SASC Colloquium Series: Translating India: Art, Epistemology, and Mughal-French Exchange in the Late Eighteenth Century, Chanchal Dadlani

Focusing on the Gentil Collection, this talk explores the relationship between art, knowledge, and globalization in the late eighteenth century. An officer of the French East India Company, Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-1799) collaborated with a group of Indian artists and scholars to produce a set of manuscripts that were translated from Persian into French and richly illustrated. I interpret the collection in relation to multiple artistic and epistemic systems, from the manuscript workshops of India to the early Orientalist libraries of France, examining the nature of cross-cultural collaboration and the role of images in the translation of texts and production of historical narratives.
Chanchal Dadlani is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wake Forest University. Her first book, From Stone to Paper: Architecture as History in the Late Mughal Empire (Yale University Press, 2018), received the SAH/Mellon Author Award and was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Award and the Kenshur Prize. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, Fulbright-Hays, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has published in Art History, Ars Orientalis, and Artforum on a range of topics, including Mughal visual culture, exchanges between France and India, and the global reception of contemporary South Asian art.