Hawon Ku - Replacing the "Indo-Saracenic": Education and Collegiate Architecture in North India

In this talk, I examine two universities established by Indians during the colonial period. Banaras Hindu University (1915) and Aligarh Muslim University (1920) both claimed religious education as a substantial part of their identity, in addition to the training of a modern Indian citizen. As part of an ongoing project on education in colonial India, I compare the methods in which the two universities struggled to bring together a religious identity and the idea of modern education, and how they aimed to present such ideas through their architecture. Particularly, through comparison with the purposes, educational curricula, and architecture of earlier colleges and universities, I argue how such processes of negotiation, adaptation, acknowledgement and resistance were often unsuccessful yet remained as powerful symbols for the public.

About the Speaker

Dr. Hawon Ku is an art historian with a special interest in the visual cultures of early modern and colonial South Asia. She is Professor of Indian Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Seoul National University, where she has taught courses on Indian modern and contemporary art, South Asian visual culture, and arts of the Islamic World. Hawon’s research interests encompass eighteenth to twentieth-century cultural histories of South Asia. Apart from her current interest in women patrons in India during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her work on Jaina temples and paintings during the nineteenth century has examined the links between Western concepts of religion and law and the shift in patronage and self-identity at Shatrunjaya, a pilgrimage site in western India. Her research on colonial colleges and universities explores how British education was implanted within the colonial state as well as how the colonial state governed and controlled visual representations of such institutions. In addition, her interest in education has led to research in the depiction of UNESCO World Heritages in Indian history textbooks.