Gods in the Time of Democracy

“Instead of lamenting the lack of a progressive secular spirit, Kajri Jain offers a rich, complex, and thoroughly fascinating account of how religiosity itself is being transformed in contemporary India into a public arena of democratic politics. Combining capitalist ambition with electoral competition, the proliferation of religious statuary brings together sacred texts, technology, automobility, and numerology into a new political aesthetic of monumentalism and spectacle. Jain argues persuasively that aesthetics is constitutive of politics, often in unexpected ways.” - Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

“Kajri Jain's extraordinary book on monumental statuary cuts across art history and visual culture. Gods and leaders are together framed within what she startlingly calls ‘the aesthetics of democracy.’ Here aesthetics as a redistributive principle generates her premise of emergence: counter-positioning of the oppressed majority, their appropriation of image, material structures, and publics within India's severely stratified society increasingly subject to fascistic Hindutva. The rise of right-wing regimes worldwide will position Jain's brilliant discourse within complex contestations on what is the aesthetics of democracy today.” - Geeta Kapur, author of When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India

“Gods in the Time of Democracy is a complex and challenging attempt at reframing the discussion around monumental iconography in India and its diaspora.... The book is a valuable contribution to contemporary art history and religious studies.” - Manasvin Rajagopalan, Reading Religion

"Jain’s book is perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated and historically informed account of this phenomenon [monumental statues] to date." - Rahul Rao, The Critical Quarterly

"Brilliantly argued. . . . Jain’s remarkable book makes a compelling case for the acuity of her material and visual lens when directed onto contemporary India." - Christopher Pinney, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute