Gods in the Time of Democracy

by Kajri Jain

In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”

360 pages, Hardcover

Published March 12, 2021

Reviews

[Nageen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly complex and tough reading. 4 stars for research and the sheer scope of this work. But oooof man, big words loaded in one sentence kind of writing is just too complex.

[T Cruz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jain has introduced an interdisciplinary approach to the sensory cultures of religion. I enjoyed reading this despite the alleged lack of a central argument.