The art of sensing moods mattered in precolonial South Asia. The eighteenth-century painters of Udaipur, a city of lakes in northwestern India, suggest that the moods of pleasure and prosperity mattered even more. The moods of grand-scale paintings, larger in size than manuscripts and portraits, which could be held in a single hand, emerged in the enchanting depictions of lime-washed palaces听and听durbars,听abundant valleys and听reservoirs,听and thriving听bazaars听and听temples. The painterly unfolding of stormy monsoons and scented springs, populated by the collectives of urbane men and women, enticed audiences to forge bonds of belonging to real locales in the present and of longing for ideal futures. These pioneering pictures sought to听stir such听emotions as love, awe, abundance, and wonder, emphasizing the senses, spaces, seasons, and sociability essential to the efficacy of objects听and expressions of territoriality. In iterating exuberant and ephemeral atmospheres, painters viewed the moods of places as听artistic, aesthetic, epistemic phenomena听open to adaptation, admiration, and assimilation. Their memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence, shaping how a culture听and time,听architecture and art听are perceived.
Dipti Khera is Associate Professor in 迟丑别听Department of Art History听and鈥疘nstitute of Fine Arts at听New York University.听As a scholar of early modern South Asia, with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology, and architecture, her research and teaching integrate鈥痩ongue dur茅e鈥perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies, and foreground art history鈥檚 (re)making of colonized and racialized pasts.听Khera鈥檚鈥The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur鈥檚 Painted Lands and India鈥檚 Eighteenth Century鈥 (Princeton, 2020, awarded American Institute of Indian Studies鈥 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize) reveals powerfully immersive and politically contingent conceptions of a place鈥檚 moods. It raises broader questions about how ecologies, emotions, aesthetics, and artifacts operate to constitute histories and collectives. Her articles have addressed the crafting of colonial taste and design by Indian silversmiths; material histories of eighteenth-century pleasures; entangled mobilities and conceptual affinities between disparate maps and scrolls that enabled long journeys. Her collaborative work with Rajasthan鈥檚 museums has led to conservation, exhibition, and digital projects, including co-curating with Debra Diamond,鈥疉 Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (opening听in听November 2022听at 迟丑别听Smithsonian鈥檚 National Museum of Asian Art). With Sarah听Betzer, she is co-editing a forthcoming volume for鈥Journal18听(Fall 2022), 鈥淭he 鈥楲ong鈥 Eighteenth-Century?,鈥澨齱hich explores听from which vantage points, whether local, regional, or transregional, and for whom, is the eighteenth century long.
Organised by Professor Sussan Babaie (The 91自拍)听