16 Books


Contemporary Korean Art: New Directions Since the 1960s by Mina Kim, Reaktion Books, ISBN 9781789148718, £35


Presenting fresh and thematic interpretations,


this book showcases a collection of the most visually captivating, socially intriguing and often overlooked examples of Korean art. Set against the backdrop of


a tumultuous history, artists in Korea embarked on explorations of themselves, society and the profound forces shaping their world. Kim highlights the artistic output of the 1960s and 1970s, providing crucial context for understanding the work of later twentieth- and twenty- first-century artists. Key themes, including performance art, gender and identity, the interplay of local and global influences, and the evolution of contemporary multimedia practice, structure Kim’s study of Korean art across the last sixty years. By placing artists’ creations at the core of Korean culture and society, this exploration sheds new and revealing light on the role of Korean art within global visual culture.


and comics, there is a growing desire to understand the folklore and mythical underpinnings of contemporary Korean culture. Insu and Bella Fenkl bring together a wealth of knowledge of both the new and the old, the traditional and the modern to guide the reader through this fascinating history and help them understand the people, their traditions and culture. From the Changsega (‘Song of Creation’) sung by shamans, to the gods, goddesses and monsters who inhabit the cosmos, including the god Mireuk, creator of the world, and the giant Grandma Mago, who was able to create mountains from the mud on her skirt, these myths have been disseminated for centuries and continue to resonate in popular culture today.


Mater 2-10


by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae, Scribe UK, ISBN 9781917189064, £12.99


Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high- altitude sit-in, the book vividly portrays the lives of ordinary Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the 21st century. It is at once a gripping account that captures a nation’s longing to be free from oppression, a lyrical folktale that manages to reflect the realities of modern industrial work, and a culmination of Hwang’s career – 30 years in the making.


South Asia


& Himalayas Amaravati:


Art and Buddhism in Ancient India by Jas Elsner, Reaktion Books, ISBN 9781789148695, £45


Tis exploration of the Buddhist stupa (reliquary mound) at Amaravati, one of ancient India’s most extraordinary monuments, presents a fresh perspective on the rich visual culture of ancient South


Asia through the lens of art history, connecting the stupa’s artistic innovations with advancements in Buddhist philosophy and rituals. Jaś Elsner offers new insights into early Buddhist art in South India, as well as a new understanding of the relationship between early Buddhism and its material culture. Te new photographs, particularly those featuring objects from the British Museum in London, show in detail how the stupa communicated Buddhist teachings and practices to its followers.


Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire


by Nandini Das, Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526615664, £12.99


When Tomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Teir understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires in the world. In this history of Roe’s four years in India, she offers an insider’s view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace


intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. A debut book that explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India.


Dethroned


by John Zubrzycki, C Hurst & Co, ISBN 9781805260530, £25


Te dramatic story of the betrayal of hundreds of Indian princely states by


The Golden Road


by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781408864418, £25


For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and


mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India’s oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it.


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both the departing British and the new Congress government. In July 1947, India’s last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, stood before New Delhi’s Chamber of Princes to deliver the most important speech of his career. He had just three weeks to convince over 550 sovereign princely states – some tiny, some the size of Britain – to become part of a free India. Once Britain’s most faithful allies, the princes could choose between joining India or Pakistan, or declaring independence. Tis is a saga of intrigue, brinkmanship and broken promises, wrought by Mountbatten and two of independent India’s founding fathers: the country’s most senior civil servant, VP Menon, and Congress strongman Vallabhbhai Patel. What India’s architects described as a ‘bloodless revolution’ was anything but, as violence engulfed Kashmir and Indian troops crushed Hyderabad’s dreams of independence. Most princes accepted the inevitable, exchanging their power for guarantees of privileges and titles in perpetuity. But these dynasties were still led to extinction – not by the sword, but by political expediency – leaving them with little more than fading memories of a glorified past.


Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh, John Murray, ISBN 9781529349245, £22


When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th-century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the narrative is at once a travelogue, memoir, and history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. Te trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, while its revenues were essential to the Empire’s financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, America’s most powerful families, and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and contemporary globalism itself.


Empire of Contingency:


How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World by Jorge Flores, University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 9781512826449, £54


Tis book explores the information and communication practices of the Portuguese empire in late 16th- and 17th-century India, a period during which Portuguese imperial ambitions were struggling for survival, while the Mughal empire was at the height of its power and influence. Jorge Flores uncovers the tenuous but ingenious apparatuses of intelligence through which the Estado da India, the name given to the Portuguese political administrative unit in the region between the Cape of Good Hope and East Asia, endeavoured to survive in a vast Indo-Persian world shaped by the influence and power of the Mughal empire. Detailing the complex relations that the officials of the Portuguese empire, particularly


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Travellers in the Golden Realm by Lubaaba Al-Azami, John Murray, ISBN 9781529371321, £25


Before the East India Company and before the British Empire, England was a pariah state. Seeking better fortunes, 16th and 17th century merchants, pilgrims and outcasts ventured to the kingdom of the mighty Mughals, attempting to sell coarse woollen broadcloth


along the silk roads; playing courtiers in the Mughal palaces in pursuit of love; or simply touring the subcontinent in search of an elephant to ride. Into this golden realm went Father Tomas Stephens, a Catholic fleeing his home; the merchant Ralph Fitch looking for jewels in the markets of Delhi; and John Mildenhall, an adventurer revelling in the highwire politics of the Mughal elite. It was a land ruled from the palatial towers by women – the formidable Empress Nur Jahan Begum, the enterprising Queen Mother Maryam al-Zamani, and the intrepid Princess Jahanara Begum. Teir collision of worlds helped connect East and West, launching a tempestuous period of globalisation spanning from the Chinese opium trade to the slave trade in the Americas.


in Goa, the capital of the Estado da India, maintained with the Mughal empire as well as the sultanates of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur in the Deccan region – through information gathering, record- keeping, interpreting, and diplomatic correspondence – the book demonstrates how the Portuguese territories along the western coast of India were substantially incorporated into the vast Persianate cultural sphere spanning from Iran to Southeast Asia. Te process of empire-building on the fringes of the Persianate world and the prolonged interaction with the Mughal empire, Ahmadnagar, and Bijapur, Flores argues, led to the irregular, non- linear, and incomplete assimilation of the Portuguese empire into Persianate India.


Vagabond Princess:


The Great Adventures of Gulbadan by Ruby Lal, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300251272, £22


Taking place in the early decades of the magnificent Mughal Empire, this first ever biography of Princess Gulbadan offers a portrait of a charismatic adventurer and unique pictures of the multicultural society in which she lived. Following a migratory childhood that spanned Kabul and north India, Gulbadan spent her middle years in a walled harem established by her nephew Akbar to showcase his authority as the Great Emperor. Gulbadan longed for the exuberant itinerant lifestyle she had known. With Akbar’s blessing, she led an unprecedented sailing and overland voyage and guided harem women on an extended pilgrimage in Arabia. Amid increasing political tensions, the women’s ‘un-Islamic’ behaviour forced their return, lengthened by a dramatic shipwreck in the Red Sea.


The Great Mughals:


Art, Architecture, and Opulence edited by Sue Stronge, V&A Publishing, ISBN 9781838510367, £40


Te Great Mughals accompanies the exhibition at the V&A in London and presents, for the first time the opulent, internationalist culture of Mughal Hindustan in the age of its greatest emperors: Akbar (r 1556-1605), Jahangir (r 1605-1627) and Shah Jahan (r 1628-1658). Providing a compelling new narrative to describe the origins of Mughal art, it explores how a huge Iranian influence permeated the sophisticated craft traditions of the Indian subcontinent to create a distinctively Mughal court are included: from contemporary portraits to jewelled gold vessels and carpets. In chapters that conjure the unique dynamics of each reign, essays with historical sweep combine


Asian Art Newspaper


with texts focused on important objects to tell unexpected stories about this influential dynasty.


The Lion and The Lily: The Rise and Fall of Awadh by Ira Mukhoty, Aleph Book Company, ISBN 9788119635979, £39.99


Trough the turbulent 18th century, Awadh grew to become one of the richest and most coveted regions in all of Hindustan. Although it was nominally ruled by the Mughal emperor in Delhi, the Mughal empire itself under Muhammad Shah ‘Rangeeley’, and later under Shah Alam II, was in terminal decline. Te British and French East India Companies were vying for control of the subcontinent. As the Seven Years’ War between these European powers came to an end, and the British lost territory in other parts of the world, they became more determined to seize power in India. Meanwhile, France began a ‘war of revenge’ against its old enemy to restore its prestige. Te French Revolutionary Wars (1792-99) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) would lead to even greater volatility in India. French players continued to intrigue untilthe last quarter


of the 18th century in various Indian courts. Awadh’s rise to prominence began


when Saadat Khan Burhan-ul-Mulk (r 1722-1739) was posted there by the Mughal emperor as a demotion for failing to quell a Jat rebellion. Undeterred, Saadat Khan and his successors worked relentlessly to bring stability and glory to the province. Shuja-ud-Daula (r 1754-1775), the third nawab, was widely considered the most powerful and courageous ruler of the time. But after the disastrous loss of the Mughal army at the Battle of Buxar (1764) Shuja was forced into an unsavoury alliance with the British. Despite this unfortunate development, Shuja worked hard to develop Awadh, and Faizabad in particular. Shuja’s son, Asaf-ud- Daula (r 1775-1797), was a visionary and an exemplary diplomat, and his mother, Bahu Begum, a formidable force of nature. Asaf created a Shia renaissance that challenged both Mughal Sunni power and the increasing parochialism of the EIC. His adopted son, Wazir Ali (r 1797-1798), was deposed by the British who then crowned his uncle Saadat Ali Khan (r 1798-1814) as a puppet ruler. In the treaty of 1801, Saadat Ali Khan ceded half of Awadh to the British East India Company and agreed to disband his troops in favour of an expensive British-run army. Tese and other developments would reduce Awadh to a shadow of its former glory within a couple of decades.


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