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"Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy is the key figure responsible for introducing ancient Indian art to the West. He is noted especially for his efforts to solve one of the great (and remaining) mysteries of Buddhist history: the emergence of the Buddha image from what had been an aniconic tradition. While he is remembered today as an art historian and cultural scholar, he was trained as a geologist. Making a Canon explores Coomaraswamy's journey from scientist to cultural scholar, demonstrating how his time in Sri Lanka was key to his arguments about Indian art. Tracing the importance of Sri Lankan examples in Coomaraswamy's early writing also confronts a much larger question: what constitutes Buddhist art? Focusing on the years of Coomaraswamy's posting as director of the Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon and his initial years in the United States, art historian Janice Leoshko reveals how Coomaraswamy's immersion in a Buddhist culture in colonial Sri Lanka distinctly inflected his efforts throughout his life. Making a Canon recovers the Buddhist thread in the formation of Coomaraswamy's scholarly perspective and his efforts to promote South Asian art. It also reveals how Coomaraswamy's distinctive repetition of images in his work inscribes a particular definition of Buddhist visuality that created a South Asian visual canon and the ideas underlying it"--
About the author
Janice Leoshko is associate professor of South Asian art at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of
Sacred Traces: British Explorations of Buddhism in South Asia.
