Races of Monsters or Monstrous Races? How Identitarian Claims and Aesthetic Discourse Shaped Colonial Interpretative Perceptions on Hindu Religious Art.

Abstract

Since ancient times, the encounter with faraway and exotic people has captivated the curiosity of Western armchair travelers and, in the meantime, has set in motion a query about identity, questioning who is the ‘other’ and how should it be conceived, thus triggering a supremacist struggle. But, has the quest for identity an impact over the way we perceive the world? To what extent? And how does the cultural background mediate for the aesthetic interpretation of ‘other’ artistic streams? In this final MA thesis, I focused my attention on the strong relationship between identitarian policies related to racial claims, and monstrosity, showing how these two aspects came to mold and affect different mindsets when they came to interpret the world, in particular other artistic forms. Albeit it is clear that aesthetic gradients vary from one culture to another so that it resulted in diverse beauty canons, monstrosity is an evergreen aspect common to human communities all over the world, from the Greek civilization and even before, until today, because “there is a deep-seated emotional need for monsters in our world of imagination. […] To me, this expresses a universal need that transcends local considerations” (Mitter, 2012, p. 341). In this sense racial orientalist claims and the cultural-mediated conception of monstrosity came to shape the colonial English approach towards Indian art, depicting the Hindu gods as pagan monsters, whereas Gandharan Buddhist sculpture as a magnificent manufacture because of its inherited Hellenized 'influences'.