In an advantageous collaboration, Vidya Dehejia, an eminent historian of South Asian art, and Peter Rockwell, an accomplished sculptor and author of numerous articles on stone carving, begin their book with a well-known conundrum in the history of Indian stone carving: why are so many monuments and sculptures in stone unfinished? By acknowledging that in many instances the answers to this question are as varied as the unfinished art and architecture they examine, the authors shift their focus to related questions and observations that radiate, to borrow their metaphor, like the petals of a lotus blossom around the center of this corpus of unfinished stone work (p. 11).
In the following thirteen chapters and the epilogue, Dehejia and Rockwell have crafted a compelling study of stone carving that not only draws on case studies from across the subcontinent (largely south and central India with a few examples from Pakistan), but also carefully examines the sculpture of the distant past alongside contemporary practices. This thematically organized structure allows the authors to develop several intertwined arguments—namely that South Asia's unfinished stone carving provides a wealth of information about the diverse techniques employed by stone carvers and that “finished” and “unfinished” must be viewed as a continuum.
Offering fresh insights about a range of canonical art historical sites, The Unfinished, which eschews diacritical marks and provides a glossary of key terms, is accessible to a broad audience. However, the authors also understand their work as the start of a conversation, perhaps spurring scholars to scour their archives for evidence of unfinished materials or guiding graduate students to dissertation topics. Although this book does not directly engage with the literature on New Materialisms, the discussion of stone and its active and, at times, unpredictable nature seems relevant to debates about the agentive aspects of the nonhuman.
Chapter 1 directs the reader's gaze to those roughly chiseled blocks of unfinished rock lurking alongside India's more celebrated and refined stones. Indeed, many of South Asia's Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain monuments (no Islamicate sculpture or architecture is examined) are to some degree unfinished. Dehejia and Rockwell introduce a “flexible” understanding of the unfinished: objects or sites that reveal “clear evidence of an intention that has not been carried out” might nevertheless have served their patrons’ needs (p. 17). Unfinished sites and objects also document the act of carving, with literal traces of tools and techniques recorded for posterity.
Chapter 2 outlines the authors’ gradations of the unfinished—Unusable Unfinished, including the subcategory of the Barely Begun, and the Usable Unfinished, with the Almost Finished at the end of this spectrum—by providing examples from a range of sites. Chapter 3 turns to rock-cut monuments to develop the category of the “Usable Unfinished” and to demonstrate that, when equipped with objects of veneration, even unfinished excavations could function as devotional spaces. Donative inscriptions, the subject of chapter 4, were likely added, perhaps optimistically, during initial work on rock-cut caves and not at the successful conclusion of work. Similarly, chapter 5 considers inscriptions recording the names of stone carvers—sometimes carved on the bodies of figures in erotic scenes or on unused stones abandoned at a quarry. Such inscriptions seemed to ensure that stone carvers were appropriately compensated.
The remaining chapters explore technique and process. Chapter 6 examines the types of stones found in India (with additional analysis provided in the appendix by Randall Law), the minimal tools—one type of axe and the flat and pointed chisels—employed by Indian carvers to achieve sophisticated results, the factors that carvers must consider when working stone, and the organization of teams of carvers and other artisans. Again, with unfinished monuments yielding substantial evidence of facture, chapters 7 and 8 juxtapose carving practices used for caitya halls in the Deccan with those employed for the granite monoliths in Mamallapuram. While chapters 9 and 10 compare the carving of sculpture from living rock with sculpting quarried slabs to be installed within temple niches, chapters 11 and 12 further develop these ideas by establishing how “the rhythm of construction” necessitated the installation of certain stones before they were fully carved. The authors then compare the techniques used for carving stone at an on-site workshop with those required for stones that had already been installed on a temple wall. Chapter 13 transports the reader to Swat Valley in Pakistan for a brief consideration of some unusual stone construction practices there. Given that the Gandharan sculptors worked with the same tools but adopted techniques distinct from those found at the other sites discussed, a fuller consideration of this region would be beneficial.
By way of conclusion, the epilogue argues that the careful examination of unfinished sculpture at Mamallapuram reveals the hand of a sculptor, referred to as the “Animal Master,” who specialized in the nuanced portrayal of animals. As the previous chapters have outlined the collaborative, flexible, and technically talented work of stone carvers, perhaps Mamallapuram's gentle elephants and cows might be the result of a team of animal-loving sculptors.
Raising questions about more speculative arguments (and noting a few errors, such as an incorrect caption in chapter 5, or alphabetical inconsistencies in the rather brief bibliography) should in no way detract from this lively and original book. The Unfinished will serve as a lodestone for art historical scholarship to come.
