The present paper aims at offering some preliminary reflections on the question of images in India, in order to start a rethinking of these themes, also in relation to the debated interpretation of the history of Indian art in the light of the notions of aniconism and iconism, which may also be taken as a starting point for the following observations.

The very formulation of such categories results as being theoretically problematic. In its broadest meaning, the use of the term aniconic indicates any non-figurative representation, whose referential level cannot be identified in natural and/or real forms. However, in the scholarly tradition of art history it is common to reduce the category of aniconism to the rejection of anthropomorphic images, often connected to a religious frame. In this perspective, if we go back to the original etymological meaning of ‘aniconic’ as ‘imageless or figureless’, the category of aniconism results as implying an identification of images with what presents a figurative aspect and especially a human one, thus implicitly entailing a quite extreme and binding understanding of images themselves.

In the Indian scholarly context, the use of these categories retains such problematic fluctuation, inasmuch as aniconism is understood both as the absence of figurative representations, especially in relation to the Vedic tradition, and also as the absence of anthropomorphic representations, especially in relation to the iconography of the Buddha and Hindu deities. Conversely, iconism is the category used either for any figurative representation or for any anthropomorphic representation.