Early Matters (Essay on the History of Buddhist Art in Zangskar, Western Himalaya)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

Early Matters: Essays on the History of Buddhist Art in Zangskar, Western Himalaya is focused on the art in the remote valleys of Zangskar, a region of the union territory of Ladakh in northern India. It proposes that, first, the people and institutions in Zangskar produced a treasury of understudied Buddhist art in the form of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and that, second, examination of this corpus models the formation of early visual culture in the western Himalaya as a whole. Its chapters provide correctives to the reduction of this region to a miniature or provincial Tibet, particularly in the early periods of extant sculpture (between the seventh and eleventh centuries) and of painting (tenth to thirteenth centuries). It locates Zangskar as its own center intersecting and in contact with a range of Buddhist visual production sites surrounding it in all directions, including greater Kashmir, Khotan, Central Asia, northern and eastern India, Tibet and western Nepal. The analysis of early Zangskari Buddhist images is a much more complex-and interesting-story of cultural development and inspiration than the simplified "Indo-Tibetan" narrative which ignores the agency of Zangskar's artists, merely attributing forms and objects to invisible Tibetan hands.

The first chapter of Part I, "Theoretical and Methodological Matters," takes a historiographic approach to highlight misunderstandings in regional nomenclature. The second chapter reconsiders the relevance of the influential Tibetologist and art collector, Giuseppe Tucci, in the practice of art history on Tibet and the western Himalaya. The three chapters of Part II, "Early Matters," successively examine the earliest low relief stūpa engravings on stone in Zangskar and Ladakh, the early figural carvings and paintings in the area, and the important early Esoteric Buddhist sculptural and painted program at the Malakartse Khar site in Zangskar. The latter are compared to other extant sites in western Tibet. The sixth chapter, the first of three in Part Three, examines two radically different sets of Mahāsiddha stone carvings in two neighboring villages of Zangskar. Chapter 7 recounts the discovery, recovery, expansion, and renovation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of twelfth- to fifteenth- century structures, paintings, sculptures, and other finds at Karsha village by the Karsha Lonpo Sonam Wangchuk and his family. The final chapter considers a single painting of Sarasvati of late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century date preserved in the Phugtal Monastery of Zangskar, conjuring the embedded religious and social significance to its monastic sponsor who is depicted at the bottom of the painting. The 585 illustrations, with many details, represents an expansive documentation of culture heritage currently threatened by climate change and the lack of protection for objects traditionally displayed in open view.

Rob Linrothe is Associate Professor Emeritus of Art History and former Chair of the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois, USA. His research is mainly on Ladakh and Zangskar in the Indian part of the western Himalaya and in Pala-Sena period art in eastern India. He earned a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. In 2016- 2017 Linrothe received a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies supporting field- work in eastern India on 8th to 13th century sculpture in Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha. His recent books are Reenchantment: Masterworks of Sculpture in Village Temples of Bihar and Orissa (2021); Seeing Into Stone: Pre- Buddhist Petroglyphs and Zangskar's Early Inhabitants (2016); Visible Heritage: Essays on the Art and Architecture of Greater Ladakh, ed. Rob Linrothe and Heinrich Pöll; and Collecting Paradise: Buddhist Art of Kashmir and its Legacies (2015) (with contributions by Melissa Kerin and Christian Luczanits). Other recent publications include: "Photography, Painting, and Prints in Ladakh and Zangskar. Intermediality and Transmediality" in Ladakh Through the Ages: A Volume on Art History and Archaeology (2020); "Noise Along the Network: A Set of Chinese Ming Embroidered Thangkas in the Indian Himalayas" in Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia (2018); ""Utterly False, Utterly Undeniable': The Akanistha Shrine Murals of Takden Phuntsokling Monastery," Archives of Asian Art (2017); "The Human Sphere: Comparative Analysis of Sponsor Images in the Jaina Caves of Ellora," "Deeply Rooted Ritual: The Plurality of Sponsor Couples in Eastern Indian Sculpture, Ca. Eighth to Thirteenth Century, and an Explanatory Hypothesis," (2019) and "Donor Figures on 9th-12th Century Sculpture in Eastern India: A Progress Report" in the Journal of Bengal Art (2021, 2019, and 2017); "Siddhas and Sociality: A Seventeenth-Century Lay Illustrated Buddhist Manuscript in Kumik Village, Zangskar (A Preliminary Report)" in Visible Heritage (2016); "Mirror Image: Deity and Donor as Vajrasattva" in History of Religions (2014); and "Portraiture on the Periphery. Recognizing Changsem Sherab Zangpo." Archives of Asian Art (2013).

Is there a need for studies of the visual heritage of Zangskar? Compared to the relatively plentiful documentation of sites, objects, and cultural currents in Spiti and Ladakh since 1974 (when travel restrictions were lifted), there have been pitifully few of Zangskar. It seems that Zangskar has largely escaped the attention of the cartographers compiling the art historical map of the western Himalaya. Apparently it has been off the radar range as other monuments have drawn our attention. No historians of art or visual culture participated in the otherwise extraordinarily comprehensive (from Agriculture to the Zodiac) "Zangskar Project of 1980 with its invaluable results published in 1994. Of the 198 black and white photographs included in Khosla's 1979 Buddhist Monasteries in the Western Himalaya, only 22 depict sites in Zangskar, and many are picturesque rather than documentary: "Zangskar Valley seen from Karsha," "Yak as a mode of transport in Zangskar," "Padam folk dance." Of the fifty eight technical drawings in this specialized study of Buddhist architecture, six are of sites in Zangskar. In Christian Luczanits' 2004 book on the early sculptural art of the western Himalaya, which one reviewer rightly called a "profound assessment" (K. Paul) and another "a major scholarly work of enormous significance" (P. Pal), Zangskar art plays no substantial role. The "Alchi Group of Monuments" of Ladakh occupies more than 75 pages of this well- illustrated work, but Zangkar, a substantial area formally incorporated as the southern region of Ladakh and with at least two dozen monasteries and nunneries, is scarcely mentioned and no illustrations of any sculptures or murals appear. A full decade later, a volume of 400+ pages entitled Art and Architecture in Ladakh, contains more than a dozen scattered references to Zangskar among its sixteen essays, and (progress!) one of the essays includes two sites in Zangskar among the ten discussed.