Mobile objects, mobile people - South Asia in Indian Ocean world circulation before 1500 CE
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15 Mar
2025
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Indian Aesthetics
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Elizabeth Lambourn
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Image: Cenotaph of 'Umar ibn Ahmad al-Kazaruni (d. 733/1333) Khambhat, Gujarat. White marble. (Photograph by Elizabeth Lambourn)
Craft communities are often assumed to be fundamentally static. Mobility, when documented, is most often that of forced removal at the hands of ruling elites. Yet one of the distinctive aspects of Indian Ocean cultures is the agency and autonomy of non-state actors. Professor Lambourn will examine textual and material evidence for the self-motivated mobility of craftspeople across the Indian Ocean area. Although the millennia-old metals trade between the Mediterranean and South Asia is well known, newly identified material offers a unique view into the workings of one coastal workshop. In her second lecture, the scholar will sketch the trans-oceanic operation of this workshop.
Session I: Neither heroes nor conquerors: craft mobility in the Indian Ocean world before 1500
Session II: Metals and models: the exchange of technologies between Aden and the Malabar coast as recorded in Geniza documents
Online Public Lecture on ZOOM
P.S: The Zoom link to join the lecture will be shared 24 hours prior to the talk.
Duration -
March 15, 2025
Timing: 1:30 - 5:30 PM IST
Fees
Rs. 1,000
Register
Elizabeth Lambourn
Elizabeth Lambourn is a historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean world and. Newly elected Fellow of the British Academy. Originally trained in Art History, she now spends a lot of time reading, and talking to, anthropologists, archaeologists, and textual scholars of all genres. She has published widely on varied aspects of the circulation of artefacts, animals, people, and ideas in the Indian Ocean area. Her monograph Abraham's Luggage was published with CUP in 2018 and since then she has edited the medieval volume of Bloomsbury Academic's A Cultural History of the Sea (2021). Current research interests include the material worlds of the ‘India Book’ and the materiality of writing in the western Indian Ocean area. Photo credit: Mikael Wallerstedt