Selection of papers presented at a conference 'Art, Patronage and Society in the Muslim Deccan from the Fourteenth Century to the Present Day' (4-6 July 2008) at St. Antony's College, Oxford, with support from the John Fell Fund, Barakat Trust and Alessandro Bruschettini.

Selection of papers presented at a conference 'Art, Patronage and Society in the Muslim Deccan from the Fourteenth Century to the Present Day' (4-6 July 2008) at St. Antony's College, Oxford, with support from the John Fell Fund, Barakat Trust and Alessandro Bruschettini.

This book highlights the history of Islamic popular devotional art and visual culture in 20th-century India, weaving the personal narrative of the author’s journey through his understanding of the faith. It begins with an introductory exploration of how the basic and universal image of Mecca and Medina may have been imported into Indian popular print culture and what variants it resulted in here. Besides providing a historical context of the pre-print culture of popular Muslim visuality, the book also explores the impact the 1947 Partition of India may have made on the calendar art in South Asia. A significant portion of the book focuses on the contemporary prints of different localised images found in India and what role these play in the users’ lives, especially in the augmentation of their popular faith and cultural practices. The volume also compares the images published in India with some of those available in Pakistan to reflect different socio-political trajectories. Finally, it discusses why such a vibrant visual culture continues to thrive among South Asian Muslims despite the questions raised by the orthodoxy on its legitimacy in Islam, and why images and popular visual cultures are inevitable for popular piety despite the orthodox Muslims’ increasing dissociation from them. This work is one of the first books on Indian Muslim poster art, with rare images and simple narratives, anecdotes about rituals, ceremonies and cultural traditions running parallel to research findings. This second edition contains a new Afterword that discusses challenges to religious plurality arising on account of changing political landscapes, economic liberalisation, technology and new media, and socio-religious developments. It will appeal to the lay reader as well as the specialist and will be especially useful to researchers and scholars in popular culture, media and cultural studies, visual art and performance studies, and sociology and social anthropology.

The authors in this volume explore Indo-Muslim cultures developing in South Asia from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, sharing central themes but showing significant contextual variations by time and place. They focus a much-needed analytical gaze on the rich layers of circulation and exchange of art, architecture, and literature within South Asia and testify to the interaction of Muslims and Islamic traditions with other people and traditions in India for centuries.

As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of 'art' and 'secular' in their theoretical and historical implications. It questions the temporal, spatial and cultural binaries between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent – one, fissured by histories of partition, state formations and religious nationalisms, but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art's deep entanglements with the politics of the present?

The Deccan sultans left a grand architectural and artistic legacy. They commissioned palaces, mosques, gardens and tombs as well as decorative paintings and coins. Of these sultanates, the Nizam Shahs (r. 1490-1636) were particularly significant, being one of the first to emerge from the crumbling edifice of the Bahmani Empire (c. 1347-1527). Yet their rich material record remains largely unstudied in the scholarly literature, obscuring their cultural and historical importance. This book provides the first analysis of the architecture of the Nizam Shahs. Pushkar Sohoni examines the critical relationship between architectural production, courtly practice and royal authority in a period when the aspirations and politics of the kingdom were articulated through architectural expression. Based on new primary research from key sites including the urban settlements of Ahmadnagar, Daulatabad, Aurangabad, Junnar and the port city of Chaul, Sohoni sheds light on broader Islamicate ideas of kingship and shows how this was embodied by material artefacts such as buildings and sites, paintings, gardens, guns and coins. As well as offering a vivid depiction of sixteenth-century South Asia, this book revises understanding of the cultural importance of the Nizam Shahs and their place in the Indian Ocean world. It will be a vital primary resource for scholars researching the history of the medieval and early modern Deccan and relevant for those working in Art History, Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies and Archaeology.

One of the most remarkable artistic achievements of the Mughal Empire was the emergence in the early seventeenth century of portraits of identifiable individuals, unprecedented in both South Asia and the Islamic world. Appearing at a time of increasing contact between Europe and Asia, portraits from the reigns of the great Mughal emperor-patrons Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan are among the best-known paintings produced in South Asia. In the following centuries portraiture became more widespread in the visual culture of South Asia, especially in the rich and varied traditions of painting, but also in sculpture and later prints and photography. This collection seeks to understand the intended purpose of a range of portrait traditions in South Asia and how their style, setting and representation may have advanced a range of aesthetic, social and political functions. The chapters range across a wide historical period, exploring ideals of portraiture in Sanskrit and Persian literature, the emergence and political symbolism of Mughal portraiture, through to the paintings of the Rajput courts, sculpture in Tamil temples and the transformation of portraiture in colonial north India and post-independence Pakistan. This specially commissioned collection of studies from a strong list of established scholars and rising stars makes a significant contribution to South Asian history, art and visual culture.

Learn How to Create Immersive Virtual EnvironmentsWritten by an award-winning designer with 20 years of experience designing virtual environments for television and online communities, Virtual World Design explores the intertwining disciplines of 2D graphics, 3D models, lighting, sound, and storytelling. It illustrates how these disciplines come to

The volume takes us through a historical excursus into the various ports and docks that crisscrossed the littoral and contributed to the augmentation of Mumbai and its trading profile.