Talks
The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century
Dipti Khera
Book Cover of The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century. Courtesy of Dipti Khera.
As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across India.
In iterating exuberant and ephemeral atmospheres of their city of lakes, painters from Udaipur viewed the moods of places as open to adaptation, admiration, and assimilation. They circulated images and ideas about flourishing places beyond and between objects commissioned by courts, merchants, and colonial officers. Udaipur’s large-scale paintings of pleasure, plentitude, and praise sought to stir such emotions as awe and abundance, and confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence.
Join us at MAP for a talk by art historian, Dipti Khera, as she looks at the methods of sensing and making sense of monsoon moods. Through the talk, she discusses how we define our archives, artworks, and architecture; how claims of territoriality and infrastructure surface in art and history; and how we tell histories of the entanglement of emotions, ecology, and place in South Asia and beyond.
Bookings
Bookings are closed for this event.
Dipti Khera
Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Dipti Khera is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. As a scholar of early modern South Asia with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology, and architecture, her research and teaching integrate longue durée perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies. Khera’s The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020) was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in Indian Humanities by the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her collaborative work with Rajasthan’s museums and libraries has led to conservation, exhibition, and digital projects include co-curating the exhibition, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC and Cleveland Museum of Art, 2022-23) and writing the accompanying catalogue (Hirmer Publications, 2022). Her co-edited volumes include “The ‘Long’ Eighteenth-Century?” Journal18 (December 2021) and Readings on Painting: From 75 Years of Marg. Volume 74 No. 4 and Volume 75 No. 2 (Mumbai: Marg Publications, January 2024). In 2023-24, Khera holds the American Institute of Indian Studies-National Endowment for Humanities Senior Fellowship and is affiliated with the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
