Talk:Nataraja/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 21:29, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I'll take this one. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:29, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Comments

Well, to start, it is very welcome to see an article on an ancient and complex art tradition like the Dancing Shiva. Clearly the key to such an article is the disentangling of the threads of shifting tradition, alternate interpretations, and major historical influences, as well as of the uses to which the tradition has been put, both in its Asian contexts and in the West. Unfortunately, at the moment that sort of clarity of encyclopedic analysis is not what comes across from the article.

• The first sign of trouble is the lead, which for some reason contains 17 citations; these all ought to be in the article body and removed from the lead; at the moment 8 of them are in the lead alone, suggesting that the material has been added piecemeal to the lead, rather than that the lead has been constructed as a summary of the article body. For example, "Anshumadbhed agama" is found only in the lead.

• The next thing is that the article's division into Depiction, Symbolism, and Meaning does not currently work: there is symbolism in Depiction (e.g. "symbolic of Shiva as ...", "decorated with symbolic items", "symbolizes spiritual ignorance", "for its symbolic meaning", "well known sculptural symbol"); there is depiction in Symbolism (e.g. "he dances within a circular ... arch of flames", "his legs are bent" , etc). Clearly these things can't be separated: the only way to say what something symbolizes is to say what is depicted and then say what it means (or rather, what alternative meanings have been proposed, and by whom); and I really don't believe that anybody is going to be able to explain the difference between "Symbolism" and "Meaning" in this context - go on, prove me wrong. I'd add that it would help enormously if this was to be integrated with the images rather than having a gallery at the end (more on that question later), i.e. we'd have

Image detail (e.g. bent legs), explanation of age, location, style of sculpture, etc; interpretation A suggested by scholar X, vs interpretation B suggested by scholar Y..., with citations. I'll note that the "Shiva Nataraja Iconography" (Freer Sackler Gallery) in 'External links' does exactly what I suggest; it would be wise to imitate and indeed to cite this well-illustrated and scholarly analysis to get the Depiction/Symbolism into some sort of order. I'd think you'd want to have subsections on each of the major historic traditions and periods.

• The lead helpfully mentions "historic settings" in South East Asia including Ankor Wat, Bali, Cambodia (excluding Ankor Wat, presumably), and "central Asia". This list is repeated without noticeable elaboration in the History section. Again, the history really does need to be integrated with the historic images; and we need to hear a description of the different depictions in each of the countries and periods mentioned. It might be helpful to have a table of styles, each row with a country, period, description, and illustration (and a source or two); even better would be a diagram of influences through time (e.g. showing when Nataraja arrived in Cambodia, and in Bali, and from where: directly from India, or what?). It would help enormously if we had a map labelled with the major schools of sculpture involved, e.g. the Chola, and the locations of the major historic locations mentioned in the text, e.g. the Ellora Caves. One might even use the map to show influences through time, with arrows and dates overlaid on the map.

• The Symbolism section contains many interesting and suggestive elements, but it is unclear which sources most of them come from, as the list is only vaguely introduced with a sentence that says that four 12th century texts interpret the symbolism, without differentiating which of the four texts says what; this is supported by three citations: the textbook by Gopinatha Rao 1997; a poorly-cited chapter by Coomaraswamy on some of the mythology involved, but at least he relates the texts to some usable detail, which needs to be quoted and cited much more specifically; and a flimsy introductory encyclopedia article from the Encyclopedia of Ancient History, not a great deal of help here. Each item in the list needs a specific citation, but as explained above, it really needs to be reorganised to make art-historic sense, i.e. grouped by school and period.

• The CERN section is especially incoherent: the first paragraph and the quotation seem to be relevant, and the last paragraph might be connected to CERN (or might not), while the Chola and Bharatanatyam paragraphs seem entirely lost in the section; the Bharatanatyam paragraph could go down into the 'In dance and yoga' section', while the Chola paragraph, which is on metallurgy, may actually need to go into a new Metallurgy and materials section (or perhaps each part of the History may have a discussion of the materials used, it depends how you choose to organise it).

• The Gallery seems sadly lost without connection to the text. As I indicated above, I think the gallery should be broken up, so that the historic images are discussed and explained in the text, and are positioned close to (beside or immediately below) the text they illustrate, so that they illuminate the discussion. I would expect to see a cited paragraph on each of the images. Three of them actually have citations, so it would make sense to position those images with the paragraphs of text that have matching citations.

• The References list looks reasonable, though one might ask why the six sources in "Further reading" are not used in the article.

• The Notes section is empty.

• The External links section contains a paper, Iyer 2000, that should be integrated with the text on the South and Southeast Asia sections of the History. I've already suggested that the Freer Sackler Gallery article be used for the Depiction/Symbolism analysis above. Steven Pyne's article on JSTOR (I can fetch it for you if you don't have access) should also be used in the text; it too is misplaced down here in Ext links. The Nataraja Image Archive link is linkspam and should be removed. The Chidambareswarar Nataraja Temple link isn't the best; if you want to discuss the Chidambaram temple for some reason then more scholarly sources should be used (in the text).

• There doesn't seem to be any point linking the Wikidata here; the Commons link on the other hand gives access to a wealth of material to illustrate the materials ("bronzes", drawings, paintings, stone relief sculptures), the Badami Cave sculptures, and so on.

I'll put the article on hold to await your responses and the reorganization of the article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 22:29, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Chiswick Chap: Thanks for your points. I think the suggested changes would require more than the standard 7 days of being on-hold, and probably require assistance from other editors. I suggest that we pull it out and renominate once these changes were made. Regards, WikiLinuz🍁(talk) 17:50, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

OK, I'll do that. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:12, 6 January 2022 (UTC)