Four chapters are devoted to the Hindu view of the goddess: from the discovery of missing links in the early development of her iconography to the religious background of modern Kali worship. The Greek concept of the city-goddess in the Buddhist art of Gandhara then leads into three different perceptions of the Buddha image. Mediterranean contact with the north-western Indian borderlands - including the return voyage of Alexander's admiral, Nearchos, along the Makran coast - brings the reader into the subcontinent from the West. The reader is invited to participate in the intellectual excitement of their discoveries. It is a collection of twenty-two essays by leading Indian and Western scholars directly involved in the continuing work of understanding the art and architecture of the Indian past, and revealing the patterns of thought behind them. It is not often that readers encounter a book in which specialists reveal their working methods at the very moment of discovery, and of interpretation. Indian Art History, with its background of linguistics, philosophy, mythology, and political history, is today one of the most energetically thriving of those branches. Since then Indology as a discipline has diversified into a wide range of highly specialized areas. Pioneering researches into India's past began over two hundred years ago with the work of Sir William Jones and the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
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