240
Risha Lee
15 RETHINKING COMMUNITY The Indic Carvings of Quanzhou Risha Lee
INTRODUCTION In the late thirteenth century, a Tamil-speaking community in southern China’s coastal city of Quanzhou built a temple devoted to the Hindu god Siva. The temple is no longer intact, but over 300 carvings are still within the city, on display in the collection of the local museum, and rebuilt into the walls of the city’s main Buddhist temple.1 The known carvings are distinguishable by their South Indian style, with its closest parallels in thirteenth century temples constructed in the Kaveri Delta Region in Tamil Nadu, and are dispersed across five primary sites in Quanzhou and its surroundings. Almost all are carved with greenish-gray granite, which was widely available in the nearby hills and used frequently in the region’s contemporaneous architecture.2 The remains attest to the presence of a settled South Indian community in southern China during the late thirteenth century and indicate an even longer history of cross-cultural exchange between China and India. Scholars have charted the movement and motivations of the twelfth to thirteenth century Sino-Indian exchange, analyzing the Indic carvings to show persistent cultural and mercantile relations between the two regions. However, existing scholarship stops short of reading from the carvings a fresh politics of culture and identity, one that challenges today’s regnant theories in philosophy, history, and political theory. For, as I will show, the carvings resist a binary understanding of cultural interaction, where bounded, 240
15 Nagapattinam_Ch 15
240
By: ROS
240
Size: 6" x 9"
J/No: 09-01022
10/23/09, 10:43 AM
Fonts: AGaramond, Optima