The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries Between Sacred and Profane in India's Art.

• Author: Owen, Lisa N.
• Position: Book review

The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries Between Sacred and Profane in India's Art. By VIDYA DEHEJIA. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009. Pp. xii + 238, 72 fig.

While the primacy of the body in Indian artistic productions has been recognized by art historians, there has been little serious study synthesizing art and text and their shared articulations of the sensuous and ornamented figural form. In her book Vidya Dehejia goes beyond an iconographical analysis of selected artworks from premodern India by including passages from a variety of textual sources that also underscore the fundamental position of human and divine bodies. Dehejia does not attempt to demonstrate causal relationships between image and text, but chooses to highlight the ways that both media articulate shared concepts about the body and its ornamentation. For her textual material, Dehejia relies mostly on Sanskrit and Tamil court poetry and literature, inscriptions from monuments and sculpture, devotional hymns of saints, and dynastic eulogies (prasasti). Other sources include texts on art and aesthetics, as well as Buddhist literature and select passages from the vast corpus of Puranas. For the artworks, Dehejia presents an array of sculpted images (primarily stone and bronze) and dedicates a separate chapter to Rajput painting. A major theme explored throughout the book is how the physical beauty and ornamentation of humans, gods, and semidivine beings relates to larger concepts of morality. prosperity, auspiciousness, and health.

Chapter 1. "The Body as Leitmotif," sets the stage for Dehcjia's investigation. She begins by analyzing two sculptures: a Chola-period bronze image of the Hindu god Siva and a twelfth-century stone sculpture of a female dancer from Uttar Pradesh. With these two Images Dehejia introduces the reader to the sensuous figural form (both male and female) and the importance of ornamentation (alamkara). This exploration is continued in Chapters 2 and 4 where Dehejia more fully integrates textual expressions of the adorned body with the visual material. In these chapters Dehejia discusses the ways that both divine and human bodies are idealized and yet are related to elements of the natural world. The subjects, represented in both art and text, include yaksis and yaksas (female and male nature deities), beautiful women and young girls, kings and queens, the Buddha, aristocratic couples, and Hindu deities (featured particularly in Chapter 4).

The...