Amitav Ghosh Visit Signals Momentum for India and the Arts at Yale

The acclaimed novelist and essayist, Amitav Ghosh, will visit Yale University in April 2012 as part of a year-long focus on India at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art. 

On April 19, Ghosh will present the Spring 2012 Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture, “Emporium of Images: ‘Canton’ as Seen by its Artists and Craftsmen”. The lecture will take place on Thursday April 19, at 5:30 pm in the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Lecture Hall at the Yale University Art Gallery (1111 Chapel Street). A reception will follow at the Yae Center for British Art (1080 Chapel Street). Admission is free and open to the public.  The Ritchie Lectures are jointly sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery and were established to honor the memory of Andrew Cardnuff Ritchie, director of the Yale University Art Gallery from 1957 to 1971. The Ritchie Lectures are offered annually and bring to the University distinguished members of the international visual arts community. These lectures are free and open to the public, honoring Ritchie’s belief that the art museum serves as a gathering place for all members of the community.

In his critically acclaimed novel, River of Smoke (2011) Ghosh explores the eighteenth and nineteenth century trade in opium from India to China. For his illustrated Ritchie Lecture, he will examine a wide selection of images from that time period depicting the locales described in the novel, some of them by British and Chinese artists who appear as characters in the book. Ghosh will also discuss how these art works influenced his thinking and writing.  In the lead up to the Ritchie lecture, Ghosh will offer a reading from his work on April 17 through the Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series and the Department of English.  On April 18 he will take part in a moderated discussion of his work and writing with faculty, staff and students, sponsored by Yale’s South Asian Studies Council.  In addition to River of Smoke, Ghosh has written several works of fiction that have earned him prestigious international awards over the last twenty years, including Sea of Poppies, The Hungry Tide, the Glass Palace, Shadow Lines, and The Calcutta Chromosome. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and his essays have been published in major periodicals in the United States. He has taught at many universities in India and the United States, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College, and Harvard. In January 2007 he received the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, from the president of India, and in 2010, honorary doctorates from Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris.

Amitav Ghosh’s visit contributes to the momentum for India and the Arts at Yale, generated through a series of exhibitions and events focused on India and organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art.  The Fall 2011 Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture at the Yale Center for British Art was given by Professor Tapati Guha Thakurta from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) on the “The Production and Reproduction of a Monument: The Many Lives of the Sanchi Stupa”.  This event coincided with the Center’s exhibition, Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770–1830, which ran from October 11 - December 31, 2011.  Curated by Yale graduate student, Holly Shaffer, under the supervision of Gillian Forrester, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Center, the exhibition explored the complex and multifaceted networks of British and Indian professional and amateur artists, patrons, and scholars in British India in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their drive to create and organize knowledge for both aesthetic and political purposes.  This exhibition was mounted to accompany a major, international loan exhibition, also at the Center, entitled Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, which now can be seen at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (closing June 10, 2012). This exhibition explores the work of the German-born artist, who developed his mature career in Britain, and resided in India, from 1783 through 1789. His depictions of the court at Awadh and of emerging colonial society offer a penetrating account of public and domestic life in northern India at a critical transnational moment in the region’s complex history. To augment both Adapting the Eye and Johan Zoffany the Center hosted a series of talks examining the works on display, a film series considering Indian court culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, workshops, and Indian classical music performances.  In February 2011, the Yale Center for British Art also organized a graduate student symposium on “Art, Agency, Empire: India in Global Contexts” drawing together presentations from graduate students, gallery curators, and academic faculty based both in the US and in India.  To enhance both exhibitions, the Yale University Art Gallery mounted a display of works by Indian artists from the institution’s permanent collection.

As Amy Meyers, Director of the Yale Center for British Art, notes, “Yale offers a particularly exciting intellectual environment in which to explore the dynamic cross-cultural currents that have shaped and enriched India’s spectacular history, given the extraordinary depth of the university’s collections, and the broad interdisciplinary community of scholars whose work converges on this important topic.”

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Amitav Ghosh at Yale, April 2012: Events and Activities

Amitav Ghosh: Reading from his Work
The Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series and the Department of English
6:00 pm, Tuesday April 17, 2012
Room 211, Linsly-Chittendon Hall, 63 High Street

A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh and South Asian Studies
4 - 5pm, Wednesday April 18, 2012
Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave.

The Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture: Amitav Ghosh, Novelist and Essayist
EMPORIUM OF IMAGES
“Canton” as Seen by its Artists and Craftsmen
Thursday, April 19, 2012 5:30 pm
Robert L. McNeil Jr. Lecture Hall Yale University Art Gallery 1111 Chapel Street