Short description:

This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial, and contemporary South Asia.

Long description:

This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial and contemporary South Asia. Bringing together contributions by eminent artists, architects, curators and scholars who explore the connections between the environmental and the cultural, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies, and make an intervention within political, social and cultural discourses. A critical interjection in the sociologies of water in the subcontinent, the book brings art history into conversation with current debates on climate change by examining water?s artistic, architectural, engineering, religious, scientific and environmental facets from the 16th century to the present.

This is one of the first books on South Asia?s art, architecture and visual history to interweave the ecological with the aesthetic under the emerging field of eco art history. The volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers of art history, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, urban studies, architecture, geography, history and environmental studies. It will also appeal to activists, curators, art critics and those interested in water management.

?This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that they shape imaginations and actions in ways both fluid and enduring. At a time when the challenge of climate change calls for creative cultural politics, this exploration of ways of seeing and being is all the more valuable.?

Amita Baviskar, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India

Table of Contents:

Foreword 1. Introduction: The Materiality of Liquescence PART I. Vision and Space, ca. 1500?1750 2. The Shape of Babur?s Lake: Architecture and Water in the Central Indian Frontier 3. Water is a Limited Commodity: Ecological Aesthetics in the Little Ice Age, Mathura, ca. 1614 4. Lakes Within Lake-Palaces: A Material History of Pleasure in 18th-Century India PART II. Surface and Depth, ca. 1750?1950 5. Photos of the Ocean: Pearl Fisheries, British Colonialism and the Gulf of Manaar 6. Deep Time as Intimate Stranger: The Age of Water in the Religious Imagination at Girar, 1855 7. From Nallah to Nadi, Stream to Sewer to Stream: Urban Waterscape Research in India and the United States PART III. Materiality and Infrastructure, ca. 1950?2015 8. Water: Its Meanings and Powers in the Indian Sufi Tradition 9. Developmental Aesthetics: Modernism?s Ocular Economies and Laconic Discontents in the Era of Nehruvian Technocracy 10. A Critical Look into the Existing Practice of Water Governance in Cities: The Case of Chandernagore 11. Making Water Media in 21^st-Century South Asia PART IV. Mediations 12. The Religious and Affective Actualities of the Yamuna: Conversations with Pandit Premchand Sharma, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi 13. From Bundi to Delhi: Water Harnessing Systems in Semiarid Regions 14. You Always Step into the Same River! PART V. Afterthoughts 15. Cosmographia Universalis: Environmental Crisis and the Water Aesthetics of Global South Asia