This well-produced, well-conceived, and lavishly illustrated study of garlands and gateways as parts of the structure and decorative ornamentation of architecture in South and Southeast Asia is dedicated to Madhusudan Amilal Dhaky, under whose supervision a preliminary version was prepared as a doctoral thesis at the National Museum Institute (NMI), New Delhi. The author completed the manuscript while on a postdoctoral fellowship in Berlin. She follows that eminent scholar's methodological model, widely surveying existing monuments and coordinating inscriptional, literary, and textual references to establish an appropriate terminology and classification for an architectural and decorative element of great proliferation and importance in southern Asia. Its use and evolution spans more than 2,000 years. Dhaky set a pattern for this type of rigorous analysis of elements of South Asian architecture in his studies The Ceilings in the Temples of Gujarat (coauthored with J....
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March 2011
