Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia ingeniously reinvigorates the study of South Asia’s lesser-known book arts, transforming the reader’s experience into the rise and swell of artistic performance. With a unique editorial approach, the volume does much more than update Jeremiah Losty’s The Art of the Book in India (1982); it calls for active, reflexive engagement that unfolds like an event. This book is depicted in the volume through film, found object installation, and a variety of illustrated examples—book types crafted from palm leaf, paper, ink, paint, photo, and lithographic print—raising awareness of the vast record of an estimated seven to thirty million manuscripts (25). South Asian manuscripts may outnumber those of any other culture, leaving the reader to wonder how many more understudied works might be considered art books.

Old Stacks, New Leaves works through juxtaposition, extending to its unique and delightful design by Derek George. This calls for a word about the format. Insightful, sometimes poetic essays, often in pairs, are interspersed between red and black pages. The red pages serve as section headings, a rosary of theoretical approaches: “Holding and Carrying,” “Covering and Captioning,” “Cutting and Pasting,” “Reading and Recycling,” and “Crafting and Collecting.” The black pages feature artists’ projects as nonillustrative ruminations on themes. As an afterword, two short personal essays by a poet and a historian offer memories of their youthful engagements with books. This erudite volume, strung together like a pothi manuscript, an ancient, horizontal book format albeit oriented vertically like a kitab—the traditional Islamic book form—invites the reader to experience South Asian art books as familiar things. Its stacked internal structure becomes visible from its fore edge, and the jacket’s red spine envelopes contents like a pious donor’s gifted silk wrap. Jinah Kim claims that the primary purpose of paintings in manuscripts was to make the sacred present rather than illustrate the text. Painted goddesses predominated in early pothi-format manuscripts for Buddhist, Jain, and Brahmanic communities (33). Similarly, art projects frame essays like deities or flowers, amplifying their themes. Together, the red and black pages conspire to raise the status of South Asian art. By countering dichotomies between South Asian and Western attitudes towards art, this book writes a nonlinear teleology aligned with its lofty goals—among them, a postcolonial recuperation of traditional practice within modern modes of production (11).

Themes of reception repeat across the volume as the art historian’s response to logocentric interpretations. Kim’s discussion of Devimahatmya manuscripts from the Punjab Hills connects their painted iconographies to user engagement with the materiality of 12th-century Buddhist manuscripts and conceptual play by 16th- and 17th-century makers. Similarly, Laura Weinstein examines marginalia in the British Museum’s The Book of Sindbad, where 18th-century Kannada inscriptions accompany Persian text in nastaliq script. Weinstein argues the later writing reflects a reader’s efforts to recount an Arabic tale for an elite Kannada-speaking, likely Hindu, audience within Mysore courts. The current scholarly emphasis on monumental literary cultures, textuality, and the loss of archives has marginalized South Asian art books and such layered analysis. Through their intersections with users over time, manuscripts reveal their multilayered histories, breathing new life into South Asian art books and restoring them to collective artistic heritage. 

Sylvia Houghteling’s essay emphasizes the materiality of giving and receiving through delicate silk book wrappers. Such fabric covers, where red dyes, initially used for insect protection, later became symbols of prestige, express how designing for care can convert function into form, and embed meanings that can get lost. Many important South Asian art books entered European collections stripped of their silk wrappers, which were often smoky, frayed, and seen as less valuable than the books they once held. Meanwhile in South Asia, new textile covers continued to be made. They responded in color and form to a book’s pages, even centuries later. Similarly, manuscript paintings, like a 15th-century Kalpasutra from Gujarat, preserve lost textile-making practices, including the unruly seepage of blue dye across outlined patterns directing attention to the “sensory presence of the book” for its readers (68). By linking books to the social contexts in which they were viewed and exchanged, Yael Rice grounds muraqqa—artist scrapbooks recontextualizing earlier paintings, drawings, calligraphy, and prints—in environments, like the Mughal Garden. Apart from the plant and animal imagery painted onto framing margins, the graphic prologue and epilogue of an album compiled for Shah Shuja repeat plant imagery and parterres across many pages (143–44). These studies align with a growing scholarly interest in materiality and environments, proposing new insights about design through reception and use.

If marginalia and covers trace response, possession, and care, albums can also work as sites of creative agency and innovation. Iftikhar Dadi reinterprets the scrapbook tradition that once linked Mughal painting to Urdu poetry by coining “lithographic assemblage” and emphasizing their resistance to the hegemony of print. In early 20th-century Lahore, encouraged by his friends and family, Muhammad Abdur Rahman Chughtai developed associations between his paintings and the 19th-century poet Ghalib’s verses to produce a print muraqqa, illustrating the collaborative nature of his creative process. Reuse offers insight into the minds of makers, exploring how they, as bibliophiles, took ownership of a former book’s materiality.

Circulation also affected the overall meaning of a collection of images through variations in emphasis for different audiences. For example, Holly Shaffer discusses how the Poona Photographic Company transformed colonial album formats into expressive nationalist forms, sometimes in new media, like the album walls of the Gwalior Maharajas, where portraits of Queen Victoria appear subordinated to those of local kings. Khullar extends this framework through contemporary artists’ projects by T. Shanaathanan, Naila Mahmood, and Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi, which attend to how books gain value through use, shifting their meanings over time. By putting theories of reception in artists’ hands, Khullar attempts to close a gaping divide between text-based and visual analyses of books in South Asia.

Considerations of use lead essays to raise questions about mobility and knowledge systems. Kim examines Nepali paper manuscripts shaped by palm-leaf traditions, questioning whether paper was indeed introduced into South Asia by Muslim communities. With an image of Ram Kabaari, a junk recycler, Khullar links acts of reading to recycling. He sits on burlap-wrapped piles of books waiting to be trashed while reading a newspaper (243). Books are remade through reading, traveling vast distances, acquiring and shedding relationships and meanings, and leaving us to marvel at their endurance. In fact, several essays draw attention to the colonial collection histories that separated South Asian art books from their readers and users. Many pages from once-bound palm-leaf and paper manuscripts and albums have been dispersed in collections worldwide, pieced together only through the careful work of art historians. Contemporary projects by Shanaathanan, Huma Mulji, and Bani Abidi index the mortality of the library itself through acts of war, development, and censorship. Textile coverings complicate any conservation stability attributed to the built environments that hold our books. Khullar quips that libraries endure as places where scholars find love in the stacks.

Hybridity and intersectionality rise through the layers of this intricately crafted blend of ideas, countering parochial interpretations of South Asian art books. While I would have liked more discussion of the role of East Asia in South Asian book-making practice, the path forward has been lit. Khullar’s invitation to supersede approaches that have hampered the study of text and image in South Asia has been met with creativity and rigor. The essays in this volume also engage with contemporary theories of agency, care, materiality, and ecocriticism, stimulating our intellect and broadening our understanding of the studied object itself. Strung together like a South Asian manuscript book, the contributions in this volume work independently and together.

Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia achieves a rare balance between historical analysis, contemporary theory, and material engagement, opening myriad pathways to the art book. Like a classical Indian music concert, the essays rise to moments of scholarly virtuosity, relax with lilting refrains of insight, and resolve into profound discoveries. Sonal Khullar delivers on her opening promise: “we engage the visuality, materiality, aurality, and sociality of books and the porous boundary between book, painting, calligraphy, and song” (9). By turning a new leaf, this volume invites us through interconnected pathways for a deep exploration of South Asia’s book arts.