Ecologies of Emotion and Politics of Pleasure from Mughal to Colonial India
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07 Aug
08 Aug
2024
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Indian Aesthetics
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Dipti Khera
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Image: Maharana Ari Singh II enjoying Jagmandir. Attributed to Jiva and others, ca. 1767, Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 66.9 × 122.5 cm. The City Palace Museum, Udaipur, 2011.18.0037. Image Courtesy: The City Palace Museum, Udaipur ©MMCF
How do emotions and artifacts (re)constitute places, ecologies, politics, and human experiences? Iterating the exuberant and ephemeral atmospheres in paintings that celebrated a city of lakes, artists from Udaipur visualized the bhava—feel, emotion, and mood—of particular places in scores of artworks commissioned by courtly connoisseurs, mercantile collectives, and colonial officers. Offering a critique of past narratives of Oriental decadence and artistic inadequacy circulated in colonial accounts and beyond, this series of lectures expands the archives, methods, and limits for sensing and making sense of the ordinary, exceptional, and idealized moods of historical times from Mughal to colonial India.
Session I: Ecologies of Emotion: To Sense Udaipur’s Monumental Monsoon Moods
Session II: Politics of Pleasure: To Make Sense Between Place, Painting, Poetry, and Performance
Session III: From Mughal to Colonial India: To Paint and Play with Moods of Political Diplomacy
Session IV: Unfurling: A History of Painted Moods Circulated from Bazaars to Monks
Duration -
August 7, 8, 2024
Timing: 6:00 - 8:30 pm IST
Fees
Rs. 2,000 (For student discounts registrations kindly email info@jp-india.org)
Registrations Closed
Dipti Khera
Dipti Khera is associate professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. As a scholar of early modern South Asia, with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology, and architecture, her research and teaching integrate longue durée perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies. Along with specializing in paintings, books, letters, and maps made in northern and western India, she has published on the crafting of colonial taste and foregrounded vernacular objects that reveal global art history's blind spots in narrating stories of mobility, power, and emotional entanglements. A co-edited volume for Journal18 (December 2021), "The 'Long' Eighteenth-Century?” considers from which vantage points, whether local, regional, or transregional, is the eighteenth century long, and to what ends we deploy such visual and material microhistories. Her book The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020) received the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in Indian Humanities (American Institute of Indian Studies), and was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award (College Art Association), BASAS Book Prize (British Association for South Asian Studies), and Kenshur Prize (Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies). A recent co-edited catalogue, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (Hirmer Publications, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2022) accompanies the co-curated exhibition currently on view at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC.