Temple to Love

Pika Ghosh is Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is co-editor (with Michael W. Meister) of Cooking for the Gods: The Art of Home Ritual in Bengal.

• ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsNote on TransliterationIntroduction1. Desire, Devotion, and the Double-Storied Temple2. A Paradigm Shift3. Acts of Accommodation4. Axes and the Mediation of WorshipEpilogue: A New Sacred CenterGlossary of Architectural TermsNotesBibliographyIndex

"This remarkably bold, insightful, and challenging study of regional architecture and worship in late medieval Bengal offers food for further thought about the complex negotiations of world systems in local cultural formations of South Asia.128.2"—Journal of the American Oriental Society"Pika Ghosh's Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal breaks new ground in its exploration of Hindu temple architecture. This deeply researched, well-argued work considers a radically new form of temple design that was first consolidated in mid-seventeenth century Vishnupur, capital of the Malla dynasty of western Bengal. Ghosh weaves together histories of architecture, religion, culture, and sacred poetic literature to explore the genesis and early development of the temple form proclaimed by its patrons navaratna ratnam—in her translation, 'new bejeweled temple'—in an inscription on the mid-seventeenth-century Shyam Ray Temple at Vishnupur."—caa.reviews"Ghosh offers an exceptional, much-needed study of the hybrid Hindu temples of Bengal, examining selected examples of so-called Ratna (Jewel) style religious architecture in eastern India during the Mughal Imperium. Idiosyncratic in configuration and unique in the use of materials, substantial brick structures sheathed in terra-cotta plaques create the format for jeweled effects appropriate to newly developing religious practices of Gaudiya Vaishnavism centered on Radha/Krishna Hinduism. Complex ritual modes of Gaudiya devotional religion determined the spatial organization of Ratna temples and the structural formats of buildings and courtyards as well. More than 100 of these temples in a new style dotted modern West Bengal and Bangladesh during the 17th and 18th centuries, but this study sharply focuses on a smaller group of 30 or more still standing at Vishnupur, built during the 17th and 18th centuries. This study examines ten of these 30 Vishnupur temples, framed within the religious, political, and social contexts of late-17th and early-18th-century life in Bengal. The discourse intelligently offers small details that speak of much larger historical factors, and primary ideas are clearly defined in language that brings to life the temples and their usage. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students; faculty."—D. K. Dohanian, emeritus, University of Rochester , 2005dec CHOICE