Old Stacks, New Leaves

"In the twenty-first century, debates on the history and future of the book and print culture have intensified with the rise of digital technologies, and the contemporary art world has witnessed an explosion of interest in the book form. Amid this burst of artistic and cultural activity, there has been little scrutiny of book arts in South Asia, and their peculiar ontologies, histories, and genealogies. Why has the book form been a crucial medium for the visual arts? How do we theorize this form in a region where orality is valued, literacy remains low, printing was adopted relatively late, and books are venerated in homes and places of worship? What is the relationship of books to calligraphy, manuscripts, and paintings? In devotional contexts and outside of them, the book-like painting-was and is a catalyst for history and memory, and subject to reading, recitation, reiteration, and revision. This volume addresses the role of art books and book arts by contrast to existing scholarship on book history in South Asia, which has focused on textuality, the printing press, nation-state, modern city, and print capitalism. It traces a history of illustrated books in South Asia from 1100 C.E. to the present, emphasizing their visual, material, aesthetic, and phenomenological dimensions, and showing how the book is a living form and practice, arguing against the death of books in a digital age. Contributors highlight aspects of the book from the medieval through modern periods in South Asia, considering its visual, material, aesthetic, and phenomenological dimensions and identifying particular uses of the book in relation to the muraqqa (album), pat chitra (scroll), bhandar (storehouse), and kalam (pen, style, school). Collectively, they bring together recent developments in art history, literary studies, anthropology, and history to present the book as practice and process rather than thing: a dynamic form, network, and method. Against narratives of the death of books in a digital age, this volume argues for the book as a vital form and dynamic practice. Written in a lucid and lively style, it will be of interest to scholars, curators, artists, critics, undergraduate students, museum visitors, and readers of contemporary graphic novels and comic books"--