This book, published to accompany the touring exhibition of ninth- to thirteenth-century south Indian bronzes that opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., follows the trend of recontextualizing works of Indian sculpture that began with the Asia Society exhibition, Gods, Guardians, and Lovers: Temple Sculptures from Northern India, A.D. 700–1200 (1993). These bronze figures of deities and saints are examined against the backdrop of the religious and literary world in which they were created and used, when the Chola dynasty dominated the Tamil Nadu region of south India. It seems remarkable that these exquisite works of sculpture, which figure among the paradigms of South Asian metalwork, have never before been the sole subject of a museum exhibition in Europe or the United States. From two to five feet in height, the figures are stunningly beautiful, often imbued with an expressive intelligence, their poses relaxed and graceful, and startlingly sensuous in their treatment of bodily form, as the book’s title aptly suggests. And yet, as this publication takes pains to point out, the lovely bodies upon which we gaze today were not generally seen by the audience for whom they were created, since in the south Indian world in which they were made and used they were resplendently adorned in silk, jewels, and flowers when on display, their bodies modestly hidden from view.

The author and curator of the exhibition, Vidya Dehejia, has a talent for taking on timely and topical projects, and this is no exception: the growing body of scholarship on south India in general and the Chola era in particular during the past two decades provides potentially rich frames of reference for examining these sculptures and our assumptions about them. She enlists a number of scholars known for their work on south India to contribute essays to the volume, including Richard H. Davis, R. Nagaswamy, and Karen Pechilis Prentiss. They have created a work that is easily accessible to an audience well beyond the academic specialist, as is appropriate to an exhibition catalogue, making this a text that will be widely used. The bronzes exhibited and published here all hail from European and American collections; photographs of many works from Indian collections also appear as explanatory and supplementary material. The number of photographs, usually in color and printed on high-quality paper, and the diversity of works brought together here will be welcomed by specialists and generalists alike.

Davis’s essay, “Chola Bronzes in Procession,” reminds us that in early medieval Tamil Nadu, Hindus believed that the “High God” was the transcendent Supreme who also made himself present on earth, where he might intervene in human affairs (49). Davis looks at festivals today, at what we can glean about such activities in the Chola era from ritual texts of the time, and at earlier devotional poetry to explain how the deity came to be accessible in the earthly realm. The human need for direct experience of God, for “seeing” the lord, was accommodated in particular during festivals and ongoing ritual processions, when the deities, embodied in images such as these bronzes, were carried aloft for all to see. When they left the confines of the temple in this way, they became available even to those who were refused entry into the temple. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the poetry, the rituals, and the ritual texts, as well as visual material that documents these events, Davis explains the nature and context of these practices and evokes the noise and excitement of temple processions for an audience new to this material.

Prentiss also translates the poetry of Tamil saints in “Joyous Encounters: Tamil Bhakti Poets and Images of the Divine” to enliven our understanding of these images. The “theology of embodiment” that she describes, which “foregrounded the human appreciation of God” (66), meant that life on earth was transformed: seeing God in this way required birth in this world. The compelling poems evoke the joyous imagery of this longing. Examining the poems of a number of these saints, Prentiss also addresses aspects of the development of this tradition. The stone temples built in the Chola period, which replaced the brick shrines known to the poets, created a sacred geography that remembered and commemorated in permanent form the world traveled by these wandering saints in the earlier era. By the eleventh century these poems formed the basis of a performed temple liturgy, their legitimacy established; and yet, she indicates, the liturgy represented by the saints’ poems played a “supporting role” to the main traditions of ritual worship, thus contesting conventional hierarchies of worship (67).

“The Bronzes of Kulottunga and His Successors,” by Nagaswamy, looks at bronzes after the “early Chola” (approximately the mid-ninth to late-tenth centuries) period, that is, about 1070–1250; he believes that the high quality of bronzes in this later phase is attributable to the direct involvement of the emperor and high officials in their production. He provides inscriptional evidence for the patronage of the emperor Kulottunga I and his chief minister Naralokaviran, as well as the royal guru, though the argument that this explains the quality is less compelling. He also proposes that along with this royal school of sculpture there existed regional schools centered around a number of villages; future research may explain more about the processes and interactions of these localized traditions. Nagaswamy brings considerable new material to our attention; photographs of works that are still in regular use in various temples will be appreciated by scholars, though they might take issue with Nagaswamy’s methods of stylistic analysis. He notes that while some bronzes may be dated through epigraphic records, style is often the only means of dating; thus, an explanation of how dates are assigned on the basis of style could be more convincingly developed, even if the argument was unobtrusively tucked away in footnotes.

This book as a whole clearly belongs to Dehejia, who returns here to a topic that has long interested her. Her opening essay introduces the important role of early south Indian images in the development of devotional Hinduism, a movement that privileged an intensely personal relationship with God as the means to salvation. The hymns and poems of the saints—the devotees of Shiva and Vishnu who traversed the landscape to be near the various sites where these deities were immanent—are among the earliest texts recording these new forms of religiosity, which used the language of love to express this blissful longing for the divine. The devotional fervor stimulated by “seeing” the lord is recorded in the poems by these saints, some of whom were of humble and/or low-caste birth and who composed these verses in Tamil, the local language, rather than Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism.

Like Nagaswamy, Dehejia also attributes the stylistic diversity among these pieces to regional differences; she too brings in examples still enshrined in temples in different regions of the former Chola realm, which are published here, to establish her regional idioms, though at times one wishes for more information as to how a particular piece can be regarded as indicative of the region as a whole.

In her final essay, “Assemblages of Sacred Bronzes,” Dehejia points out that temples generally housed large groups of bronzes. She examines two sets of inscriptions for such assemblages. One is from the Great Temple at Tanjavur, the royal construction of Rajaraja I that inaugurated the pattern of large-scale temple building among south Indian monarchs, where more than sixty bronzes were commissioned: twenty-two by the emperor and others by family and officials of the ruler. The other inscription, from the much more modest Gomuktishvara temple at Tiruvaduturai, lists twenty-five images. Here the inscription records not the direct patronage of images but gifts of jewels for certain bronzes and gold for ritual vessels on the part of four individuals, only one of them a member of the royal family (by marriage). These inscriptions provide, among other things, details about the specific deities depicted, their materials (which sometimes included gold and silver), and their height and weight. How representative these two inscriptions might be of such patronage or assemblages is a complex issue. It raises further questions about the nature and extent of various sources and forms of patronage and suggests an important area for further research about how bronzes were produced.

The catalogue organizes the bronzes according to iconographic categories: forms of Shiva, Vishnu, and the Shaiva saints, in addition to Buddhist and Jain images, as well as lamps and jewelry. Dehijia’s discussion of Shiva Nataraja is the most extensive, noting a number of fairly recent contributions to the scholarship on this form of the deity but not acknowledging alternative explanations of chronological or iconographic development or interpretation. The footnotes and bibliography, however, provide access to that scholarship. All in all, this gorgeous book is a truly welcome addition to our understanding of these “sensuous” icons and is a reminder that, even if these bronzes were never intended to be displayed as works of art in a museum setting, they can certainly hold their own when called upon to do so.