To write a book entitled The Arts of India must have been a labor even more daunting than to write a review of one. The Western reader might reflect on what it would be like to address “the Arts of Europe” between two covers. Admittedly this volume catalogues one museum’s collection, which might seem to require finite skills. In fact, that collection includes forms often entrusted to separate curatorial departments: stone sculpture (originally part of a building), bronze sculpture (created and set differently), paintings (originally viewed by readers and connoisseurs of diverse kinds), textiles (in a wide range of techniques, mostly made to be worn), and various decorative arts (metal, jade, ivory). The curator of this cornucopia, Joseph Dye, has done a remarkable job of contextualizing each genre and medium, reflecting his familiarity with the places in which they were made and used—experience too rare in many collections of Asian art.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ collection of Indian art is worth consideration in itself. Its core comprises a large purchase from the Parsi art dealer Nasli Heeramaneck and his wife Alice. The Arts of India gives an unusually candid account of the process by which the museum made the acquisition. Yet from reading this, one would not know that another drama was simultaneously at play, whereby another major part of the Heeramaneck collection, once intended for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, was rejected there and became the core of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s burgeoning South Asian galleries.

From the catalogue we can see that the Virginia collection has continued to grow admirably in the past two decades. Not every curator would welcome a nineteenth-century image of the Sun God such as cat. no. 53. The choice, however, not only demonstrates the continuity of iconography and the sculptor’s use of multiple viewpoints, but also shares with painting the meaning and form of the period in Rajasthan, showing that sculpture had not declined in significance and quality. Among paintings, cat. nos. 162 (Jnaneshvari, Mysore, 1763), 164 (Painter’s Modelbook, Karnataka, 1825–50), and 165 (Treatise on Horses, Andhra Pradesh, 1700–50) also represent bold choices, for none are textbook examples of familiar styles. All are lively, interesting works produced in South India at a time of political change. Moreover, all are complete (or close-to-complete) books, kept together in Richmond so that vivid individual images can be seen as part of an entire physical and intellectual project. We can now pursue the first, an illustrated commentary on the Gita Govinda, as a pictorial response to the text, a commentary in its own right. The second, a book of drawings, becomes a document of artistic production. And the third, a text on horses, serves as a colorful statement of courtly material culture. Newly acquired sculptures, a category that fits in the museum with less propriety, are fewer than paintings and include no pieces that bring immediately to my mind an Indian building bereft of its décor. In short, the museum is to be commended on a collection acquired responsibly.

Qua catalogue, this volume is both admirable and weighty. Most of the museum’s own objects are reproduced in color and are supplemented with comparative material in black and white. Moreover, sculptures are shown in rear or side view when this is significant, reminding us of their physicality. In an appendix inscriptions are reproduced as well as transliterated, enabling us to check their reading. And another appendix provides ample technical information about the works.

The catalogue entries are often the result of extended research. Thus cat. no. 166, a large painting from the late nineteenth century, has been carefully examined and its inscriptions expertly read by Kannada-speakers. The painter’s great grandchildren were tracked down in Mysore, as detailed by Dye in an earlier article in the museum’s bulletin, Arts in Virginia. Hence we can see this elaborate, painted narrative as the product of a lineage of artisans and of progressive, enlightened patronage in the Mysore state. What might seem to be an offbeat specimen becomes part of a rich, interesting body of images.

Likewise cat. no. 210, a silver platter embellished with colored glass and gold foil (the thewa technique of Pratapgarh in southern Rajasthan), was the object of another ethnographic expedition by Dye. He succeeded in learning both the history and the carefully guarded secrets of thewa production as it is still practiced by one surviving family of craftsmen. More museums should encourage their curators to undertake such active research, which brings the isolated object alive and contributes to wider cultural understanding.

In so ambitious a work as this catalogue, specialists are bound to have some quibbles. Mine are remarkably few. Among the works categorized as belonging to the Gupta period (fifth to sixth century), I am happy that only four fragments of such rare and lusciously elegant sculpture have made their way to Virginia. With that bias, it is small wonder that I feel impelled to argue that cat. no. 23 is in fact not Gupta but is instead from at least the seventh and possibly the ninth century. This small schist image of Ganesha is radically flattened in the lower part of the body, unlike sixth-century images from western India. And the ears of the elephant-headed god have been defined with the eccentric, linear abstraction that characterizes early-medieval sculpture, more so here than in even a piece from Amjhara, cited in a footnote. Surely we no longer need equate the fine quality of this sculpture with a Gupta date.

More serious is Dye’s description of cat. no. 98, a complex mid-nineteenth-century painting of a court festival: “Nawab Wajid’Ali Shah, the possible patron of this picture, was an imbecile who is said to have enjoyed the company of eunuchs, fiddlers, and dancing girls” (266). Here the author repeats the assessment of British administrators, who disapproved likewise of the ruler wasting time with poetry. Admittedly, the Nawab was not much of a politician in managing the state of Oudh or in opposing the encroaching European interests, but he fitted well the South Asian royal trope—which included splendor and sensitivity without Western gender stereotypes. Anyone who would describe that as imbecility should watch Satyajit Ray’s film The Chess Players (1977), in which Wajid’Ali Shah figures prominently, as haunting as in this painting. If we are to understand the fine examples of nineteenth-century Indian art brought together in Virginia, it is essential that we recognize the fertile hybridity of the period.

Yet on the whole, this catalogue is only to be praised for the wealth of information and ideas it presents in connection with an interesting collection of powerful images. From this, others can go on to further research and opinions.