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A narrative of the early modern Indian sculpture known as the Mithuna couple.

Meena Kandasamy writes about the Mithuna couple, a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu, India, depicting lovers. Kandasamy unfurls a multi-layered, multi-directional narrative built from images, questions, and contradictions evoked by the sculpture. “How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it?” Kandasamy asks and then examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. Such knowledge complicates easy associations of love that may be evoked by the couple. 

Refusing any impulse to idealize or exoticize, Kandasamy connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom, and how. She sets the intimate alongside the institutional to interrogate terms such as decolonize, restitution, and preservation. Through an astonishing stylistic mix, including Twitter, academic discourse, poetry, and memoir, she talks back, forward, and sideways with the object.

The first nonfiction collection by internationally acclaimed writer and translator Amit Majmudar, Black Avatar combines elements of memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism.

The eight pieces in this deeply engaging volume reflect author Amit Majmudar’s comprehensive studies of American, European, and Indian traditions, as well as his experiences in both suburban Ohio and the western Indian state of Gujarat. The volume begins with the title piece, a fifteen-part examination of “How Colorism Came to India.” Tracing the evolution of India’s bias in favor of light skin, Majmudar reflects on the effects of colonialism, drawing upon sources ranging from early Sanskrit texts to contemporary film and television.

Other essays illuminate subjects both timely and timeless. “The Ramayana and the Birth of Poetry” discusses how suffering is portrayed in art and literature (“The spectrum of suffering: slapstick on one end, scripture on the other, with fiction and poetry . . . in the vastness between them”), while in “Five Famous Asian War Photographs”—a 2018 Best American Essays selection—Majmudar analyzes why these iconic images of atrocity have such emotional resonance. In “Nature/Worship,” another multi-part piece, the author turns his attention to climate change, linking notions of environmentalism to his ancestral tradition of finding divinity within the natural world, connections that form the basis of religious belief.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of these wide-ranging essays is the prose itself—learned yet lively, erudite yet accessible—nimbly revealing the workings of a wonderfully original mind.

What happens when a passage from the world of light to the world of darkness opens onto a new chapter of life? A retrospective account of a pioneering Indian artist who continued to paint after losing his eyesight. 

Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904–1980) was one of the most influential and highly regarded artists in the history of modern Indian art. Chitrakar brings together four broadly autobiographical pieces written by Benode Behari after he lost his eyesight in the summer of 1957. The Artist is a selective reminiscence recapturing various pictures from the years of his childhood, apprenticeship, and maturity, up to the time he became blind. Master of the Household is a candid and complex fictionalized account of his struggle to come to terms with his blindness and continue making art. The Creator is a simple, but telling, parable about the vanity of inordinate ambition. Finally, Art Quest outlines his philosophy of art and the basic elements of his work. 

In the sensitive and empathetic hands of K. G. Subramanyan, once his student and later himself a major figure in the Indian art scene, this translation, appearing for the first time in English, is a precious and timeless document.

A profound reckoning with feminine power, sacred art, and the restless spirit of resistance.

Irwin Allan Sealy—master chronicler of the Indian imagination—sets off on a singular quest: to follow in the wake of the yoginis, those fierce, flying, shape-shifting female adepts of yoga whose images were carved in stone a thousand years ago across India and who now sit, displaced, in American museums.

Part travelogue, part philosophical musing, part cultural excavation, Flying Yoginis is a meditation on art, power, devotion, and the subversive energy of women who step out of line. With wit and wonder, Sealy traces their transcontinental journey from lost temples near Kanchipuram to glass-walled galleries in Kansas City and Minneapolis—finding along the way unexpected kinship with rebels and visionaries, from Rosa Parks to Carson McCullers. Blending the spiritual with the personal, the mythic with the mundane, Sealy offers a dazzling, genre-defying reflection on how the sacred persists, how memory travels, and how history is always being rewritten by those bold enough to reclaim it.

In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”

The story of how one scholar’s experiences in Sri Lanka shaped the contours of the Buddhist visual canon.
 
An early interpreter of Buddhist art to the West, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy laid the foundation of what would become the South Asian visual canon, particularly through his efforts to understand how Buddhist art emerged and developed. In Making a Canon, Janice Leoshko examines how Coomaraswamy’s experience as the director of a mineralogical survey in Sri Lanka shaped his understanding of South Asian art and religion. Along the way, she reveals how Coomaraswamy’s distinctive repetition of Sri Lankan visual images in his work influenced the direction of South Asia’s canon formation and left a lasting impression on our understanding of Buddhist art.

How lens-based art from Southeast Asia offers alternative visions for ecological sustainability

A new paradigm of ecologically minded artistic practices is taking shape in Southeast Asia—one that at once tracks ecological destruction and works specifically to cultivate deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. Examining a range of photography and video work, The Empathic Lens explores how these lens-based projects respond to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration.

In this analysis of work produced across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, Brianne Cohen highlights artists for whom rampant urban development, resource extraction, and environmental toxicity are close at hand. As each artist takes their lens to these realities, Cohen shows, they draw on Indigenous knowledge and local traditions that have long recognized the kinship of humans and nonhumans. Engaging often-censored discourses of Indigenous land relations and environmental justice in a region with a long history of colonial and neocolonial development, Cohen traces genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate how these works develop sustainable visions for the future coexistence of planetary life.

The first critical account of marginalized artworks that depict the centrality of the more-than-human in Southeast Asian Indigenous worldviews, The Empathic Lens makes a powerful case for the relevance of Southeast Asian lens-based art in contemporary media practice and the art of the Anthropocene.

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Reflections on the evolution and philosophical depth of Gieve Patel’s art, adorned with illustrations of his paintings.
 
To Break and to Branch is a collection of six essays on the artist Gieve Patel (1940–2023), written by poet, cultural theorist, and curator Ranjit Hoskote over nearly two decades, gathered together for the first time and accompanied by over fifty illustrations of Patel's paintings. In an introductory essay written especially for this edition, Hoskote looks back over the long friendship he shared with Patel, contextualizing it within the vibrant artistic milieu that was once special to Bombay, their home city: a milieu premised on a mutual curiosity that brought the arts together, hospitable to poetry, painting, theater, cinema, music, and architecture.
 
Embodying this spirit, Hoskote engages with Patel’s evolving oeuvre as a painter and his experiments with sculpture, while connecting them to his investments in poetry, theater, and his growing philosophical awareness of the more-than-human. Hoskote’s writings trace both the constant preoccupations and the changing interests that gave Patel’s art its distinctive character and reflect on the aesthetic, philosophical, and political dimensions of Patel’s gradual movement from a human-centric understanding of the world to a more holistic view as generated and sustained by interrelationships across orders of being.