After productively challenging scholars of Himalayan art to reconsider their premises on the antiquity of Nepalese metal craft Mary Slusser has begun to re-write the history of a tradition of carved woodwork that has long ornamented the Kathmandu valley. In the sumptuously produced monograph under review she draws on her intimate knowledge of the valley's neighborhoods to present a meticulous documentation and an instructive analysis of an unevenly known and imperfectly protected corpus of early woodwork set into more recently built structures. The antiquity of this startling corpus, pushes a distinctive tradition of wooden architecture in the valley back by over five centuries and upstages even the most daring suspicions of other astute scholars. It also offers new resources for all those interested in recovering the early medieval history of India and Nepal.
In the sophisticated ‘Newari style’ Hindu and Buddhist temples and monasteries that crowd the valley today - and which mostly date to the sixteenth century and later - wood is used for making rafters, struts set between walls and the wide overhanging eave of the roofs, windows and the portal system. These wooden architectural elements beautify and protect these structures.
The first portion of Slusser's book focuses on thirty-two pre-fourteenth century figural śāla wood struts. Samples of some of these struts were collected with the cooperation of the industrious Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust and sent to a US laboratory for radiocarbon dating. The earliest of these samples, which was assigned a calibrated calendar date of 660–850 CE (95% probability) securely fits into the very period in which the Licchavis held the fertile valley. By discussing other radiocarbon dated samples Slusser shows that the earliest dated strut depicting a śālabhañjikā compositional scheme—of a rocky perch on which a crouching dwarf supports a youthful woman who stands under the shade of a tree that has burst into flower and fruit by her touch—informed the appearance of figural struts carved in subsequent periods.
In addition to cataloguing all the pre-fourteenth century struts, as well as representative samples from subsequent periods, Slusser connects differences among them to broader shifts in taste, in religious ideology and in their carvers' abilities. She also adroitly melds the archaeological, inscriptional and ethnographic record to consider whether these struts may have belonged to the original fabric of royally endowed buildings once erected at these sites.
Slusser also probes the antecedents of their compositions, drawing on disciplines from ethnobotany to comparative mythology to arrive at intriguing hypotheses such as how the assemblages of foliage, blossoms, and fruit of carved trees may refer to endemic and exotic species. Her subsequent consideration of linkages between these woodcarvings and other arts that flourished in the Kathmandu valley in the same period is equally engaging.
The second portion of Slusser's book is devoted to other wooden components of ‘Newari style’ sacred architecture. Here she offers radiocarbon dates of a well-preserved portal system of one shrine (810–1000) and the toraṇa or tympanum of another (910–1030) among other pieces and discusses their constituent elements and the ways in which they reference the symbolic morphology of other parts of the structure. Having recognized the antiquity of these carvings it is surprising that Slusser does not compare or contrast any of them with the contemporary woodwork known from sacred centers such as Bharmour and Katarmal in the Himachal and Uttarakhand Himalayas and Isawal in Rajasthan.
Her comparisons, which frequently come from the Kuṣāṇa and Gupta periods and follow a formulation of the strong impress of these early aesthetic conventions on the Newari architectural canon made by Ulrich Wiesner in Nepalese Temple Architecture (Leiden: Brill, 1978), are also less convincing. Such comparisons overlook the ways in which wood carvers, of ‘Newari style’ temples built between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, revived well-established motifs, emulated and translated forms from contemporary traditions of lithic architecture and sculpture being promoted by the rulers of Central, Western and Eastern India. The creative nature of Kathmandu valley wood carvers, whose finest products Slusser has brought to light, in my judgment is also discernable in their imaginative treatment of composite animals that they carved on toraṇas and in their renderings of śālabhañjikās. The generative iconography of these bracket figures may be read in part as a self-conscious symbolic substitution of the wood-carver's act: of breaking open of a stiff plank to give birth to a new form, of transforming nature into a work of art.
The monograph which ends with too-brief a discussion of the two oldest wooden cult images known to be from Nepal is followed by a series of helpful appendixes and the scientific conservator Paul Jett's lucid explanation of the validity of laboratory's radiocarbon dates. These minor quibbles aside, Mary Slusser deserves our gratitude for writing a monograph which is sure to illuminate pathways that it has also opened the doors to. The artists, photographers, and publishers—whose drawings, photographs, and page layouts further clarify elements discussed by the author and allow readers to see and enjoy the relationships between these elements and the forms around them - also merit our thanks.
