Religious Landscapes

The idea of religious landscape significantly shaped the production and reception of James Tissot’s *The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ* (ca. 1886–1894), a series of 350 biblical scenes that enjoyed significant commercial success at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. Tissot portrayed himself as an artist committed to depicting the biblical landscape as realistically and comprehensively as possible, a modern form of *geographia sacra.* Viewers of the series – both in gallery exhibitions and via subsequent print editions – described experiencing Tissot’s series as if they had stepped into a religious landscape. This paper explores how *The Life of Chris* positioned the landscape as the truest, most faithful form of religious art and how Tissot’s efforts to create a totalizing, authoritative landscape fueled Americans’ particular love of the series.

The Maṇḍalikanṛpacarita, a Sanskrit courtly epic poem (mahākāvya) from Gujarat, details characteristics of ideal kingship in the fifteenth century. Geography and topography are important first-encounters to the king’s capacity: the first chapter of one-hundred verses describes the kingdom with great poetic fancy and florid language. The physical location is an integral part of the history of the king’s life, and chronologically it precedes even the birth of a king, demonstrating that the king has control over the long-standing land that is well-established in its glory. The land that the king of this poem, Mandalika, rules over includes a mountain called Girnar, which is important to various sects in that time period. The poem, though, includes only Puranic stories and figures. Through a literary analysis of this epic poem’s opening chapter, I argue that the poem constructs a forward-looking view of the kingdom’s history as Hindu.  

Gadhada is a small village and pilgrimage site in the Kathiawar region of western India. My paper explores how parts of Gadhada’s sacred landscape were depicted in correspondence between Hindu monks and laity and a religious magazine, the Swaminarayan Prakash, from the 1940s. I show how a piece of land on top of a hill by the banks of the River Ghela, where a new Swaminarayan sect sought to construct a stone temple, becomes contested space. The old Swaminarayan sect aligned with local rulers to prevent the new sect, led by the monk Shastriji Maharaj, from purchasing the hilltop. The letters and articles demonstrate how local political alliances, intra-sectarian conflicts, combined with collective aspirations and a strong memory of revelation shaped the changing nature of and disputes around local religious landscapes.

Takashi Nagai (1908-1951) wrote _The Bells of Nagasaki_ in 1946 (published, 1949) following his experience of the explosion of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, and his work as a medical doctor in the days and weeks that followed. Nagai’s narrative recounts his travels through the “appalling atomic wasteland” that remained after the attack; it is in many respects the story of a pilgrimage through an apocalyptic landscape. Nagasaki has a complex religious history, and a distinctive religious and literary tradition emerged from the bombing of the city – overshadowed, to some extent, by Hiroshima’s better-known bomb literature. Working from William Johnston’s (1984) English translation of _The Bells of Nagasaki_, this paper explores Nagai’s framework of meaning for the city and its surrounding countryside as a result of the bomb, and analyses his description of the shattered landscape he travels through as a literary and religious artefact.