The Government Museum and Art Gallery of Chandigarh was established to fill a cultural vacuum in post-partition Punjab. It received the seed of its collection from Lahore and the rest was amassed by M. S. Randhawa (1909–1986), an Indian Civil Service officer with a love for painting that at the time was identified as “Kangra” for its style and association with the eponymous region and kingdom. In the 1950s, he spent considerable time traveling in the western Himalayas, tracking down paintings and acquiring them for the museum. The many volumes of correspondence that he later bequeathed to the museum reveal how collections of early modern Pahari paintings were rapidly dispersing to form new collections elsewhere. Through the lens of the bureaucrat-collector Randhawa, this article sheds light on the complex history of collecting in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. In tracing the movement of paintings from private royal collections to a public government museum, the article approaches provenance as biography with the goal to contribute to collective efforts of mapping networks that connect collections and collectors.

Buddhist temple bells (bonshō) are a precious feature of almost every Japanese temple. These bells often have a singular status within their environment, with a strong aural and visual presence prominently positioned in their own structure. While most past studies of Buddhist bells have concentrated on their inscriptions, craftsmanship, technologies, or sound, this article will focus on how approximately 45,000 of them disappeared during the late 1930s and mid-1940s. During the Asia-Pacific War, as metals grew scarce, temple bells became a material resource for munition production. Why were temples and shrines convinced to give up their bells that embodied the hopes and vows of past donors? What was the process of transformation from a religious instrument used to comfort the dead into an object that would destroy life? Four case studies, presented as object biographies of bells that date from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, will be examined to consider these questions, as well as how these bells managed to escape the fate of being melted down and the international, national, and local ramifications of reuniting these survivors with their original temples.梵鐘は、日本のほとんどの仏教寺院に欠かせないものである。寺院の中でもしばしば特別の重要性を持つ梵鐘は、独立した建物に設置され、強い視覚的、聴覚的な存在感を放つ。これまで梵鐘に関しては、銘文、製作技術や技能、音色などに焦点を当てて研究が行われてきたが、本論文では、1930年代後半から1940年代半ばの間に、約4万5000点が姿を消したという事実に注目する。太平洋戦争中、金属不足が深刻になると、梵鐘は武器弾薬の素材として供出を求められるようになった。過去の寄贈者の願いや誓いが込められた梵鐘の供出要請に、神社仏閣はなぜ応じたのだろうか。死者を供養するための法具から、生命を破壊する武器への転換のプロセスは、どのようなものだったのだろうか。17～18世紀に鋳造され、現在まで残った4つの梵鐘の来し方を振り返るケーススタディを通じて、この問題への答え、およびこれらの梵鐘がどうやって溶解される運命を免れたかを探る。さらにこれらの梵鐘がもともと安置されていた寺院に返還された時に、海外、全国、そして地域レベルでどのように影響があったかを考察する。

Sculptors during the Kamakura period at times looked to unconventional sources for the material for their images and other projects. In 1183 Unkei used fragments of wood from the destroyed Great Buddha Hall at Tōdaiji for the rollers of two sets of the Lotus Sutra, and in 1206 an anonymous sculptor used a piece of charred wood, presumably from the same structure, for the right shoulder of the memorial portrait of Shunjōbō Chōgen, the monk who rebuilt the temple after it burned in 1180. Unkei’s father, Kōkei, employed wood from a sacred pillar beneath one of the halls at Ise Shrine for a now-lost image of Dainichi that was originally installed at Hosshōji in Kyoto in the late twelfth century. In 1256 the Nara sculptor Kaijō carved statues of Aizen Myōō and Jizō commissioned by the monk Jakuchō. The inscriptions indicate that they were fashioned from wood from the pillars of the Great Buddha Hall, most likely ones that remained after the conflagration. When preparing to carve the statues, Jakuchō and Kaijō consecrated the wood, and the sculptor and his two assistants maintained the Eight Pure Precepts while sculpting the image. Through the use of repurposed wood from structures with potent connections to Japan’s religious history, the installations of dedicatory objects, and their own personal devotions, Kaijō and other sculptors of the period embedded their works into multiple networks of meaning that reinforced the spiritual authority of their statues in ways that went far beyond their immediate visual impact.鎌倉時代の仏師たちは、彫像や他の作品に通常考慮外の木材使用に目を向けることがあった。1183年に運慶は、火災した東大寺大仏殿の焼け残りの木片を「法華経」二部の軸棒に使用した。また1206年には、無名の仏師が、おそらくこれも大仏殿の焼けた木片を俊乗房重源の遺像の右肩に使った。重源は、1180年に東大寺の焼尽後、再建のために奔走した僧だ。運慶の父の康慶は、今は存在しないのだが、12世紀後半に京都の法勝寺に安置されていた大日如来像に、伊勢神宮の正殿の床下の中央に立てられた心御柱を利用した。1256年には、奈良の仏師であった快成が、仏僧の寂澄からの依頼を受け、愛染明王坐像と地蔵菩薩像を制作している。銘文を読むと、これらの像が大仏殿の柱に使用されていた木材を転用されたということが分かる。おそらく、火災で焼け残ったものを利用したのだろう。彫像制作の過程においては、寂澄と快成は使用木材を清め、彫像を彫るあいだは、仏師及び二人の弟子共々、八斎戒を守り続けた。このようにして日本宗教史との強い繋がりのある建築物に使用されていた木材を転用し、納入品を入れ、個々の献身をすることにより、快成やこの時代の他の仏師たちは、視覚的迫力を超えた精神面での権威を強化し、その多面な意図を彫像に組み込んだのであった。

During the 1640s, a unique turn in imperial Mughal patronage reconfigured Muslim devotional painting in India. At this time, two of Emperor Shah Jahan's children entered a Sufi order under the guidance of their sheikh, Mulla Shah. Jahanara Begum-the emperor's favorite daughter-became a central patron of Sufism in North India, commissioning paintings of living Muslim saints, including portraits of her master. Before her entry into Sufism, scenes with Muslim mystics tended to be either allegorical or historical, often conceived to reinforce the Mughal claim to divinely ordained kingship. After her initiation, many such portraits developed a meditative function. This paper explores the writings of three disciples of Mulla Shah-Jahanara Begum, her brother Dara Shikoh, and Tavakkul Beg-to frame an underlying function of devotional portraits. I demonstrate how Sufi practitioners used portraits of saints as portals that facilitated meditative visualization or, in some cases, communication with the supernatural world.

Unlike most post-Renaissance art, medieval painting-East and West-often juxtaposes elements of different styles in one work. In the absence of clear evidence of relevant period theorization, Occam's razor requires us to view such juxtapositions as the result of an indifference to art history, rather than a celebration of the historicity of styles. In China during the Song dynasty (960-1279), the development of naturalistic styles, along with relevant theories, meant that earlier, prenaturalistic styles came to be viewed as anachronistic. Yet in the painting of the literati of the Northern Song (960-1127) we find obsolete styles juxtaposed with more recent, naturalistic styles. Unlike the art of medieval China, these works were created on a foundation of two types of theory: the literary theory of citation and new, historically conscious theories of historical development.

This paper explores the possibility of reading the shifts in locations of objects as processes of translation and change in art history.The study focuses on the journeys and material reconstitutions of ancient Buddhist corporeal relics as they travelled from an archaeological site in British India, Piprahwa Kot, to a new relic temple in Bangkok, the capital of the Kingdom of Siam (Thailand), during the late nineteenth century.Mapping the shifting locations of the Piprahwa relics across changing geographical, institutional, cultural, and political spaces, the paper traces the changing materiality and multiple identities that accrued around these objects.This study does not ascribe these new identities of Buddhist relics solely to the "inventive" capacity of the cultural politics of British colonialism.Rather, it seeks to bring out the complexities of antiquarian collecting and market, connoisseurship, display, and scholarship; rituals of state diplomacy; and religious reclamations across transnational Southern Buddhist worlds, as constitutive of the new and multiple identities of ancient Buddhist corporeal relics. Bones of the BuddhaAs the sun rises against the silhouette of a brick mound, an Indiana Jones-like soundtrack leaves the audience in anticipation of exotic adventures and great discoveries.The next few shots move between a dramatized past and an enacted present to recreate the site of Piprahwa, the brick stupa (Buddhist funerary or commemorative mound) of the opening shot.Bodies of "native" laborers surround the central figure, a man playing a late nineteenth-century European landowner of the site, who sifts through the dust of centuries that has gathered on a recently unearthed stone coffer buried underneath the mound.The heavy stone lid is partially lifted as the camera focuses on the contents of the stone chest: a couple of almost indistinguishable artifacts all covered in dust, and some smaller objects strewn on the floor of the coffer, glittering in the light.As the central protagonist reaches down to the objects in the coffer, the disembodied voiceover (of Charles Dance) begins a dramatic rendering of how, in 1898, a colonial landowner in India made one of the most significant religious finds in history.The shot quickly shifts to the persuasive onscreen narration of the writer-protagonist Charles Allen as he passionately asks the audience to consider the impact of the finds: "Imagine