The 1981 publication of the first edition of Diana Eck’s Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India marked an important watershed in the scholarly understanding and interpretation of visual interaction with and experience of three-dimensional temple icons in Hinduism (and by extension, South Asian religions more broadly). While there had been previous publications on ritual visuality in India (most notably Jan Gonda’s Eye and Gaze in the Veda [1969]), and 1981 also saw the publication of Lawrence A. Babb’s article “Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism,”1 Eck’s monograph, especially in its 1998 third edition, has remained definitively central in all subsequent discussions of darśan. In the words of Philip Lutgendorf (2006: 233), Darśan is now the “key text” on the subject. It is usually the first source on ritual visuality to which scholars of South Asia turn, and its prominence is equally evident in comparative discussions of icons and visuality by non-South Asianists.2 Due in significant part to Eck’s thin volume, darśan has become what we can call—to import a term John Carman (1985: 117) used in a different context for the concept of the ‘sacred’ or the ‘holy’—a “super-category” in the study of South Asian religion and visual culture.

In this essay, following a review of the ways in which Eck’s definition has become standard in studies of South Asian religious (and in some cases, secular) visuality, I argue that thirty years after the publication of her slim monograph, it is now time to revisit the broadly phenomenological theory of darśan that she advances. Instead of seeing darśan as functioning in the same way in all situations, regardless of such framing features as sect, region, time, gender and physical setting, this essay calls for a more multivalent understanding of darśan. It is not a single experience in all of South Asia. Rather, people have experienced darśan in many ways. By way of example, this essay presents evidence from eighteenth and nineteenth-century darśan pads (hymns) from the north Indian Digambar Jain tradition.3 A further argument in this essay is that the use of hymns that are sung on a regular basis, and thereby structure the oral experience and muscular memory of the singer, can give us insight into the subjective experience of darśan. The experience of darśan articulated and sung in these Jain hymns is quite different from that presented in darśan. This example, in conclusion, is an invitation to other scholars of South Asian visual culture to revisit this central category and to begin to see it as a highly variable rather than singular super-category.

• 1. Significant parts of this article were reprinted, albeit not all in the same chapter, in Babb (1986).
• 2. Let me cite just four examples. Morgan’s path-breaking The Sacred Gaze devoted three pages to darśan (2005: 48–50), and while he also quoted Huyler 1999, in his endnote he directed the reader solely to Eck’s book as “an excellent discussion of Hindu visual piety” (271n1). Nelson (2000: 13), in the introduction to the volume of excellent essays he edited on visuality in a wide (both historically and geographically) range of cultures, first cited Eck when addressing visuality in South Asia, adding to it only a reference to the 1997 doctoral dissertation of Woodman Taylor. Brown (1989: 206n7) cited only Eck as the source for a reference to “the observation that the central act of much popular Hindu worship is seeing— and being ‘seen’ by—the image of the deity present in the sanctum of the temple” (114). Finally, a passage from the third edition of Darśan is the first of four entries in the section “Darshan: Seeing the Hindu Divine Image in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in a recent cross-cultural anthology of readings on religion, art and visual culture (Plate 2002: 171–75); the other three passages were taken from the writings of Davis (1997), Hawley (1996) and Lutgendorf (1995).
• 3. Implicit in my use of north Indian Digambar materials to problematize the standard ‘view’ of darśan is a premise that underlies most contemporary scholarship on the Jains: to separate ‘Jainism’ from ‘Hinduism’ is a false distinction, one that ignores the complicated ways Jains and Hindus (as well as Buddhists, Muslims and secular materialists) have interacted in South Asia for millennia. Darśan is not a ‘Hindu’ concept and practice; it is a South Asian one. See Cort (1998).