Dipti Khera Examines the Analytics of Praise and Place-making in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Rajasthan

The South Asian Studies colloquium welcomes Dipti Khera, currently post-doctoral fellow at the South Asian Studies Council, for a talk titled “An Art History of Praise and Place in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Rajasthan”.  In her talk, Khera asks: what kind of work does the analytic of praise and place-making perform in the eighteenth and nineteenth century world of South Asian art and history?

February 27, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

The aesthetic of ruination circulated through the picturesque sketches and watercolors made by British artists has mediated the art of place in eighteenth century South Asia as one deeply inflected by narratives of decline. The art made by Indian artists of this period has been often characterized as a corollary to political decline. The idea of praising places proposed by Udaipur’s artists and poets in eighteenth-and-nineteenth century India is therefore critical for re-conceiving this time and place. Drawing from a wide-ranging corpus of praise pictures, this talk will explore a 72 feet long and 11 inches wide painted invitation letter, a vijñaptipatra, sent by the regional merchants and the ruler of Udaipur in1830 to an eminent pontiff of the Jain religious community. This scroll allows us to think of a paradigm of an art history of praise and place that Udaipur artists are formulating—and continuously reinventing—in the process of circulating across the domains of the court, the bazaar, and the British Company. It suggests that praise may be the counter point to decadence and cannot be overlooked for rethinking the history of this period of transitions.

Dipti Khera has graduate training in Art History, Museum Anthropology, and Architecture which has proved invaluable in expanding her understanding of images, objects, and monuments within their historical and contemporary milieu. Her dissertation, titled, “Picturing India’s “Land of Princes” Between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and its Environs,” has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, American Institute of Indian Studies, Yale Center for British Art, and Columbia University. Dipti served as an assistant curator for the exhibition “Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj,” that showcased for the first time eclectic silverware made by Indian craftsmen for European consumption and addressed changing notions of taste and design in nineteenth century South Asia. In 2011-2012 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, at Yale, she will offer two undergraduate courses on the themes of cross-cultural encounters and the visualization of place and travel in South Asian art and history.