Lives of Indian Images.

• Author: GEROW, EDWIN
• Position: Review

Lives of Indian Images. By RICHARD H. DAVIS. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. 331. $39.50, [pound]30 (cloth); $18.95, [pound]11.50 (paper).

There are books that defeat even an editor's best attempts to find a reviewer and the lapsus is particularly painful when the book is one of the most engaging to appear in recent memory. With apologies to the author, for he does deserve better than this, the editor himself feels in such cases obliged, faute de mieux, to bring the book, at least, to the attention of his readers--presuming, of course, that they have not already seen the many and flattering reviews published elsewhere. Richard Davis' Lives of Indian Images is such a book. It is not so much concerned with "images" in an art-historical or "aesthetic" sense--Davis' telling contrast of the way sacred images are "displayed" in an austere Western museum setting, with their cacophonous and constantly wearing "use" in an Indian temple (pp. 17ff.) both puts the former approach in its (exotic) place and sets the stage for Davis' real interest--the image's religious and social (and political) context, in which the "image" turns out to be a (or the) major player in a complex game where symbolism becomes "life." It is, in other words, a study in the ways religious communities articulate themselves through potent reference points, of the ways "abstractions" become felt realities for masses of men, and serve to define them as men. A Saivite, approaching the sivalinga, sees not smooth stone--or even a "phallic symbol" (pace Freud or Katherine Mayo)--but the universe before it was born. A portable metaphysics. And the Hindu rajah is very selective in the pieces of "sculpture" he pillages, for a dvarapala, with his associations of worshipful obedience and fierce valor, is just the trophy the victor needs to "situate" himself vis-a-vis his vassal (pp. 59ff.). And these are...