In 1988, Ajay J. Sinha, MHC associate professor of art, traveled to the state of Karnataka in the southwest region of India to study ancient stone temples. Trained in the art and architecture of ancient India, he was interested in the visual means by which such religious structures gained their sacred potency. He hoped to recover and enhance an understanding of that potency through an investigation of the aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and historical intentions of the temples' makers. He returned again to the region in 1997 and has now published a book, Imagining Architects: Creativity in the Religious Monuments of India (University of Delaware Press, 2000).

The book's large black-and-white photographs of the temples reveal the striking inventiveness of the uniquely idiosyncratic monuments of Karnataka. For more than two hundred years, says Sinha, these shrines, made for the worship of Hindu gods such as Vishnu and Shiva, distinguished eleventh-century Karnataka and neighboring regions from temples in greater South India. Their surfaces are carved in high-relief with detailed repeating patterns of miniature shrine models, distinguishing them also from contemporary temples in other parts of India that have an elaborate use of human and animal figures on their decorative exterior. In art historical literature, these Karnataka temples are referred to as vesara (a Sanskrit term meaning “mule”), because they represent a hybrid form of temple architecture that mixes typical features of South Indian and North Indian forms.

Sinha argues in his book that the hybrid aspects of these structures are far more complex than current scholarship has allowed. "In particular," he writes, "Karnataka shows a wide variety of unusual architectural experiments which are puzzling because they are all concentrated in a relatively small area." In addition, he notes that their construction occurred during a period of only eighty years. Arguing against a notion of mere "exoticism" embraced by Indologists, Sinha identifies the vesara as representing a remarkable period of artistic license in the history of ancient Indian temple design.

"What I found was deliberate, self-conscious experimentation," says Sinha. "There's a vibrant and dynamic range of expressions, and a self-reflexive quality to this art. It is an expression of modernity in ancient times." The temple architects ultimately reveal themselves to be bold pioneers, offering a critique of current scholarship that views these structures as part of a historically conservative religion, he says, "with a particularly slow, organic" evolution in terms of design.

Sinha's multifaceted approach to these monuments flies in the face of traditional art historical methods. In his preface, he notes that his analysis results from considering the "slowly accumulating residue" of the temple makers' "artistic labor and thought." Through his unique lens, he examines how the anonymous architects adapted their local traditional designs to "contemporary systems of use and meaning," synthesizing in his method the separate domains of anthropology and art history.

Sinha hopes his ideas might inspire more expansive dialogues in the field of Indology. Having grown up in modern India, he is passionate about finding demonstrable links between the old and the new. The links, he says, are indirect, "and fraught with dangers of nostalgia that attend them." It is the "knots, glitches, and gaps that attract my attention," he adds, noting that his most recent preoccupation is an investigation of the murals of a leading modernist artist in India, Binode Bihari Mukherjee.

Sinha has recently completed an essay proffering a new interpretation of Mukherjee's famous fresco Medieval Saints, 1946–48, painted in Shantiniketan, a well-known university campus established by the poet laureate, Rabinranath Tagore. The dynamic figurative fresco embellishes three walls of a library with scenes of what Sinha says has heretofore been considered an allegory "of the nation as an homogenized utopia." But Sinha has found something more than the utopian vision. He interprets the highly detailed vignettes—which are peopled with saints and mendicants, mothers and children, men performing rites, families, soldiers, horses, and village entertainers—as narrating the tensions and conflicts of India's colonial history. He sees a complex modern story of power and politics. The saints, he says, are portrayed "in a way that they were cherished not in medieval times, but in modern times, as authority figures in community institutions."

Sinha's essay on the mural will appear in Iconographies of Nation-State, a forthcoming volume edited by Richard Davis, professor of religion at Bard College. Sinha has authored many articles on twentieth-century and ancient Indian art and has lectured widely on the subjects. A member of the faculty at MHC since 1993, he teaches courses in the arts of Asia, with a focus on relationships between geography, religious beliefs, and cultural history, as they are embodied principally in the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture. His interest in modern Indian art has led him recently to a study of Indian films, on which he organized a panel for the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) meetings held in Chicago in March. Titled "Bollywood Cinema and Its Networks," the panel brought together scholars from India, England, Germany, and the United States, and was selected for funding under the AAS's Border-Crossing Initiative. Sinha is currently teaching a senior seminar on Indian films.