Temple as Ritual Center: Tenth-Century Traces of Ritual and the Record in Stone

Abstract

A diffusion of artistic style in stone leaves a trace of the production of Guhila dynastic identity in tenth-century northwestern India. Both in the twenty-first century and in the premodern period, boundaries are spaces of negotiation—fruitful places of contestation in the multivalent production of culture. Homi Bhabha has described this interruption of binary division as “a liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense cultural locations.”¹ Out of fewer than a dozen temple sites that share a cultural affinity in the Medapaṭa region,