Emerging from a series of exquisite talks presented as the Sixty-Fifth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in 2016, Vidya Dehejia's The Thief Who Stole My Heart represents a momentous scholarly achievement. As the first South Asia specialist ever invited to deliver the prestigious CASVA Mellon talks, Dehejia's book aims at a broader legibility that makes not only myriad specialist interventions but also a clear case for the significance of the region for the discipline of art history. Whereas publications in this series typically take the form of a set of essays drawn directly from the lectures, Dehejia's book instead substantially expands upon her oral arguments, revisiting older scholarship through new lenses drawn from environmental history, material culture studies, and the growing literature on mobility and globalization in the Indian Ocean world. The result is an ambitious and grand reframing of the history of South Indian visual and cultural history by a scholar who has produced nearly two dozen books over the course of a decades-long career.

Following a brief introduction, the book proceeds chronologically and thematically through ten chapters. The first three chapters work together to cover the relationship between artistic production and the establishment of Chola power. Chapter 1 serves as a historical overview, laying out the geography of artistic production and the factors that enabled the emergence of the famed bronze tradition, including the establishment of agrarian infrastructures and the growing popularity of Shaiva and Vaishnava saints that led to the development of festivals requiring large processional sculptures. One of the more significant contributions of the chapter can be found in Dehejia's tenacity in her quest to locate the Chola's sources of copper, which leads her to the richness of ore deposits in Sri Lanka. In addition to reframing Chola artistic production in relationship to extensive trade networks, this exploration also offers a new understanding of why the dynasty was so obsessed with controlling Sri Lanka during its tenure. Chapter 2 turns to the first hundred years of Chola rule (855–955), looking at the dynasty's earliest temples, the proverbial “sacred seven,” in connection with the monarchs’ efforts to secure land through military engagement. Accordingly, the earliest Chola bronzes reflect a distinct preference for Shiva in his form as victor of three forts. Temple building and bronze commissioning were expansive courtly affairs, involving not only kings and queens but also concubines, temple administrators, and priests.

Bronzes found their way into treasuries by means of gifts, which were recorded through inscriptions on temple walls and copperplates. Accordingly, chapter 3 examines the temple's function as an inscribed archive, particularly during the reign of Parantaka Chola (905–55), that attests to the participation of both royal and nonroyal patrons. Chapter 4 turns to the second half of the same century to revisit the contributions of Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, taking as the point of departure a sculpture at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery that Dehejia has in the past identified as a portrait of the queen herself.Footnote ¹ In the process, Dehejia integrates this discussion with other of her earlier writings on the growing importance of the Shaiva saints Sambandar, Appar, and Sundarar, which she also connects to the queen's crucial role in popularizing the now-famous form of Dancing Shiva.Footnote ² These religious developments are set against the backdrop of the ecology of rice cultivation and the Chola's expansion of irrigation networks.

The next three chapters cover the height of Chola rule in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Chapter 5 looks closely at the Tiruvenkadu master sculptor, to whom is attributed the “portrait” of Sembiyan Mahadevi and many other spectacular surviving works. Building on her 2009 monograph, The Body Adorned,Footnote ³ Dehejia interweaves textual and visual sources to highlight the significance of jeweled ornaments not only in ritual performance but also temple accounting and the administration of wealth. The particular desire for pearls imported from Sri Lanka brings Dehejia, in chapter 6, to consider the Chola's expanding geographic sphere of influence and investment in larger Indian Ocean networks spanning from Aden to China, as well as to methodological questions of borrowing, citation, and selective adaptation in connection with the mobility of objects, craftsmen, and patrons. Chapter 7 moves to the twelfth century to focus on the ways in which the complex relationship that Chola king Rajaraja II (r. 1146–73) had with the king of Srivijaya shaped artistic production across the oceanic “silk route” through a focus on a set of icons depicting Shiva's eight heroic forms from Darasuram.

Breaking from the chronological framework, chapter 8 looks diachronically at evolving forms of Buddhist, Vaishnava, and goddesses imagery. Although the Cholas were primarily Shaiva, they patronized Vishnu temples, and Buddhism continued to retain a stronghold in south India, particularly at ports associated with the broader Indian Ocean world. Dehejia's discussion of female icons enables her to delve more deeply into changing architectural forms by looking at how temple complexes expanded in response to the increasing centrality of goddesses in Shaiva theology and ritual. Chapter 9 moves into the thirteenth century, a time of increasing instability brought about by a combination of natural disasters, administrative corruption, and military conflict. However, as Dehejia demonstrates, recently uncovered assemblages of buried bronzes attest to the continued efflorescence, and perserverance, of the sculptural workshops founded in earlier centuries by the Cholas. The final chapter (chapter 10) serves less as a conclusion than a poetic reflection that feels like a fitting coda to a magnificently ambitious book. Scholars both within and far beyond the fields of South Asian art, history, and literature will find much to enjoy and ponder in Dehejia's impressive array of sources, innovative methodologies, and beautifully rendered prose.