ROYAL PATRONS AND GREAT TEMPLE ART , MARG HARDCOVER,1988

While popular and collective donation was responsible for several early Buddhist monuments in India, it was generally the ruling monarch, his family or members of his court who built the great Hindu temples. Two factors contributed to the direct royal patronage of temple art. One was the monarch’s belief that temple-building would help him amass a store of religious merit that would serve him well in the future world; the second was his desire to acquire worldly prestige and assume the title “Great builder of temples”. The introductory essay examines the issues involved in royal patronage and the milieu in which the artist generally assumed a background role, allowing his patron centrestage. The rest of the volume, devoted to essays on major royal temples, presents us with the character of individual monarchs and examines their varied reasons for building shrines and commissioning images. The temple art considered includes great bronzes for a wooden temple in the Himalayan foothills; a monumental Kashmiri stone temple, several important shikhara-style temples in both the north and the south, a gigantic funerary monument; and a circular hypaethral shrine.

Vidya Dehejia has a PhD from Cambridge University, England and has written extensively on Indian art. At present, she is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York.