Temple to Love.

• Position: Book review

Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal. By PIKA GHOSH. Bloomington: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005. Pp. xv + 255.

In the seventeenth century, a religious movement centered on the worship of the divine couple Krisna and Radha, and named Gaudiya Vaishnavism, became a cultural force for transforming the countryside of southwestern Bengal into a cosmopolitan urban environment. Folklore has it that more than three hundred temples were built in the newly established capital of the local Malla dynasty, which then became Vishnupur, the city of the Hindu god Visnu, of whom Krisna is the blue-bodied, erotic incarnation. A handful of exuberant temples that still remain in the vicinity of Vishnupur is the subject of this tirelessly researched, elaborately conceptualized, lucid, and accessible study worthy of the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities it has received.

Religious architecture has both a past and a present, a visual presence in which a historian attempts to re-imagine an earlier time as well as a sacred presence that rejuvenates a living community of devotees and pilgrims. Ghosh stages an interplay of these two seemingly contradictory aspects of her analysis through a fine calibration of her own documentation and visual analysis of monuments with contemporary inscriptions as well as ethnography among Gaudiya Vaishnava practitioners today. She uses their song books, ritual texts, and oral narratives alongside British administrative records and travel accounts of the region. The result is a sumptuously interwoven material and cultural history of seventeenth-century Bengal that also reveals the persistence of that past in our own times.

The book is clearly organized. The introduction describes the monuments at Vishnupur as a new type of temple called Ratna. The term is debatable, but it distinguishes the seventeenth-century temples from an older. North Indian, temple type called Nagara. from which the Ratna evolved in Bengal. Linking architectural form to ritual function, chapter one relates a distinctive, gazebo-like open shrine built on the second story of Ratna temples to a new ritual requirement of presenting portable images of the erotic couple, Radha and Krisna, to the community of ecstatic devotees gathered during festivals in the open courtyard below. Chapter two is a vivid illustration of what Ghosh calls "Islamicization." It describes Ratna as a "paradigm shift" to a new congregational temple combining within its Hindu framework features of Islamic mosques as well as local thatched huts. The chapter also explores this pastiche within a complex political history of seventeenth-century Bengal, when the Mughal empire expanded to include this easterly province. Chapter three explores the Ratna typology in relation to the older Nagara form, which it appropriates and replaces. In the process of its "Sanskritization," or taking on the ancient...