ABSTRACT
One of Michael Meister’s first scholarly publications is a short, too-little-known article entitled ‘A Plea for the Restoration of Aesthetics to the Consideration of Jaina Art’. It appeared in the Bulletin of Museums & Archaeology in U.P. in 1972, and emerged from a paper he delivered in 1972 at a Seminar on Jaina Art held at the State Museum in Lucknow. Michael began his short essay by noting that Jainism had been “ill-treated by Western scholars who have found its philosophy too negating and its art too dry”. He went on to note that Jain art in particular came in for harsh judgments by scholars who “condemned [it] for a finicky ‘dryness’, ‘stiffness’, and ‘lack of imagination’”. In some circles this continues to be the opinion of Jain art, especially, as the author have discussed elsewhere, in response to the seeming iconographic sameness of the Jina image over two millennia.
