Life and Afterlife of Sādṛśya: Revisiting the Citrasūtra through the Nationalism-Naturalism Debate in Indian Art History

This paper sets out to revisit the Citrasūtra, a seminal section on painting from the Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa, in the light of key concerns around the cultural politics of art historiography, the śāstra-prayoga debate (Maxwell 1989, 5–15), and the related question of interpretative frameworks for studying early Indian art. The latter concern has lately come to the forefront in the context of postcolonial studies and global art history. It is critical of intellectual parasitism (Dhareshwar 2015, 57–77) and pushes postcolonial thought to explore ‘native’ interpretative frames to study Indian art (Asher 2007, 12). This paper attempts to complicate the search