Pineapples, Marigolds, and Marvels of Peru: South Asian Literary and Artistic Responses to Exotic Flora, 1600-1800 (original) (raw)
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This article offers a preliminary investigation of figurative, metaphorical and linguistic aspects of the garden in Indian English fiction. After providing a short introduction to the symbolism of gardens in the colonial and postcolonial periods, and to the image of the garden in Anglophone Indian literature, the focus will be on the novel The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar (2007), in order to stress the relevance of both specific phytonyms and common names of plants as important linguistic, cultural and textual indicators employed to construct and convey meanings, often in the form of cognitive metaphors. In this light, the postcolonial garden emerges as a cultural site of hybridity and connection with the past. The examination is undertaken through an interdisciplinary approach that follows and adapts the theories and methods of postcolonial studies, stylistics and narratology (e.g. Kovecses 2002; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010; Sorlin 2014).
Roots of Wisdom, Branches of Devotion: Plant Life in South Asian Traditions
2016
Plant life has figured prominently in Indian culture. Archaeobotanical findings and Vedic texts confirm that plants have been central not only as a commodity (sources of food; materia medica; sacrificial matter; etc.) but also as powerful and enduring symbols. Roots of Wisdom, Branches of Devotion: Plant Life in South Asian Traditions explores how herbs, trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetables have been studied, classified, represented and discussed in a variety of Indian traditions such as Vedism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, indigenous cultures and Islam. Moving from an analysis of the sentience of plants in early Indian philosophies and scientific literature, the various chapters, divided in four thematic sections, explore Indian flora within devotional and mystic literature (bhakti and Sufism), mythological, ritual and sacrificial culture, folklore, medicine, perfumery, botany, floriculture and agriculture. Arboreal and floral motifs are also discussed as an expression of Indian a...
South Asian History and Culture, 2022
'What is Indian Spikenard?', asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746-1794), in a famous paper, 'On the Spikenard of the Ancients,' published in Asiatick Researches, Volume II (1790). The question serves here as a point of entry into Jones's method for creating culturally specific plant descriptions to help locate Indian plants in their Indian milieu. This paper discusses Jones's philological method for identifying the jat _ āmāṁsī of the Sanskrit verse lexicon, the Amarakośa, and materia medica texts, a flowering plant with important medicinal properties and great commercial value, as the 'Spikenard of the Ancients'. Philology, for Jones, was of a piece with language study and ethnology, and undergirded by observational practices based on trained seeing, marking a continuity between his philological and botanical knowledge making. The paper follows Jones through his textual and 'ethnographic' explorations, as he creates both a Linnaean plant-object-Valeriana jatamansi Jones-and a mode of plant description that encoded the 'native' experience associated with a much-desired therapeutic commodity. The result was a botanical identification that forced the jat _ āmāṁsī to travel across epistemologies and manifest itself as an object of colonial natural history. In the words of the medic and botanist, William Roxburgh (1751-1815), whose research on the spikenard is also discussed here, Jones's method achieved what 'mere botany' with its focus on the technical arrangement of plants could not do.
Garden and Landscape Practice in Pre-colonial India
2020
This Series takes as its starting point notions of the visual, and of vision, as central in producing meanings, maintaining aesthetic values and relations of power. Through individual studies, it hopes to chart the trajectories of the visual as an activating principle of history. An important premise here is the conviction that the making, theorising and historicising of images do not exist in exclusive distinction of one another. Opening up the fi eld of vision as an arena in which meanings get constituted simultaneously anchors vision to other media such as audio, spatial and the dynamics of spectatorship. It calls for closer attention to inter-textual and inter-pictorial relationships through which ever-accruing layers of readings and responses are brought alive. Through its regional focus on South Asia the Series locates itself within a prolifi c fi eld of writing on non-Western cultures which have opened the way to pluralise iconographies, and to perceive temporalities as scrambled and palimpsestic. These studies, it is hoped, will continue to reframe debates and conceptual categories in visual histories. The importance attached here to investigating the historical dimensions of visual practice implies close attention to specifi c local contexts which intersect and negotiate with the global, and can reconstitute it. Examining the ways in which different media are to be read onto and through one another would extend the thematic range of the subjects to be addressed by the Series to include those which cross the boundaries that once separated the privileged subjects of art historical scholarship-sculpture, painting and monumental architecturefrom other media: studies of fi lm, photography and prints on the one hand, advertising, television, posters, calendars, comics, buildings and cityscapes on the other.
Gardens of the Mughal Empire Bibliographic Update II --2008-18
http://mughalgardens.org/html/resources.html, 2019
This update of the Gardens of the Mughal Empire bibliography is the result of new questions and avenues of research that have expanded the temporal, geographic, and thematic bounds of Mughal garden sources. It builds on this site’s first bibliography published by Michael Brand (2001), which reflected the many historical sources for and rapid growth of Mughal garden scholarship in the 1990s. In addition to delineating the contours of this body of scholarship, that bibliography became a comprehensive list of sources on Mughal Lahore and its gardens. Notably, even in that early iteration, an understanding of the necessity for multidisciplinary approaches to Mughal gardens is evident. The range of sources identified stemmed from the disciplines of landscape architecture, geography, history, and art history, as well as South Asian and Islamic studies. In 2007, the bibliography was updated with scholarship published since 2001, and its thematic categories were refined to reflect the use of Mughal gardens as an analytic lens into the cultural heritage of Punjab. The update also benefited from detailed excavations and conservation of notable garden sites, such as the Moonlight Garden in Agra, Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, and Babur’s tomb-garden in Kabul. These projects made possible the reconstruction of newly unearthed water systems and pathways and necessitated a new bibliographic category, “Mughal and Islamicate Gardens, Waterworks, Arts, and Conservation.” The 2007 Nagaur palace-garden complex excavations also brought to light the importance of soil profiles and planting techniques, and the bibliography was also updated to include materials on plants and vegetation of South and Southwest Asia. This latest iteration highlights the substantial amount of additional scholarship on Mughal gardens published from 2007 to 2018. As in previous updates, we include earlier items missed in the previous bibliographies. Many of the updates reflect new directions in the field of art history, moving Mughal gardens beyond the visual dimension foregrounded in art historical practice. New emphasis has been placed on multisensorial experiences, bringing oral, olfactory, and affective dimensions of Mughal gardens. In addition, we have expanded the geographic span beyond Lahore and the Punjab to include recent research on regional gardens of Kashmir, Rajasthan, and the Deccan. The wider range of related materials include Pahari painting and Sikh sacred texts. These updates respond to the need for regional approaches to South Asian studies expounded in recent edited volumes on the Punjab and the Deccan, for a cross-regional comparison of gardens and water systems, and for a broader understanding of the geographic and temporal reach of Mughal gardens. This includes sources on colonial and postcolonial garden practices, contemporary Mughal gardens outside of South Asia, and vernacular kitchen gardens.Significant progress has been made in broadening the types of sources considered and making them more accessible on platforms such as academia.edu, researchgate.net, and archnet.org. The underlined articles in this bibliography are linked to PDFs that are available online for free. A number of investigative loose ends remain. While advances in scientific method were used to great effect in Mughal garden research of the early 2000s, a broader exploration of methods across disciplines is necessary, particularly in the realms of digital humanities and anthropology. On the one hand, urban infrastructure development in Lahore raises new challenges for heritage conservation. On the positive side, conservation projects carried out by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has demonstrated successful integration of heritage conservation and community concerns, of those whose lives and livelihoods intersect with historic Mughal gardens, which opens the door for further research on urban landscape heritage conservation in South Asia. List of Sections in the 2008-2018 Update 1. General Indo-Islamic History, Geography, and Culture 2. General Mughal Gardens, Art, Architecture, and Conservation 3. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Punjab 4. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Lahore 5. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Kashmir 6. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Himachal Pradesh 7. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Rajasthan 8. Cultural Landscape Heritage of the Deccan 9. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Colonial and Postcolonial India 10. Contemporary Islamic Gardens 11. Selected Water References 12. Selected References on Plants and Vegetation of Southwest Asia 13. Older Materials on Lahore