Monica Juneja

Disasters and Pre-industrial Societies: Historiographic Trends and Comparative Perspectives

The Medieval History Journal, 10, 1&2 (2007): 1–31 SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore DOI: 10.1177/097194580701000201 Acknowledgements: This special issue of The Medieval History Journal brings together the papers presented at the international conference ‘Natural Disasters and Pre-Modern Societies’, held at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, from 7–9 September 2006. The conference was, in part, a continuation of a series of meetings of the international and interdisciplinary network of scholars engaged in the ‘Historische Erforschung von Katastrophen in kulturvergleichender Perspektive’ (Historical Study of Disasters in a Comparative and Transcultural Perspective), supported since Summer 2005 by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). The circle of 12 members of the network could be enlarged to include the participation of several scholars in the field, invited from all over the world. For their generous support in making this international conference possible we wish to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG), die Swiss National Science Foundation, the Académie suisse des sciences humaines et sociales, the Department of History of the University of Zurich and the Vereinigung Akademischer Mittelbau der Universität Zürich. We also wish to acknowledge the contribution of those participants of the conference, not represented in this volume, to the lively discussions during the three and a half days at Zurich. We especially thank Jens-Ivo Engels, Jörg Fisch, Anthony Oliver-Smith and Otfried Weintritt. A special word of thanks is due to Vinita Damodaran and Alfred Thomas Grove (University of Cambridge) for their help in making the article by Richard Grove available for this issue. The publication of this theme issue coincides with the happy event of The Medieval History Journal having completed 10 years of its existence. Our sincere thanks go to the members of the Sage team for their invaluable efforts throughout the making of this double issue and to Harbans Mukhia for his unfailing support and encouragement.

The peasant image and agrarian change: Representations of rural society in nineteenth‐century French painting from millet to van Gogh

In the upsurge of rustic themes in French painting during the second half of the nineteenth century is articulated a range of urban responses to agrarian and industrial transformation of country and city at the time. The recreation through art of ‘peasant culture’ was rooted in preoccupations about work and production, changing social relations and forms of sociability, the idea of the nation and the growth of political consciousness. This article examines some of the processes underlying the abundant production of peasant images ‐ the role of patronage, the growing importance of contemporary art criticism in formulating and diffusing values and sensibilities — as well as the complex and, at times, contradictory strains within the iconography of rural life in nineteenth‐century French art.

‘Archaeologizing’ Heritage and Transcultural Entanglements: An Introduction

The appropriation of the past by actors in the present is subject to multiple dynamics. These span a field of forces composed of nation states, transnational organisations, and local communities, each concerned with preserving the remains of the past in order to emblematize identities, to protect and project a nation’s patrimony, or alternatively to construct a notion of world heritage. There are many facets to the study of heritage in modern societies; the concept is part of a transcultural order that has emerged in the last two centuries. A child of the European Enlightenment, it circulated under the aegis of colonialism across the globe where it was harnessed to the civilizing programme of the colonial state and at the same time appropriated by the agenda of nation building to wrest locality from the global constellation of empire. In the contemporary world, heritage has become increasingly enmeshed with modern media, tourism, and the spectacle, which in turn has led to the creation of a veritable ‘heritage industry.’ Today’s global heritage industry does not flatten cultural difference; rather, it exploits the particularity of the local and re-packages the exotic as a commodity for the world bazaar in ways that are reminiscent of the Orientalist fabrications in the world exhibitions of the nineteenth century. Yet the globalization of ethnicity ought not to detract from the observation that the varied national and local articulations of identity and its tangible anchors make heritage a contested issue and often a site of tension and violent conflict.

EurAsian Matters: An Introduction

“Art historians today tend to be divided between those who study what objects mean and those who study how objects are made.”

The Making of New Delhi

The paper discusses how British architects tried to create for New Delhi a public architecture that would maintain the well-established association between classical buildings and the public sphere. It argues that such projects were a global phenomenon at the turn of the century when classical ideals were drawn upon and translated into symbolic statements in a number of world capitals, shaped at each site by local conditions. The imperial capital of New Delhi was envisioned as modern in geometrical layout but built in a recognizable ‘Indian’ style, secularized by omission of any explicitly ‘religious’imagery.

Objects, Frames, Practices: A Postscript on Agency and Braided Histories of Art

‘I’d see a man with a long beard standing next to an elegant lady, sharing a moment.... Maybe through art we can bring people together.’ This observation by Sheika Hussah Sabah al-Salim al-Sabah of the Kuwaiti royal family during the exhibition ‘Islamic Art and Patronage’, which featured the family’s private collection and drew large crowds at the 22 sites across the world it travelled to, has been cited by Alan Riding in an article published in the New York Times as he advocates the potential of ‘Islamic art’ to act as a ‘mediator for cultures in confrontation’.1 Both the Sheika’s sanguine hope and the tenor of Riding’s essay articulate a stance taken up by sections of a globally spread liberal intelligentsia as a counter-poise to the sombre mood following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the political demonisation of Islam by large sections of the media. Art, according to Riding and several others—journalists, curators, politicians and cultural bureaucrats2—possesses the power to heal the wounds inflicted by terrorism and the war against it. In addition, the article continues, through the medium of art unruly ‘Muslim youths in Europe could identify with the glories of their Islamic roots’.3 In short, the rich heritage of an ‘Islamic past’ would work as a panacea for evils of the present, a position which comes disturbingly close to the neo-conservative voice of George W. Bush when, six days after September 11, he declared: ‘The face of terror is not

Translating the Body Into Image. The Body Politic and Visual Practice at the Mughal Court During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract This article investigates the ways in which visual representations reconfigured the body in North Indian political culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While images were meant to transmit and translate ethical conceptions of the polity, communicative modes of the visual medium followed a dynamic that was not a rehearsal of the path taken by texts. As images cut across distinctions formulated elsewhere and drew up new boundaries, they worked to refine and pluralise the understandings of political culture beyond the normative. Pictorial experiments at the North Indian courts involved negotiating multiple regimes of visuality and arriving at pictorial choices that ended up creating a new field of sensibilities, especially the corporeal. An argument is therefore made for the agency of the visual in defining new ideas of the political body that were constitutive of politico-ethical ideals in early modern North India.

Book Reviews : EBBA KOCH, Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. xxvii + 317, 235 black and white illustrations, Rs 1295

pioneering studies have sought to extend the parameters of this vast subject beyond colonialist and nationalist frameworks through the application of fresh critical strategies. Ebba Koch’s writings on Mughal architecture and painting, the outcome of her research of many years in India and Pakistan, can be located in this growing field. The present volume brings together eleven essays, published between 1982 and 1997, whose central thematic focus is architectural production during the reign of the emperor Shah Jahan, with one essay on miniature painting of the

Book Reviews : Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1997 (reprint Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1999), pp. xiii + 331 + 50 b&w reproductions:

One valuable dimension of the self-reflexivity induced by postmodernist moods is a search for what lies latent beneath the seemingly unruffled surface of historical narratives, a search for the unspoken which reveals that history writing is never a univocal act. It happens often enough that persuasive ideas get articulated, incorporated within writings, and accepted by a professional community as possessing the weight of authority. Showing that ideas about the past are constructed out of the polysemous panoply of their contemporary settings and concerns, and not in the spirit of ’pure enquiry’, becomes a vital exercise in view of a naively positivist acceptance of the ’truth’ value of materials used in modern historical writings as ’primary sources’. One such exercise, finely tuned and discerning, has been carried out by Richard Davis in the work under review. It sets out to chart the mobile ’lives of Indian