MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
South Asian Studies Council

Rediscovering Unakoti

Chatterjee

Indrani Chatterjee is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and has been teaching there since 2001. She completed her PhD. from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, and is primarily interested in the fields of slavery, law and gender in South Asia, as well as in the intersection between the three. Recently, she has also worked on the intellectual and cultural histories of the notion of a ‘family’ in the region. One of her most noteworthy publications has been Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (OUP, Delhi, 1999) and she has also edited Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (Permanent Black, 2004) as well as Slavery and South Asian History (Indiana University, Bloomington, 2006) . She has also published articles in The Indian Economic and Social History Review and in the tenth volume of Subaltern Studies.

Chatterjee will be delivering a lecture entitled A Small History of Forgetting: Erasing Unakoti from South Asian Art History. In it, she intends to explore the manner in which Unakoti, a popular pilgrimage site in the Indian state of Tripura, has been ignored in academic and scholarly research. Unakoti houses hundreds of rock carvings and murals, dating back to the 7th-9th centuries CE. The site is dominated by two massive rock cut carvings of the Hindu deities Ganesha and Shiva. The Shiva bust is almost 30 feet high, including an embroidered head dress which in itself is 10 feet high.

Although Unakoti has largely been ignored in academic circles, it remains sacred to Hindu’s across north-eastern India, and thousands flock to it during the ‘Ashokastami Mela’ held in April every year. Chatterjee seeks to explore reasons behind the disconnect between popular practice, artistic value and academic discourse, and points to discrepancies in the linear narratives of dominant discourses in art history in the Indian subcontinent. The talk will be held in Room 203 on October 20th, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue. The room is wheelchair accessible.