Visuality, Spatiality, and Society in Indian Art and Architecture examines how the writing of Indian art history has evolved in dialogue with broader historical scholarship and its shifting ideological frameworks. Bringing together papers presented at the Indian History Congress between 1986 and 2013, the volume places these essays within the intellectual and historiographical contexts in which they were produced, tracing how art and its study have been shaped by changing understandings of history itself.

The volume reveals the diverse ways in which visual and spatial forms express social meanings. From the 1990s, what has often been described as the ‘visual turn’ in history encouraged greater attention to art historical materials as sources that illuminate emotion, memory, and experience. These materials require a kind of visual literacy: the capacity to interpret and situate images within the cultural and historical conditions that give them significance. Organized thematically, the volume’s six sections may be read independently, though they continually intersect—iconography merges with gender and region, regional traditions with patronage and ideology. Through these overlapping concerns, the essays demonstrate that visuality and spatiality are not peripheral to history but central to how societies imagine themselves and inscribe meaning in the material world.