Larger Than Life: Interrogating Monumentality in South Asian Art and Architecture

In recent years, monumentality has emerged as a protean theoretical lens with growing relevance across art history and related disciplines. What makes something monumental? Over-human scale, material durability, public visibility, and commemorative purpose are among the constellation of answers scholars have proposed. There is also something ineffable; as Louis Kahn put it, “a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys the feeling of its eternity.”

Despite the profusion of monumental statues and structures erected throughout South Asia’s history—Ashoka’s pillars, Buddhist stupas, skyscraping temples, Shravanabelagola’s Gommateshwara, the Qutb Minar, Mughal mausolea, Brutalist buildings, and the Statue of Unity to name a few—the interpretive potential of monumentality remains underexplored. This panel probes the relationship between exaggerated dimensions of artworks and edifices, their intended functions, and their afterlives. What aesthetic, political, theological, technological, and financial considerations have motivated the establishment of colossal works? How have architects and artists manipulated scale to imbue their creations with new meanings? And how have notions of monumentality been articulated in textual sources prescribing or describing the height of buildings and images?

We contend that monumental constructions are larger than life not only in their proportions vis-à-vis the bodies of their makers and users, but equally in terms of the memorial, political, soteriological, or eschatological significance behind their sponsorship. We invite papers that examine the centrality of scale and monumentality in the conception, fabrication, and reception of South Asian art and architecture from any historical period.