109. When the Image Fails: Understanding Ephemeral Manifestations in Premodern Indian Deities

The session proposes exploring the Indian deities beyond anthropomorphic forms in the premodern context. This panel invites scholarship that moves beyond iconocentric approaches and focuses on diverse modes of expression, i.e., in texts, inscriptions, and non-anthropomorphic (anionic) forms. This panel considers surviving artefacts, such as temple images and texts that sustained due to their agentive and institutional practices and may have received patronage from elites such as kings, priests, artisans and trade guilds. Meanwhile, counterexamples made of perishable and ephemeral mediums such as mud heaps/anthills, bamboo posts, and wooden pillars, are often overlooked and questioned for their non-linear historicity. For instance, the contemporary practices of the Stambheśvarī cult in present-day Odisha, India, are distinct from the deity evoked in Śulkī dynasty copper plate inscriptions as a family deity. Her absence in the classical temple art of the 8th and 9th CE problematizes materiality as an aspect of historical continuity. However, seeing ‘material absence’ as ‘historical absence’ within an archaeological or historical context might be an academic oversimplification. Deities were sometimes re-imagined and appeared with new nomenclature across different temporalities. The cases include indigenous deities from southern India, such as Seyyon (Kartikeya, Murugan), Māyon (Krishna) and Kotrāvai (Durgā) that appear in the ancient Tamil texts of the Sangam corpus. They transform from aniconic pillars and hero stones into icons when they reappear in the later Brahminical temple traditions. Such manifestations challenge the binaries of continuity and discontinuity in historical discourse.

This panel seeks papers on such indigenous non-Sanskritic motifs and deities that were appropriated by the classical pantheon, include of inscriptions, texts, landscape, and temples. The panel aims to understand how the visual manifestations functioned as layered, non-linear, and asymmetric apparatuses in premodern India.

Themes: Anionic, Indian art, Stambesvari, manifestation.

Lead Convenor: Rakesh Das, Doctoral candidate, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.

Co-convenors: Raj Purushottam Shirode, Dept of HSS, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, India. Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), India.

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.