Sacred Traces: British Explorations of Buddhism in South Asia examines steps in the process by which our understanding of Buddhist sculpture—particularly those from eastern India, the region where Buddhism originated—has been shaped by British colonial interest in the region. In addressing this issue, Janice Leoshko draws upon images as diverse as the Bharhut rail pillars from the first century B.C.E., medieval clay votives and models of the Bodh Gaya temple, late-nineteenth-century Tibetan tangka paintings of the Wheel of Life, and the illustrations accompanying the original 1901 edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. This innovative juxtaposition of material from a wide chronological range across a region the size of Europe and across various media and diverging functions is marshaled to ask why, and more importantly how, a particular trajectory of Buddhist art has emerged during the last two hundred years. For example, how have complex iconographic images from the Pala period, such as deities in multiple-limbed forms, engaging in battle or sexual embrace, come to dominate the literature over other images, such as the Buddha attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya. While the latter example endured from earlier times and proliferated in large numbers, undoubtedly because of the devotional significance of his enlightenment, it has been overlooked in the scholarly literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Downplaying or ignoring the role of devotion in the understanding of visual imagery takes the study of the material in certain directions, while neglecting others, and marks a divergence of scholarly interest from that of practitioners.

To consider how these particular perceptions emerged and persisted, Leoshko points to the approaches of pioneering figures such as Alexander Cunningham, the first director general of the Archaeological Survey of India. She contextualizes their role within colonial knowledge-production processes, drawings parallels to the ambitious surveys and mappings of the land and living communities, projects that have recently come under the scrutiny of historians and anthropologists (e.g., Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1983]; Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996]). She locates the endeavors of Cunningham and his colleagues within this frenzy of scientific activity, which was pivotal to the making of the British Empire. And in considering eastern Indian sculptures of the Pala period (ca. eighth through twelfth centuries), which form the primary focus of this book, the author also situates these colonial formulations against the backdrop of military expeditions such as those into Tibet in the early twentieth century. She traces how such events explicitly informed the explanatory models and sources traced for Himalayan imagery, as Stanley Abe has demonstrated for Central Asian works (“Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995]). As Leoshko points out, Cunningham was a military surveyor before he became the first director general of the Archaeological Survey of India.

Leoshko questions the privileging of innovation and the urge to document new forms over attending to the longevity of older iconographic forms and the complexity and creativity inherent in their endurance, a predilection that has framed and constricted scholarship into the present. As in many other fields, colonial methods reveal the priority given to textual material in guiding the experience of visual imagery, and hence in the processes of selection, documentation, collection, and display of sculpture in a number of ways. The textual bias results in a dismissal of ritual practiced by the throngs of devotees who flocked to pilgrimage centers, activity that the European scholars must surely have witnessed firsthand. It also results in an attempt to reconstruct Buddhism on a model based upon particular sets of texts that happened to have been “discovered,” sometimes accidentally, and chosen for translation. The texts often do not belong to the same period as the images that they are used to illuminate, and there seems to have been less historical awareness than what we expect today in our reconstructions.

These texts fueled the quest by many Westerners—scholars, military expedition leaders, administrators, missionaries—for a pure, original form of Buddhism, one tied to the teachings of the Shakyamuni Buddha, who lived more than two thousand years ago. This quest defined contemporary religious practice as degenerate and corrupt by comparison. Such perceptions, as Gregory Schopen has pointed out, reflect the Protestant presuppositions of the scholars (Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997]). Leoshko notes the enthusiastic but uncritical deployment of recently translated Chinese pilgrim accounts to map the sacred geography of Buddhism in its homeland, a text-driven trajectory upon which images were plotted when they fitted and abandoned when they did not.

The book is a valuable contribution to the emerging body of literature that examines approaches to material culture in order to reassess the British encounter with South Asia. Leoshko’s attention to the concept of difference in the interaction among colonial explorers, archaeologists, and historians and the tangible remains of past Buddhist devotion is a most useful construct for us to apply to other areas of Indian art and culture. In drawing attention to the peculiar ways in which the study of Buddhist sculpture has been shaped by a body of colonial scholars, this book asks questions about method. In doing so it suggests more possibilities for alternative approaches that will revitalize the study of Buddhist art, not only in eastern India but also in all of South Asia and beyond.

Opening up such discussions may be highly productive toward calling the canon into question in the classroom as well. For this reason, as well as its conciseness, Sacred Traces will be effective as assigned reading in a field where textbooks are scarce. The book also collects a corpus of early-twentieth-century black-and-white photographs of expeditions, discoveries, and digs, which contextualize the works of art discussed just as effectively as does the text.