Historiography of South Asian Art

Art has been produced in South Asia for approximately forty-five hundred years. Art history, however, is much more recent in South Asia. Although some historians consider various texts dating as early as the 3rd century ce to be art history and others have gleaned the writings of early travelers to South Asia for information on art, the earliest histories of South Asian art begin in fact during the colonial period. That is both because art history is intrinsically a European field of knowledge and because colonial authorities understood knowledge about South Asia, including its past, as a tool for power. The work was done largely by amateurs, self-trained British who had come to India as part of the colonial enterprise. Historical studies of South Asian art do not really begin until the early 1900s, and the earliest surveys date back to 1927. About the same time, Ludwig Bachhofer, a protégé of Heinrich Wolfflin, published his study of early Indian sculpture. Both did much to move the study of South Asian art from its roots in archaeology and textual studies to art history as it was then conceived. Whereas Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the pioneering historian and philosopher of Indian art, did not teach and thus produce students, Bachhofer did, although more of his students went on to gain expertise in Chinese art than in South Asian art. The earliest full-time South Asia specialists in the United States, those working largely after World War II, came from other fields of art history, for example, medieval art in the case of Benjamin Rowland and Chinese art in the case of J. Leroy Davidson, and Stella Kramrisch, who had trained with Josef Strzygowski, the Polish Austrian art historian, came to the University of Pennsylvania. Their work, though quite different from one another, did much to shape the study of South Asian art in the United States and Europe. In South Asia the study of art remained heavily descriptive and often linked to studies in epigraphy and ancient history. On the Continent much of the work came from scholars who had been part of the colonial project either in India or in Southeast Asia. For example, Philippe Stern, who initially wrote on the art of Southeast Asia, trained a number of outstanding scholars during his years at the Musée Guimet, often following a close motif analysis. And Jean Philippe Vogel, though Belgian, had worked for the British in India. South Asian scholars who wrote on the monuments of the region were most often affiliated with museums or with the Archaeological Survey of India. As literature in the field of South Asian art history expanded, scholars began to stake out areas of specialization, sometimes following the model of European art history, that is, limiting specialization by geography and chronology. But three particular areas of writing on South Asian art developed rather distinctive scholarship. First, painting specialists tended toward connoisseurship as they sought to sort out the vast number of paintings in diverse collections and to create taxonomies for the understanding of painting production. Their scholarship was often presented in museum exhibitions, creating a rich repertoire of very important catalogues. Second, specialists in South Asia’s Islamic heritage sometimes had been trained in the field of Islamic art and so came to the study of South Asia as Islamicists rather than as South Asia specialists. Finally, the contemporary scene, once seen as derivative of European modern and contemporary art, has attracted some outstanding scholarship. In fact much of the very best work on South Asian art now focuses on the period from the arrival of the British and other colonizers to the early 21st century.