Early Matters: Essays on the History of Buddhist Art in Zangskar,

by Rob Linrothe

This book 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. 9788196871567

524 pages, Hardcover

Published December 1, 2024