Sugata Ray

photography, and prints created in Braj alongside theological treatises and devotional poetry to foreground seepages between the natural ecosystem and cultural production. The paintings of deified rivers, temples that emulate fragrant groves, and talismanic bleeding rocks that Ray discusses will captivate readers interested in environmental humanities and South Asian art history.

A wonderfully imaginative addition to the growing body of literature on the Little Ice Age. Sugata Ray traces the influence of climatic variations on South Asian art, architecture, and devotional practices with extraordinary interpretive skill.―Amitav Ghosh, Author, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

The rocks, rivers, forests, plants, animals, and even the skies of the Mathura-Vrindavan region in north India come alive as historical agents acting alongside humans in Ray's pioneering and imaginative attempt to develop a geoaesthetic approach to the study of Hindu religious art and architecture over a period ranging from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. His impressive ability to connect events in the realm of aesthetics and religious devotion with the climatic impact of the Little Ice Age in South Asia, is bound to influence debates in art history in South Asia and beyond. A brilliant achievement.―Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Sugata Ray's Climate Change and the Art of Devotion draws an unexpected and strikingly original connection between the catastrophic consequences of the Little Ice Age (c. 1550-1850) and the rise of a site-specific theology at the pilgrim centre of Braj in India. This scholarly, elegantly written art historical monograph that skilfully combines archival scholarship with theoretical sophistication, makes a powerful contribution to recent debates on the environmental crisis in the present anthropocene epoch.―Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde – 1922-1947

Sugata Ray’s important book represents a bold attempt to frame a new ecology of art and to engage with local ways of thinking that have not been previously been incorporated into scholarship. It should gain a wide audience.—Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Frederick Marquand Professor, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University

A bold and ambitious project that takes on a sweeping range of issues across both the humanities and social sciences. Ray brings core Indian material into dialogue with current conversations about the relationship between the human and nonhuman, between materiality and immateriality, and climate change and visual culture. The book serves as a challenge to future scholars to expand the range of their own conversations.―Tamara Sears, author of Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India

Climate Change and the Art of Devotion is a wonderfully imaginative addition to the growing body of literature on the Little Ice Age. Sugata Ray traces the influence of climatic variations on South Asian art, architecture and devotional practices with extraordinary interpretive skill. This book is a must read for everyone with an interest in human responses to climate variability.

- Amitav Ghosh, Author Blog, https://amitavghosh.com/blog/?p=7567

By opening art history to questions about how humans have thought about the earth, and how art and religion have been shaped by human changes and natural disruptions to the earth, Ray’s brilliant book guides us to new problems, and to new ways of thinking about art.

- David Curley, H-Asia, March 2020, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54359

This is a thought-provoking work whose greatest contribution is that it carves a path for new studies that may extend our understanding of the deep and complex interrelationships among geoaesthetics, ecology, spiritual practice, and the built environment in early modern India.

- Purnima Dhavan, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 79, no. 3 (2020): 335–37, https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2020.79.3.335

This is an excellent book that is well worth reading. Sugata Ray is a very good writer, and Climate Change and the Art of Devotion was impressively researched.

- David Haberman, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 4 (2020): 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfaa052

I recommend this beautiful volume (truly a bargain at $70) to those who know Krishna lore and imagery well and equally to non-South Asianists interested in environmental humanities as we all should be in these ominous times.

- Ann Grodzins Gold, The Middle Ground Journal 23 (2022): 30–32, https://middlegroundjournal.com/?p=3162

Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, eds. Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, Visual and Media Histories Series (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020; South Asia edition, 2020; Paperback 2021).

This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial, and contemporary South Asia. Bringing together contributions by eminent artists, architects, curators, and scholars who explore the connections between the environmental and the cultural, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning, and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies and make an intervention within political, developmental, and cultural discourses. A critical interjection in the sociologies of water in the subcontinent, the book brings art history into conversation with current debates on climate change by examining water’s artistic, architectural, engineering, religious, scientific, and environmental facets from the 16th century to the present. This is one of the first books on South Asia’s art, architecture and visual history to interweave the ecological with the aesthetic under the emerging field of eco art history. The volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers of art history, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, urban studies, architecture, geography, history, and environmental studies. It will also appeal to activists, curators, art critics, and those interested in water management.

This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that they shape imaginations and actions in ways both fluid and enduring. At a time when the challenge of climate change calls for creative cultural politics, this exploration of ways of seeing and being is all the more valuable.—Amita Baviskar, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India

This beautifully produced volume, printed on fine glossy paper, is a joy to hold and read. Ray (Univ. of California, Berkeley) and Maddipati (Ambedkar University Delhi, India) have put together a luxurious book of 14 chapters and 122 plates, in both black and white and color, to explore the material culture of water in oceans, dams, rivers, and lakes, from antiquity to the present. This is a wonderful contribution by Routledge and the contributors.—CHOICE, January 2020 Vol. 57 No. 5

Sugata Ray, ed. “The Language of Art History,” Special issue of Ars Orientalis 48 (2018)

Guest edited by Sugata Ray, the forty-eighth volume of Ars Orientalis, “The Language of Art History,” foregrounds the concepts of “translations,” “terminologies,” and “global art history.” The seven articles in the volume all were developed from papers presented at the Thirty-fourth World Congress of Art History in Beijing, hosted by the Chinese committee of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA). They address key issues with methodological urgency, such as the development of representational techniques across cultures, the relationships between real spaces and spaces of representation, the adaptations of architectural idioms within the context of colonialism and its legacy, and the notion of objecthood in the digital age. In doing so, the authors test the terms and methods for a global art history and explore diverse modes of being in translation.

Available here