Presented here is a novel approach to understanding the relationship between the past and the present using the unique concept of re-use, wherein elements from the past are strategically adapted into the present, and thus become part of a new modernity. The book uses this method as a heuristic tool for analysing and interpreting cultural and political changes and the transnational flow of ideas, concepts and objects. The chapters apply this concept to South Asia but the concept of re-use and the method of its application are both general and amenable to cross-cultural and comparative analysis.
Re-use is a collection of well-researched and lucidly written scholarly articles that apply the concept of re-use to different aspects of cultural, political and material life-from art, architecture and jewellery to religion, statesmen and legislatures. By not treating artistic, political, religious and cultural developments as linear evolutions, this book encourages readers to understand them as a continuous modification of the past and a periodic return to earlier forms.
Beautifully illustrated with exquisite images, and containing a scholarly bibliography pointing in the direction of hitherto unexplored terrain, this new text will be a source of inspiration to the specialist and a source of delight to the general reader.
Julia A B Hegewald is Professor and Head of Department of Asian and Islamic Art History, in the Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies (IOA) at the University of Bonn, Germany. She is Director of the Emmy Noether Research Project on Jainism in Karnataka, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She has been a Reader in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester (2007–10), a postdoctoral Fellow at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University (2005–07) and a Research Fellow at University College Oxford (1998–2005). She graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, from where she also holds a PhD. She is the author of Water Architecture in South Asia: A Study of Types, Developments and Meanings (2002), Jaina Temple Architecture in India: The Development of a Distinct Language in Space and Ritual (2009) and the editor of The Jaina Heritage: Distinction, Decline and Resilience (2010).
Subrata K Mitra was trained as a political scientist at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, both in India, as well as at the University of Rochester, New York, USA. He is currently Professor and Head, Department of Political Science at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University and was the coordinator, Area A (Governance and Administration), Cluster of Excellence―Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows (2008–2010). His publications include The Puzzle of India’s Governance: Culture, Context and Comparative Theory (2005) and When Rebels become Stakeholders (2009). He is the academic editor of Advances in South Asian Studies, Heidelberg Series in South Asian and Comparative Studies and editor of Critical Issues in the Modern Politics of South Asia (2009).
