Introduction theorists and historiographers to be dismantled by experts and specialists. The art-historical discipline in India, we find, has remained largely unconcerned about the ways in which it has constituted its objects of knowledge. Over the years, the intricacies of its claims and conclusions have kept invisible the sites and modes of its ^ productions. What we have been faced with is an awesome framework of historical periods, stylistic sequences, dynastic and regional schools, and interrelated genres: a framework that is being continuously elaborated and refined from within. Here, the orthodoxies of the discipline have stemmed not only from the strictures of methods and canons, but also from the implicit assumptions of a national history. Perhaps no other subject has borne as forcefully the imaginings and assertions of the nation as the history of Indian art. My essay, here, touches on this process of nationalization: the ongoing quest for ancient, autonomous origins, for a unique 'Indian7 aesthetic, and for a pan-Indian frame in which each period, school or regional genre could find a slot. All along, the 'nation' had offered itself as the most naturalized component of an art history whose chronological, territorial and stylistic ramifications could be seen as mirroring the history, geography and culture of the Indian people. We are intent in this volume on dissolving some of these overarching unities and opacities in our art-historical scholarship. The essays here each take up their own contestatory position within this construed field of a national art history. The first three pursue very different methods and themes. But from their dispersed locations, we can see each of them resisting the authority of received concepts, questioning the purity of categories or the fixity of labels, and remapping the contours of the chosen areas of study. The fourth and fifth essays take us away from individualized genres like Mughal painting, south Indian temple architecture, or calendar art into the composite, agglomerated spaces of display, where we are treated to spectacles of the entire gamut of India's art, architectural and craft heritage. We are invited to read each of these spaces and spectacles as ideological and aesthetic constructs. From scrutinizing the objects of Indian art history in relation to its canons, we turn our attention to the very sites of exposition where they were brought into being. We begin with two pointed instances of the reformulation of artistic canons. In Gulammohammed Sheikh's article, the entity of 'Mughal' painting undergoes a detailed dissection that lays bare the rich range and diversity of visual codes that were available to the practising artist. One of his main points concerns the absence of any homogenized or centralized visual canon for Mughal painting. The focus is on the variety of regional paramparasand the multiplicity of aesthetic ideals that coexisted within the canon; it is also on the collective endeavours, the shared experiences and the local visual cultures that shaped the details of motifs and metaphors within the genre. At the core of the author's analysis is a powerful argument about 'the gestalt of an "incomplete" work of art', whereby each painting can be presented as an open-ended, partially unfinished object, inviting the cognizant viewer to enter, fill in and expand the image. What Gulam Sheikh undertakes with Mughal painting, Ajay Sinha achieves with f ownal of Arts & Ideas