Date: Wednesday, 06 October 2010
Time: 4.00pm – 5.30pm
Venue: ISEAS

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Abstract of Talk
The talk will argue that India’s pivotal place in a world system, one that involved both trade and aggression, profoundly impacted visual culture and that ultimately copies of the Mahabodhi temple at Bodhgaya, found widely distributed across Asia, resulted from that system.

Following the Gupta period, that is, after the sixth century, India’s art-producing centers shifted from central India to coastal areas because, it is proposed, maritime trade generated the revenue to build temples. It also, however, provided transport for Buddhist pilgrims coming to the major sites associated with the life of the Buddha, Bodhgaya first among them. Growing international trade also generated disposable income even in many interior parts of India, income that could be invested in the construction of temples, for example the reconstruction about the eighth century of the Mahabodhi temple in a form very close to its present appearance.

Military incursions of the twelfth century, which have been misrepresented as iconoclastic rampages, did much to terminate the steady flow of pilgrims. The infrastructure that had supported pilgrimage was largely destroyed and the sites, including Bodhgaya, were deemed unsafe. Thus small replicas of the Mahabodhi temple were brought to many parts of Asia and served as models for large-scale replicas of the temple. The talk argues that this resulted in a sense of fluid geography, one in which Bodhgaya was not understood as a spatially fixed entity but rather one that could be replicated in both appearance and function.

About the Speaker
Frederick M. Asher, a specialist in the art of India, is currently writing a book on the sites associated with the Buddha’s life and their replicas across Southeast Asia, even as distant as Florida, in the U.S. He is also writing, with three others, a book (under contract with Cambridge University Press) on the history of India, and looks forward to writing a book on the visual culture of the Indian Ocean. His other interests include the politics of art and issues relating to the illicit movement of art. For many years, he chaired the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota, where he is currently a professor, and serves as President of the U.S. National Committee for the History of Art. He recently completed a term as editor-in-chief of caa.reivews, the online journal of the U.S. College Art Association, and is South Asia editor of the journal, Archives of Asian Art. Asher recently served as President of the American Institute of Indian Studies and currently chairs the Institute's Development Committee.