceptionally well-written essays by a few seasoned scholars, much of the long, sparsely illustrated text has been written largely for art-historians, who are either familiar with cited monuments or will be interested enough to chase the bibliographical references. Here, however, one encounters a strange manner of citation by chronological order of the publication date rather than the more familiar arrangement by alphabetical order of the authors' names. There are also serious omissions and in certain cases the citations seem personality oriented. For instance, for 2nd-1st century bc sculpture, Coomaraswamy's monumental Yaksa is omitted and yet it is a work of seminal importance, and still unsurpassed, for the understanding of the Yaksa concept. Indeed, overall, the essays are mostly concerned with stylistic analysis and dates rather than concepts, iconography or social aspects of art.

In its coverage of Indian art history, the section on the subcontinent is more sweeping than most general art history books as it includes essays on textiles, furniture, metalwork, all sorts of crafts and village as well as tribal art. A very brief essay is devoted to "Early modern styles'' with illustrations of two works by Nandalal Bose and Ravi Varma, while the postindependence period is treated separately under India, Pakistan and (since 1971) Bangladesh. One building, one painting and two sculptures illustrate the last half century of India's creativity in the visual arts and architecture. (One wonders how that compares with coverage for western countries.) There are also essays on museums and collecting that are rather skimpy but should provide a foundation on which others can build. However, one fails to understand why only the collectors' names are mentioned and those of curators without whom there would be no museum collections or even some private collections are considered unworthy of recognition. What is perhaps most peculiar is that the discussion of the art of the Indian subcontinent is brought to a close with a superficial and quite unnecessary essay on copies and forgeries. I did not find a similar ending for the essays on Indonesia. Perhaps this topic should have been treated with more expertise, in a separate section of the Dictionary in a global context, for it is not just an Indian art problem.

Pratapaditya Pal is fellow for research, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, and visiting curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art, Art Institute of Chicago.