Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760-1910

In this episode of MAP’s Deep Dive series, Professor Holly Shaffer takes us through her book, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760-1910. 

In the eighteenth century, British East India Company officials and Maratha military rulers vied for power in western India. In this talk, Holly Shaffer, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, will discuss the artistic combinations that resulted from this power struggle as ones of “graft”– a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among the artists, administrators, and soldiers who assembled such materials. By tracing grafted arts from multiple perspectives – Maratha and British, artist and patron, soldier and collector – this book charts the methods of empire-building that recast artistic production and collection in western India, and across the rest of India and Britain.