Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The very word for a Westerner calls up myriad conflicting visual images: teeming cities with flower bedecked cattle wandering among the urban poor; dark-eyed mysterious jeweled and veiled women in colorful silk saris; similarly dark-eyed children the eyes imploring us for a meal; the sacred Ganges and the burning funeral pyres along its banks; Mother Theresa’s pious and deeply etched face; a holy man sitting on a bed of nails; the gleaming and pristine Taj Mahal. But these stereotypical images of India too often created by travel ads social agency appeals for help newsclips and the occasional television documentary only begin to suggest the complexity and richness of Indian culture. Focusing on customs that we perceive to be exotic even sensational and on the urban problems confronting India today these images- if left intact and unexamined-rob us of a true understanding of the diverse peoples and places that comprise modern India. So it is that we offer up Mud Mirror and Thread: Folk Traditions of Rural India in the hope that the museum’s many visitors and readers of this volume will consider anew their images of India. The pictures presented by the distinguished writers whose work appears herein are very different ones. Drawing upon the traditions of India’s some half million villages they help us to begin to comprehend the inner logic behind the almost numberless acts of Hindu devotion that occur each day many of which involve the adornment of homes and altars and the creation of clay vessels and images. They show us how in traditions of embroidery and dress we can “read” the complicated ethnic and caste relationships that characterize the societal matrix of the rural peoples whom they have studied so diligently. Consequently the India presented here is village rather than city local and regional rather than national peaceful rather than chaotic spiritual rather than sensational and despite the vast changes taking place. essentially timeless. (MP)