By Alka Hingorani
Taberam Soni, Labh Singh, Amar Singh, and different artists reside and paintings within the hill-villages of the reduce Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh, India. There they model face-images of deities (mohras) out of skinny sheets of invaluable steel. Commissioned by means of upper-caste consumers, the gadgets are cultural embodiments of divine and earthly kinship. because the artists make the pictures, additionally they move caste limitations in part of India the place such adjustments nonetheless verify principles of touch and correspondence, proximity and organization. as soon as a mohra has been accomplished and consecrated, its maker isn't really authorized to the touch it or input the temple within which it's housed; but in the course of its production the artist is sovereign, handled deferentially as he stocks residing quarters with the high-caste patrons.
Making Faces tells the tale of those god-makers, the gods they make, and the groups that perform the artistic procedure and its accompanying rituals. For the writer, the method of studying approximately Himachal, its artwork and artists, the folks who make their domestic there, concerned pursuing itinerant artists throughout tricky mountainous terrain with few, if any, technique of communique among the thinly populated, high-altitude villages. the cruel geography of the area allows scant go back and forth, and the itinerant artisan types a severe hyperlink to the area outdoor; villages that fee mohras are usually populated by way of a small variety of households. Alka Hingorani inspires this global in wealthy visible and descriptive aspect as she explores the ways that either item and artisan are got and their identities remodeled in the course of a interval of creative endeavor.
Making Faces is an unique and evocative account, fantastically illustrated, of a few of the stages within the lifecycle of a mohra, at assorted instances a spiritual icon, an artwork item, and a repository of fabric wealth in an differently subsistence financial system. it is going to be welcomed by way of students and scholars of anthropology, fabric tradition, faith, artwork historical past, and South Asian studies.
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