ABSTRACT
Puranas describe the universe as it unfolds in time. Narrated by Brahmins during ritual story sessions, called katha, these ancient texts portray gods, goddesses, kings and heroes as part of a single cosmological order, explained in genealogies and place-stories of pilgrimage sites and sacred shrines. “Idiom” is a key term in Meister’s study of temple architecture. In a 1982 essay, on an early-eighth century Shiva temple at Bithu in Rajasthan, Meister places idiom against “regional style,” a term used in India typically to classify architecture and sculpture according to their geographical distribution. If style represents “an accumulation of general characteristics that reflect a broad cultural grouping,” idiom signals an idiosyncratic appropriation and mutation of divergent styles in a period of artistic instability. The Bombay idiom of modernism points to a fault-line in India’s modern art scene in the years following Independence.
