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Thesis--Harvard University. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation addresses the significance of regional developments in Indian art by focusing on the Buddhist art tradition of the Dhaka region in East Bengal from approximately the seventh to twelfth century CE. The Buddhist images and sites examined in this dissertation formed a part of a greater corpus of Buddhist art usually defined as ‘Eastern Indian art of the early medieval period or the PAlA-Sena period’. Art historians have concentrated on explaining common factors that determine Buddhist art of this region, because this is where the last stage of Indian Buddhism flourished, and thus its art has been considered as a product of the same stage of Buddhism as well as the same dynastic patronage. My study of Buddhist art from the Dhaka area is proposed as a first step toward a characterization of the different local traditions in eastern India, particularly, in Bengal, which has been neglected in the study of Buddhist art. The present study divides the Buddhist images from the Dhaka region into two groups according to their size. The size of the images helps one to place them in either a public or a private context. On the basis of surviving sculptures, most of the central Buddhist worship objects from the Dhaka region portray multi-headed and -armed deities that personify transcendent wisdom. Private worship objects also often portray these deities. The presence of large images of unique wisdom goddesses in the Dhaka region, who were never portrayed or only portrayed in a small size in other regions, suggests that the Buddhist practice in the Dhaka region was closely engaged in the assimilation of various goddess cults. The present study challenges the traditional distinction between iconography and style. By discussing individual components of the images as a whole, this dissertation also seeks to identify the major characteristics of Buddhist art from the Dhaka region. / text

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis presents the first extended ethnographic account of a popular professional theatrical form and life-style—the jatra of West Bengal, India. The research material presented and analysed was collected from 1970-1972 in West Bengal and the immediately surrounding states of Assam, Orissa and Bihar. The cognitive universe of the jatra jagat (world), the cultural practice of the jatra business, and the interactional constraints operating among the various categories of people within the jatra profession, are described and interpreted. In addition, this thesis presents the first systematically and anthropologically annotated translation of a popularly performed jatra play, Pariah Paiser Pvithibi (The World for F-ive Paisa). The central point of the thesis revolves around an interpretation of the concerns of the professional jatra business—an aesthetic business, the business of cultural performance. The argument is that this performance form, from its asserted putative origin, has been a critical and self-reflective commentary on Bengali social and cultural life. The jatra is inextricably bound within the existential and cultural dilemmas of Bengali life, dilemmas and contradictions that traditionally were resolved at both metaphysical and practical levels. Now that the jatra is embedded within a capitalist business world, critical commentaries and revolutionary desires remain unresolved within the profession itself. In spite of this, the jatra remains critical of both itself and Bengali social and cultural life, embedded as it is in the current context of feared and despised Western cultural imperialism and internal domination. The anthropological interpretation and analysis presented in the thesis is informed from a number of sources; the views expressed by people within the jatra world, the work in anthropology that currently goes under the heading of 'symbolic anthropology', critical theory and literary criticism, and semiotics. With these points of view in mind, the thesis presents an analysis of the jatra advertising system, the jatra performance system, and a larger peripatetic performance system, as well as a statement about the interpretation of meaning in Bengali life. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Unknown