"As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of 'art' and 'secular' in their theoretical and historical implications. It questions the temporal, spatial, and cultural binaries between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent-one fissured by histories of partition, state formations, and religious nationalisms but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales, and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art's deep entanglements with the politics of the present?"--

List of Images; 1. Introduction Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar; Part I. Secularity and Its Art: 2. Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis Akeel Bilgrami; 3. Art and Secularism in Contemporary India: A Question of Method Karin Zitzewitz; 4. In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History Kajri Jain; Part II. Boundaries of Secular Nationalism: 5. Displacements of Secularity: Decapitations and Their Histories Vazira Zamindar; 6. Modern Art and East Pakistan: Drawing from the Limits Sanjukta Sunderason; 7. Making Place for People? Geeta Kapur, Secular Nationalism, and 'Indian' Art Zehra Jumabhoy; Part III. Art and Its Gods: 8. Shivaji's Portrait and the Practice of Art History Holly Shaffer; 9. Can a Festival of a Goddess Be 'Secular'? Tapati Guha-Thakurta; 10. A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India Sumathi Ramaswamy; Part IV. Architectures of Devotion: 11. Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture: A Critique of the Secular Disenchantment of India's Past Santhi Kavuri-Bauer; 12. Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century: Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and Discourses of Inclusivity in Gwalior's Birla Temple Tamara Sears; 13. For the Love of God: Conservation as Devotion in Tamil Nadu Kavita Singh; About the Contributors; Index.