Published in eight volumes between the years 1868-1875, and comprising 480 pasted-in albumen prints accompanied by descriptive letterpress, The People of India (henceforth POI) is a publication more (in)famous now in the twenty-first century than it was ever well-known at any point during the nineteenth. It stands in our historiographic imagination as a seminal text through which colonial authorities established the technical and conceptual practices that would shape the photographic activity on the subcontinent for over a century. And while there is no doubt that the bigoted attitudes and cultural misconceptions manifest in the volumes do exemplify a very real and persistent phenomenon, the publication itself was not a substantial factor in the formation and establishment of the notions intimated in its text. However, to dismiss the POI as a work of great historical significance on the grounds that it was not a direct agent in the codification of the legacy would be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Once the project is approached in terms of individual images with the potential for multiple manifestations and modes of textualization, scholarly enquiry is no longer limited by the dearth of historical evidence regarding the application and reception of the volumes.

In reframing the POI as a photographic project and explicating it in terms of images circulating in a broader public sphere, this dissertation endeavors to identify commercial media in a popular Western arena as an extremely significant yet largely unarticulated mechanism in the formation and establishment of colonial knowledge. Centered firmly in the metropole, the popular sphere was unregulated, with a mass audience, and characterized by a diffuse and long-lasting circulation and repurposing of images. Upon charting the dissemination and circulation of POI images in a variety of display contexts and modes of reproduction, it becomes clear that the prolific repurposing of individual POI portraits in contexts of popular mass circulation—rather than the formal publication— is primarily responsible for the transformation of the arbitrarily constructed “native types” contained in the volumes into recognizable and functioning categories.

This thesis will attempt to demonstrate that Islamic political thought developed democratic features and embraced concepts of universal human rights long before these features were evident in the west. By surveying Islamic religious, philosophical, and juridical records, it will attempt to determine whether the single over-arching theme of religious exclusivism has remained constant in Islamic literature (fundamentally alienating east from west), or whether concepts have been debated, modified, and incorporated in a dynamic way that reveals Islam as an evolutionary concept, rather than a rigid set of religious precepts, that is capable of producing a political process predicated on pluralism, consensus, respect for human rights, and toleration of civil disobedience. Samuel Huntington may be entirely correct that liberal democracy as it is understood in the west will never be derived from an Islamic ideology. However, we shall ask if Islam could provide a conceptual framework from which a non-western liberal democratic theory (one that retains the unique features of Islamic ideology) may be constructed, given time?

Huntington seems to ignore the ways in which western liberal democracy emerged throughout centuries of social conflict and challenges to time-honored culturally nurtured institutions. Similarly, Islam's culture stretches back for more than a millennium, and has undergone its own transformations. Were there periods of time in which the philosophic debate in Islam incorporated ideas that have nurtured democratic process? Is there evidence that Islamic ideology, like any other ideology, has been subject to alternative interpretations? In short, are Islamic religious beliefs flexible and can they express a genuinely Islamic brand of democratic culture? In this regard, there need not be extensive comparison with western democratic theory, either in the establishment of a "democratic culture", the debate regarding the normative understanding of rights (and their sources), or the implementation of a democratic process. It will suffice merely to examine the textual evidence and glean from it what Islamic scholars themselves debated.

Embekke devāle (house of god) is a Hindu temple dated to the fourteenth to eighteenth century of the Gampola and Kandy periods. Located in Embekke village in central Sri Lanka, the temple is dedicated to god Skandha, the god of war and victory. The central paradox of Embekke devāle is that it is a Hindu temple within a predominantly Sinhala Buddhist community with unusual woodcarvings in its Digg-ge (pillared hallway). The carvings are neither exclusively Hindu nor Buddhist and their purpose remains an ambiguity. By analyzing the historical shifts of the Gampola and Kandy periods, when the devāle was built and perhaps renovated, I propose that the fluidity of religious and social identities resulted in the eclectic collection of art and architecture in Embekke devāle and its contemporaneous temples, the Gadaladeniya and Lankātilaka temples. I also argue that rather than being an example of Sri Lankan art that lacks a prototype, the iconography of Embekke woodcarvings draws from designs and motifs that are prevalent within the broader scope of South Asian art. Instead of isolating the woodcarvings as a collection that is specific to Sri Lanka, I place Embekke devāle in a more cosmopolitan historical setting where exchange of art and iconography took place frequently between sites and kingdoms. I propose that the appropriation of the pillars from a royal audience hall into a Hindu shrine has re-articulated the Digg-ge’s architectural space; the variety of seemingly secular and non-secular mythical motifs in the woodcarvings create a visual transitionary point for the devotees as they move from the mundane to the sacred. Instead of compartmentalizing the historical narrative, I address the significant South Indian presence in Gampola and Kandy that is underscored by exchanges with South India and migrant artisans of the Viśvakarma caste. In conclusion, I argue that as a visual testament to the cultural syncretism during the diverse period between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, Embekke devāle along with its two neighboring temples reflects the continuation of both Sri Lankan and South Indian architectural designs in Medieval and Early Modern central Sri Lanka.

The earliest extant depictions of the Ramayana in Indian art are found on narrative reliefs on Hindu temples dated to the sixth to eighth century, and are located primarily in the region governed by the Early Western Chalukyas (a.k.a. Chalukyas of Badami), who ruled from circa 550-750 CE in much of the Deccan and southern Maharashtra. The sixth to eighth century is significant as the period immediately following the florescence of a shared courtly culture, and the establishment of regional dynasties across the Indian subcontinent. The political culture of the court was highly aestheticized, and heavily informed by the Sanskrit literary tradition of eulogistic inscriptions, epic poems, and dramatic performances. The Valmiki Ramayana was among the most popular heroic narratives; the story of Rama, an avatar of the god Vishnu, was considered a paragon of Hindu kingship. The goal of this dissertation is to understand how Rama's life was represented in literature and visual art, and what it signified for the king and members of his royal entourage. Through a comparative analysis of narrative depictions of the Ramayana in plays and temple reliefs dated to the sixth to eighth century, I identify a shared visual lexicon that reflects a courtly worldview. The methodology employed in my analysis emphasizes the social history underlying the monuments in order to think about their secular meaning. This dissertation is a reconsideration of material that has primarily been studied in terms of its religious function, iconographic meaning, and stylistic attributes. Chapter 1 provides a historiography of the study of Hindu temples, and the impact of previous scholars' emphasis on the religious symbolism of the temple. My analysis of literary and art historical evidence is presented in Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 looks at the literary evidence of aesthetic treatises and plays that informed the artists who produced the relief sculptures that are the subject of Chapter 3.

The majority of archaeology in Champa consists of Hindu arts and architecture. Buddhism co-existed with Hinduism, but it was not the dominant religion. In 875 CE, Indravarman II was the first Cham ruler to actively support Buddhism with the construction of the Dong Duong temple located in present-day Binh Dinh, Vietnam. An analysis of Sanskrit Buddhist inscriptions helps shed light on Cham royal women. The inscriptions revealed that royal women and the king shared an interest in Buddhism. Narrative relief carvings from two altar pedestals displayed the prominent role of females. In addition, a rare seated Buddha statue with the legs pendant-- a posture associated with female goddesses also intensified the importance of female power. In the 9th century, the female role in art at Dong Duong is extraordinary in the Buddhist context. I argue, that the seated Buddha with the legs pendant and narrative relief panels of the Buddha's life depicted at the temple emphasized the female realm.