Art

Exploring India’s religious imagery provides an alternative to textual

interpretation as a basis for understanding Hinduism. As Diana Eck rightly

stated:

Hermeneutics has been used to describe the task of understanding and interpreting ideas and texts. In a similar way, we need to set for ourselves

the task of developing a hermeneutic of the visible, addressing the problem

of how we understand and interpret what we see, not only in the classical

images and art forms created by the various religious traditions, but in the

ordinary images of people’s traditions, rites, and daily activities.