Elizabeth A. Cecil’s research while affiliated with Florida State University and other places

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (10)


A Forgotten Family Portrait
  • Article

October 2022

·

4 Reads

Archives of Asian Art

Elizabeth A. Cecil

Ancient Daśapura was the site of an internally complex Śaiva religious community. The Aulikara rulers used Śaivism as a political idiom to celebrate military might and royal power. Their ministers, the Naigamas, promoted an irenic vision that praised Śiva as a source of protection and prosperity. Attention to those expressions of Śaivism enable us to contextualize one of Daśapura's most famous, yet enigmatic, works of art: an ithyphallic male figure depicted with a double phallus (ca. sixth c. ce). To date, the sculpture has remained impossible to place within the greater artistic landscape of the region. This study proposes a resolution by showing that the icon was conceived as part of a triad of sculptures that included Śiva's wife, Pārvatī, and their son, Skanda. The images of Śiva and Skanda are displayed at the Bhopal Museum, and while their similarities have been noted in previous studies, they have not been viewed as part of a set. The reason for this is their separation from an unpublished Pārvatī that currently is displayed in the Mandasor Archaeological Museum and identified as a yakṣī. When viewed as part of a triad, the double-phallus figure is transformed from an iconographic puzzle into an innovative visual strategy to reconcile what might seem opposing facets of a divine persona—that is, the ascetic and the family man. By presenting these icons as a “family portrait,” this study recontextualizes important works of art from early India and initiates broader considerations of the political and religious ideologies that inspired their production.


figure 1 Remains of Guḍnāpur Pillar
figure 2 Estampage of Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription after gopal, 1973
Kāma at the Kadamba Court: The Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman as a Text-Monument
  • Article
  • Full-text available

March 2021

·

337 Reads

Indo-Iranian Journal

In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in the village of Guḍnāpur in Karnataka. The monument has since become known as the Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman (ca. 465–500 CE ) after the ruler of the early Kadamba kingdom who commissioned it. The inscription preserves a compelling historical record that details the intersections of religious and political performance at the Kadamba court as centered around a temple to Kāma constructed within the confines of the royal residence at Vaijayantī (Banavasi), and the distribution of agrarian lands to support its maintenance. This study presents a new translation and analysis of the text and a discussion of the pillar as a ‘text-monument’ that was both embedded within and constitutive of landscapes: physical and built as well as rhetorical and imagined. By presenting the Guḍnāpur inscription as a text-monument situated within multiple landscapes, the article reveals how documentary, donative, religious, and agrarian practices supported state-making in an early South Indian kingdom.

Download

Idiom and innovation in the ‘Gupta Period’: Revisiting Eran and Sondhni

February 2021

·

16 Reads

·

9 Citations

The Indian Economic & Social History Review

To show how kingship was enacted and materialised in specific contexts within the ‘Gupta Ecumene’, writ large, this article presents a detailed analysis of two sites that served as centres for political performance, devotional practice, and artistic production between the fourth and the sixth century CE: Eran and Sondhni in the Indian heartland of Madhya Pradesh. Eran is commonly held to be a key site for the study of Gupta art and architecture and holds several important inscriptions from the beginning to the end of the Gupta period, including one issued by Samudragupta. Sondhni is marked by two inscribed columns of Yaśodharman, a former Gupta subordinate who challenged the imperial rulers using metaphors borrowed from Samudragupta’s Allahabad Pillar Inscription. Examining these two sites in dialogue presents an opportunity to identify a shared cultural realm in which local polities participated and developed a transregional ‘Gupta’ political discourse. This study normalises a Gupta-centred imperial history and, in doing so, participates in a wider departure from dynastic history by emphasising the ways in which localised polities and rulers negotiated the political idioms of their day, challenged them, and created spaces for innovation.


A Natural Wonder: From Liṅga Mountain to Prosperous Lord at Vat Phu

November 2020

·

1,508 Reads







Citations (3)


... This identification was introduced by Gopal in his 1973 edition of the text. Given that a number of other Kadamba records 101 On this feature of Gupta epigraphic self-fashioning see Cecil and Bisschop (2021); Pollock (2006), 240. On the sharing of political idioms and imitation as a mode of learning to being 'imperial' see Pollock (2006). ...

Reference:

Kāma at the Kadamba Court: The Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman as a Text-Monument
Idiom and innovation in the ‘Gupta Period’: Revisiting Eran and Sondhni
  • Citing Article
  • February 2021

The Indian Economic & Social History Review