Four Scholars, Four Paintings: Yale-trained Historians Revisit Gems from YUAG’s South Asian Collection

On Thursday, October 9th, a panel titled Four Scholars: Four Paintings brought together four historians of South Asian art and architecture to discuss a selection of Indian paintings from the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) collection.

Organized by YUAG and the South Asian Studies Council (SASC) with support from YUAG’s Alan L. Gans Fund for programming in Asian art, the event highlighted not only the depth of YUAG’s collection, but also the role that Yale has played in supporting early training and scholarship by scholars who are now leaders in their field. Three of the evening’s speakers–Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Dipti Khera, and Emma Natalya Stein–had spent time at Yale as doctoral and postdoctoral scholars.

The four scholars spoke after an introduction from Denise Leidy, the Ruth and Bruce Dayton Curator of Asian Art and a presentation by John Seyller, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Vermont.

“They will delight your eyes, soothe your soul, and today we will tell you some really fascinating stories,” said Leidy as she introduced the speakers.

Mrinalini Rajagopalan - Former Dr. Malathy Singh Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the South Asian Studies Council (2010-2011)

Mrinalini Rajagopalan spoke to the significance of women in the piece she discussed, Palace Scene with Emperor Shah Jahan (1592 - 1666).

The painting depicts the fifth Mughal emperor, who is known for commissioning the creation of the Taj Mahal. In it, Shah Jahan is located at the center of the palace complex. Posed in various windows and jharokas, or balconies, women abound in the palace scene. It total, fifteen women are featured in the piece, some engaged in conversation with each other, others seated in their own windows, and two in the central space featuring the emperor.

“Wives, consorts, and concubines advised the emperor, and sometimes strategized without his knowledge about regnal succession,” said Rajagopalan. “Mothers of potential heirs had much to gain from their sons receiving a sarpech and being recognized by the emperor as a rightful heir to the imperial throne.”

If we know Mughal women had an understated role in succession, then perhaps their inclusion in this portrait is an allusion to that power.

Rajagopalan put forth that interpretation during her presentation, examining the painting as an embodiment of how elite Mughal women exercised their power. Rajagopalan focused on one of the women visible from Shah Jahan’s position in the central jharoka of the painting. From her own jharoka, the woman faces the king, meeting his eyes.

Rajagopalan invited viewers to imagine a deliberation about succession, wherein the emperor wonders whom to bestow his sarpech upon. The woman, perhaps one of his consorts, engages in the dialogue as an equal, her gaze a symbol of their connection and her influence.

Rajagopalan concluded her speech with a proposition: that to better reflect the presence of the many women the piece depicts, the gallery should change its name to Palace Scene with Shah Jahan and Queens.

Rajagopalan currently works as an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. A historian of architectural and urban studies in Modern South Asia, her course offerings include classes about the built environment and architectural preservation.

Reflecting on her time as the Singh Postdoctoral Associate at SASC, Rajagopalan shared, “Yale was my first, and possibly my last, real experience of being within a very tight-knit South Asian community,” said Rajagopal. “All of a sudden, I had this community of interlocutors who were very well-versed in South Asia.”

Having completed her PhD in an interdisciplinary program at the University of California, Berkeley, joining a program focused on South Asia felt “expansive.”

Rajagopalan said Yale’s collections, particularly objects in the Beinecke, found their way into her first book, Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi. In particular, she mentioned a pamphlet documenting the violence following the Indian rebellion of 1857. “It was really wonderful to actually hold the object and really think through it,” Rajagopalan explained.

Rajagopalan is currently preparing for the release of her second book, Marks She Made: The Art and Architecture of Begum Samru.

On Wednesday, before the Four Scholars event, Rajagopalan spoke about the feminist frameworks she used to examine Samru’s life. The famed military commander and the only recorded Catholic ruler of India, Samru presided over the principality of Sardhana during the 18th and 19th centuries.According to Rajagopalan, the book has been nine years in the making.

As a fellow at Yale, Rajagopalan envisioned the project on Begum Samru as a series of articles.

“But Begum had different designs for me,” Rajagopalan joked, “and now [the project] has turned into a book.”

In the book, Rajagopalan explores Samru’s military power and quieter expressions of her agency, like her commissions of portraits and architecture.“I think that our language is so limited when it comes to thinking about South Asian women in history, but then also South Asian women and art,” said Rajagopalan. “They’re seen as part of the decor.”

Dipti Khera, Former Postdoctoral Associate at the South Asian Studies Council (2011-2012)

In her talk at the Four Scholars lecture, Dhipti Khera challenged that same notion of women as passive actors present in artistic representations only as embellishment.

Khera spoke about Maharana Ari Singh in the Chinese Picture Hall, which shows a palace scene from Udaipur, then the capital of the Mewaric court. The painting was made in 1764 by Shiva, a prominent artist of the period. Khera situated the work within the context of political representation and rhetoric, interpreted through the lens of bhav, “the mood, feel and motion of a place and time.”

In her description of the work, she highlighted the singular candlebearer, a characteristic figure who appears across paintings of the period. “He is witness to the mood that is set up for pleasure, piety, politicking, and connoisseurship," said Khera, explaining that “Painters across works insert him to hold up light to the mood-makers.” These “mood-makers” refer to the musicians and dancers that made royal courts come to life and whose expressive presence gave them the ability to sway the bhav of a gathering.

Khera added that paintings like this one would have been held up at an angle by attendants or placed on low-lying tables. They were not, as we might assume, vertically hung on walls. 

Khera joined the Council in 2012 for a one year fellowship before joining NYU as an Associate Professor of Art History in the Institute of Fine Arts.

Calling Yale “rich in archival sources,” Khera said her experience at the council was a formative one. Khera taught two courses during her fellowship, Cross-Cultural Encounters in South Asian Art and History and Place, Landscape, and Travel in South Asian Art. That experience helped her learn how to teach with collections, engaging primary and secondary sources.

Today, Khera said she still teaches revised versions of these two classes at NYU.

Meeting scholars hosted by the Council from a diverse range of fields also broadened Khera’s intellectual pursuits and aided the interdisciplinary nature of her work. Beyond academic growth, Khera was struck by the lasting connections she made.

“I cultivated some friendships which have become lifelong,” said Khera as she reflected on her time at Yale. In particular, she mentioned scholars like Timothy Barringer, Kishwar Rizvi, and Tamara Sears.

Khera characterized her professional journey as “interdisciplinary,” with a focus on reading against the grain while placing sources in dialogue. That sense of boundless investigation imbued her talk.

Throughout it, Khera cross-compared the Maharana Ari Singh in the Chinese Picture Hall with contemporaneous sources and questioned the form, function and—like Rajagopalan—even the name of the piece she discussed.

“What does ‘Chinese picture hall’ mean,” she asked, suggesting that the title is confusing and perhaps even misleading.

Instead, she proposed çini as a more appropriate, though still not entirely satisfactory title. Çini refers to a characteristic style of art inspired by Chinese styles and significant in Islamic architecture across cultures. Although not characterized as such in the source itself, Khera said the term describes a much more “established,” and thus clear, category.

Ultimately, Khera said she hoped to explore “the histories that visual materials can show that the text can’t always.”

Emma Natalya Stein - PhD in History of Art from Yale University (2017)

Like Khera, Emma Natalya Stein synthesized visual and textual sources in her presentation. The Associate Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the National Museum of Asian Art of Smithsonian Institution discussed The Hindu God Krishna Lifts Mount Govardhan, from a History of the Lord (Bhagavata Purana) manuscript, a 1760s imaging of the famous narrative.

In the story, a young Krishna suggests to his fellow villagers that they should cancel an annual festival for the god Indra and instead honor the nearby Govardhan mountain where they fed their cattle, foraged for food, and obtained clean water. Krishna names himself the god of the mountain and eats Indra’s offerings.

After an enraged Indra unleashes a torrential storm to flood the village, Krishna lifts up the mountain and balances it on his pinky finger. Lifting it with ease, like a child might hold a mushroom, Krishna protects his people from Indra’s wrath.

Examining how the story informed the creation of the painting, and how the painting reifies the message of the story, Stein spoke to the significance of both.“Besides getting away with having eaten loads of sweets, something else happens to Krishna during the course of this story,” said Stein. “He grows up. He becomes a fully actualized deity with the strength to defeat Indra and protect his community.”

Stein chose the painting, in part, because it reminded her of another representation of the famous tale from the Bhagavata Purana. In 2022, she curated an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Asian Art focused on depictions of Krishna in the story. One display included fragments from a statue in a Cambodian cave, which had originally depicted the monumental Krishna pressing his hand against the cave’s ceiling as though he was indeed lifting the mountain.

Stein received her PhD in History of Art from  Yale in 2017. While at Yale, she received a grant from the South Asian Studies Council for eight weeks of fieldwork in southern India and Sri Lanka. “It’s one of the great advantages of being at Yale—there is a lot of support for pre-dissertation exploratory travels,” said Stein.

Through her fieldwork, Stein decided to write her dissertation about Kanchipuram. In the city of a thousand temples, she studied multireligious religious architecture across time.

She traced the origin of her interest in sacred architecture to a family trip in Europe as a teenager. Visiting museums and cathedrals in Italy and France, Stein found herself drawn to the integration of divine scenes, like those found on stained glass, into religious architecture.

Beyond her fieldwork, Stein conducted research here on campus. Working with Ruth Barnes at the Yale University Art Gallery, she broadened her scope from South to Southeast Asia and incorporated textile histories into her study of the regions’ connections. That work informed her dissertation on Kanchipuram, and later her book, Constructing Kanchi: City of Infinite Temples.

“I think that’s a great asset of Yale—the ability to work between the art history department and the gallery,” said Stein.

Reminiscing on her time as a PhD student, Stein spoke to the value she placed in the Council.

“My continuing relationship with the South Asian Studies Council was really meaningful because it was another venue for learning about South Asia from disciplines beyond art history,” she added.

She said that attending SASC lectures and engaging with her peers helped her gain insights about her own work.

“It was another audience to test my ideas on and see if my interpretation from an art historical perspective matched with or complemented other disciplines.”

A Milestone for YUAG and SASC

According to Denise Leidy, the Four Scholars event was the first formal talk on Indian painting organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. The Asian Art Department includes material from West Asia, East Asia, and South Asia,“three of the world’s great geo-cultural regions,” Leidy explained.

She noted that the department has a “small but very nice” collection of Indian paintings, some which are permanently on view and others that are displayed in rotations. In hosting the Four Scholars event, Leidy said she thought it would be interesting to hear the varied perspectives of the scholars, using the Indian paintings as starting point for discussions about “a fascinating range of historical and cultural issues.”

Kasturi Gupta, the Program Director for the South Asian Studies Council, expressed her joy about hosting Rajagopalan, Khera, and Stein, all of whom had passed through Yale under her tenure. For her, gathering the scholars together offered an opportunity to reflect on how the Council had nurtured their research, careers, and friendships.

“It just goes to show the impact of the support that Yale, the MacMillan Center, and the Council provide to emerging scholars,” Gupta said, emphasizing how all three women have built successful careers in the study of South Asian art since their time at Yale. “It was just so amazing to have these women back on campus.”