Welcome everybody to the latest instalment of the Art Radio Hour.
My name is Geoff Batchen,
and every week at this hour I have the pleasure and honour of being in conversation with a guest where we talk about art history and its vicissitudes.
And I've done my best this term to arrange a relatively diverse range of scholars looking at
a whole range of different types of types of art history and different types of material.
And this week, I'm very lucky to have Professor Dipti Khera with us today.
Dipti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University and also an associate at the IFA,
which is where a graduate studies is done at NYU and she specialises in.
Well, she's going to tell us which specialise and let's call it the art of India to begin with,
and then we're going to whittle down to a more and more specific locale.
But thank you Dipti for joining us. When I was looking at your CV,
something struck me because I have a similar pattern in my own background that you actually
began with degrees in architecture and design and then subsequently shifted to art history.
What? What made you want to shift from designing and building to studying, you know, at an academic level?
DK: That's a great question to start. Firstly, let me thank you and the History of Art department at Oxford for this invitation.
As I was saying earlier, I've really enjoyed some of the conversations for the way in which you've been able to draw
out some of these smaller and bigger questions for Art History from people having very,
you know, different journeys, perhaps. And so my journey, as you noted, started in the architecture school and I.
I actually was working as an architect in the best place possible, according to me.
I was working as an architect after I finished my degree in Goa and I was having a time of my life because of what that city is and what it offers,
like what its history has been, which has been extremely intercultural, very localised,
excellent food, excellent architecture and the firm that I was working with.
A group of architects really focussed on thinking about this particular history and the history of the built environment,
both in terms of thinking of preservation projects of Re-adapting some of the older houses, which are very,
you know, very one could call them eclectic, but also like very precisely mixed houses for various kinds of patrons from the Portuguese who settled
there to the local Goans who were kind of travelling across different worlds in the Indian Ocean.
So one, thinking about the question of adaptation of historical architecture and open
places and two, thinking about construction technologies and local building material,
especially the red laterite stone from which much of the building happens there and thinking in terms of like local low cost building modes,
if you will, for various kind of scales of architecture.
In that sense, dive also into this entire kind of 1960/70s post-independence, thinking on the question of low cost housing.
And Laurie Baker was an architect who really was a steward of that. And so these were students of Baker.
This was an office where there were architects and draughtsmen on the payroll and you had carpenters on the payroll and,
you know, masons on the payroll. And every project was a project was a key project.
We were working with the in-house staff, so one would spend two or three days a week on the draughting board.
I learnt architecture that gives you a sense of how ancient I am.
Like, we had one computer station, but you just embarked onto digital in terms of thinking about architecture, drawings of the computers and,
you know, spending two or three days on site, sometimes laying out arches like, you know, really getting to know the material.
So this question of how you adapt historical architecture for contemporary design was like really
at the core of what this practise was and how do you think about it for a variety of publics?
So in that process,
I found myself really drawn to research and I found that the architectural practise at any given point fairly soon one had to stop and say,
OK, what is the design solution for it? Where are we going? So that's when I kind of realised that my kind of draw was and research.
And it's not that I had a direct route into art history from there because honestly,
like I did not have any exposure to art history given that I was, you know,
what my schooling was and the space that I came from and the space for the humanities in
some ways not something that I knew in a way that I know now as a curricular,
as a discipline, right?
And so from there, I kind of followed and went to this programme, which kind of looked at South Asian design and architecture, you know,
history from people who were practitioners, architects, sculptors, painters who were interested in the question of history as a practitioner.
So that kind of like got me into that world and got me actually then thinking more in terms of historic preservation,
museums, history museums, old buildings of museums.
Yeah, that led me then later to museum anthropology.
Again, not art history, because I was coming from that space of the built environment in some ways right to do it.
GB: But you ended up in Columbia, at Columbia, in New York. Why there?
DK: So I came for my museum anthropology degree to Columbia, and I was in anthropology and museum anthropology.
You know thinking about questions of heritage,
thinking about how anthropology defines anthropology and archaeological anthropology in that sense defines museums and stakes of museums,
as I was embarking on those projects and thinking about contemporary heritage landscapes.
In some ways, reflecting on the work that I had been doing.
With some of these museums, post my first kind of masters and inroads into historical studies.
My interest became even more historical because I was questioning some 20th century narratives that took me into 19th
century colonial narratives and the continuities and those as twentieth century heritage
landscapes are shaped, and that led me to the question then, OK, what were the other competing narratives?
How is it possible to be center what was going on? What are the sources that we go to?
So that kind of took me more into art history, and I did my Ph.D. in art history at Columbia, but
As you can see, it wasn't circuitous journey. And even at that stage, I was.
This question of disciplines was very much perhaps like I can now, I can now verbalise it,
think through it, but I had like this very interesting scenario when I was to start my PhD in art history.
I was actually considering a Ph.D. I had three choices I had.
I could go for a Ph.D. in anthropology and material archaeological anthropology at Chicago.
I could go to Berkeley for architecture and I could go to Columbia, offered a Ph.D. in art history.
So I kind of was like stuck between three great institutions, three great cities and three different disciplines.
So. So that kind of reflection in some ways has been part of my journey and I think
has been part of how my projects have been shaped henceforth as well.
GB: And I guess by the time you finished your Ph.D., you've become a specialist in painting rather than architecture.
So particularly struck by things written about, I guess, I'd call them invitation scrolls.
I know there's a specific Hindi word for it, but yeah, Invitation Scrolls,
which I think from your writing you suggest have previously been somewhat
marginalised in the like in the way that Indian painting has been written about.
Could you perhaps describe one of these scrolls for us? And then I'll ask you why they are significant, do you think?
DK: Sure, sure. So and I'm also happy to dwell upon that painting vs. architecture question.
For me, kind of. It was a little bit about like getting into the questions of historical experiences of spaces.
One of them being this kind of invitation letters which enable you to then think
through these sources for histories and experiences of the built environment.
So in that sense, like, yeah, by many, I'm now perceived or categorised as a,
you know, we all inhabit multiple categories, but as a scholar of Indian painting.
But for me, it's interesting in some ways like I started and even at times now,
like I find like I'm an interloper in those boundaries because my questions didn't start with questions of painting per se.
But that's a different quest track because I feel in some ways.
It's it's always the in-between space of them, the interloping that has attracted me the most.
And in that sense, these invitation objects are also those kind of boundary objects that do not fall into any category.
So these letters, they're called [INAUDIBLE], but those which quite literally translates as meaning invitation.
But your meaning letter, sometimes they're called [INAUDIBLE].
So that's a painted letter.
And these are letters that were sent by mercantile collectors, by merchants in the space of a bazaar in cities all over the subcontinent,
West, north east haven't been able to track as many in the south,
but it's just a question of more research and from small towns like from port towns like you saw on the Western Indian Ocean to desert towns,
towns within northwestern India, to the east.
In very much and the at the heart of high colonialism in the 19th century from Bombay, from 19th century Bombay.
And these were invitations that were sent by merchants who belonged to the Jain community.
jainism, as there is, is a religion that has a very long history.
As long as Buddhism in the subcontinent and most of the people who belong to the jains are in professions
that are related either to them being bureaucrats or being artists or being merchants, of being,
you know, scribes, historians, monks, so on.
And so they played a very key role in the mercantile and wealth that was generated in the
bazaars of India with their trained trade that was there across the Indian Ocean.
So they sent these letters to important monks of the Jain community,
asking them to come to their city during the next monsoon season and settle in their city for three or four months.
So visually, these are like long scroll objects GB: I should mention that some of them can be as long as 70 feet in length.
- a very big letter. DK: Yeah, very big letters, which usually have the textual letter on one end.
And the visual letter is a praise, but the textual and the visual is a praise for the city and the visual letter,
you know, different artistic, different approaches from different cities.
They make connexions to painting practises. They map out the cities.
There are certain genre, you know, certain vignettes that are expanded upon based on what they decide to do.
But it's the space of the bazaar that certainly celebrated.
And so in some ways, it's like this very interesting object, which I think really strikes home for us now.
At least for me, the project has been changing and expanding as we've gone through this pandemic because
these are letters which are trying to tell these monks that you have to undertake this travel.
We know that this travel is very arduous because these are monks who only walk.
So they are going to walk for months to arrive at this place.
So you have to convince them that this is a place worth coming.
GB: And what's the advantage of having the monk come? I mean, what? Why merchants are concerned to have the monk there?
DK: That's a great question. And that's one that has been at the heart of these multiple letters.
I call them letters from the local bazaar for a new project that I'm working on, which is what they are,
the monks might be receiving letters from different places at the same time. Scribes have been able to track that,
even though I haven't been able to track this, the decision they took where they ultimately went in each case,
then I have these examples of competing letters.
And the advantage of them coming is from what one can gauge
is that it's very historically specific in each piece at the general level.
It certainly would transform the entire political economy of that city because with monks would come,
the merchants would come the pilgrims, you would have this entire kind of setting up of this base on the frontiers of the city and.
The border of the city, so in some ways it changes.
It would change the entire political economy of the city, it would change the demographic of the city.
It would bring prestige to the city. And what I've been able to track is that.
For most places, these letters have been sent at very critical points in,
you know, how the political economy of the city is shifting.
So for example, this 70 feet letter that you are referring to, which was sent by the local merchants airport in 1830,
was sank precisely at the time when the Udaipur agency - Udaipur was a town in northwestern India, was abolished,
and that is when the British had been able to bring Udaipur within a larger administrative unit.
Their independence had been entirely curtailed.
And so you can very clearly see what is going on when you look at the letter because you can see that
these there are as many as 30 merchants who are signing these letters in different handwriting,
and they're saying, Look, of course, this is the best place you can see.
You can see it's a 70 feet long letter, so it is saying like they can't be anybody better than us.
Why it is also saying: when you come, that is when this place will change.
And what's interesting is that in this letter, like in many letters, but in this letter, it's very precise.
It actually imagines the time in the painting when the monk would arrive and where
he would set up his entire durbar or his gathering on the outskirts of the city.
And the artist actually maps it in a way that that particular space is absolutely
opposite the new residency of the British agent that has been set up.
He kind of creates a competing vision between them and kind of paints, in there, that the monks setting,
which he imagines will happen in 1831 is quite a large group of people,
including the British resident, who's kind of in the procession going to words now on its way.
This becomes really interesting is, you know, when I'm talking about this question of borders, right?
These questions of margins. So when you look at this archive along with the letters that are being exchanged between the Udaipur
court and the British residency and the main kind of prejudices {INAUDIBLE] officials in Delhi.
You read this anxiety about the political economy of the city who is lending money to whom.
And in fact,
you find that the merchants who sebd these letters are the ones who are lending money even to the British, who are lending money to the court.
And so you can see that it's actually participating in a different genre of letters and diplomacy and questions of the [INAUDIBLE] as well.
So if you start along with like the code painting, then you are seen like in some ways, what the artist is doing and changing the painting.
Now these kinds of scrolls, in that sense, if you were to look at them coming back to a question of history of Indian painting.
Then they would be just seen as - 'oh this is not like the best object.
These are scraps. It's not the best painting what is going on here'
but that exactly is at the heart of the various kind of conversations I'm trying to bridge.
GB: So just physically, how would the monk receiving such an invitation scroll, you know,
physically see it because if it's 70 feet, I presume it's, you know, as a scroll wound up.
I mean, when you unscrolled it, is there a temporal element to it as well?
I mean, in other words, you said that the the painting imagines when the monk has arrived but is that what the monk sees at the end of the 70 feet.
And how does it how does the temporal and spatial unfolding of the scroll interact?
DK: Yeah, that's a that's you know, that's a really important question and one that has some answers,
but I don't think it's possible to find all of the answers for that.
So, for example, I've dwelled a lot and I continue to think through it with the various examples.
And as this research continues, is that what does the directionality in which the receivers would have seen it?
GB: Do you read the letter first or do you start with the painting and work towards it?
DK: So, so the thing is that with this letter, I, for example, we actually have the address of where the letter was sent.
Then the scroll is, you know, when it's a scroll, then it's not unfold.
So that at least gives me a very important clue that that is the way in which it was forced.
That is a mode in which it was carried. Right?
So that doesn't mean that after it was unfurled the first time or many times, that was the mode in which it was scrolled back.
So there's that entire kind of dimension to it.
If we are to go by how the artist would make them,
it's very clear that the artists start with the paintings certain iconographic and auspicious symbols at the beginning of the letter.
Then they depict the city and then you have the textual letter.
But if we think about addresses, then in some ways you are seeing that the the recipients likely saw it in this opposite way.
So therefore seeing the signatures of the merchants, then they are seeing the letter.
But they are kind of like seeing it backward the very first time that they will put it, right?
And and then they are seeing the entire city.
And so in some ways, like I, I think through that a lot,
but in some ways you need to think through both of those directionailites and what that does to this question of temporality,
because in some ways they are seeing the domain that they would establish when they would arrive.
You know, there's also the dimension of when they would arrive the following year,
first, before they would see the the space of the court or the bazars or so on.
But in kind of like thinking through this for the very first time, I actually created a facsimile of the scroll for myself.
Yeah, because I could handle it only in, you know, I could see it only within three feet, you know, slices and photograph it within three feet slices.
So I then kind of created the facsimile.
I still have that and you know, I laid that out in trying to understand it, but that's how these questions really kind of came to the fore.
GB: I mean, I was wondering because of the physicality of the scroll that it kind of replicates a processional experience
of the city as if the man could already imagine as the scroll on rolls a procession through the city.
I mean, there's something quite physical about scrolls as opposed to, you know?
DK: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's something that I think about as this project has expanded.
As I said, I called it Letters from the local bazaar.
And in terms of methods, I actually think of it as unfurling scrolls of mobility and scraps of time in the global eras of art history.
And by that, of course, I am making a case for a variety of mobilities in, you know,
because this genre enables me to enter the time needed to see it from almost circa fourteen hundred to nineteen hundred.
So it's also something which kind of breaks what we think of as chronological, right?
And two is that I'm quite conscious that what kinds of scraps of time does it reveal?
And then I say 'and what does it mean to write art history in this global era of art history from these kinds of scraps of objects?'
Right? But I'm also writing an art history from scraps in our time period.
There you're seeing the rise of a certain globalisation or a certain globalism that's distinct from the globalisms between,
say, circa twelve hundred and fifteen hundred.
This is
The globalism that then is when your commercial networks are becoming into your imperial networks, into your colonised networks.
GB: I wanted to ask you about that because you mentioned that the colonial governor or whatever the official word was is included in the scrolls cityscape.
But was the invitation to the monk an effort to provide a kind of power balance to the colonial presence?
So with these kind of counter colonial objects as well, then?
DK: Absolutely. I mean, that's what I find over and over again, because not all of them have necessarily procession scenes.
But, for example, one which just sent from the port town of Diu, on of the Gujarat ports,
Diu was one of the most important port cities before the rise of Surat as as a more well-known port city.
And there what's really fascinating is that at the end of the painted letter, you have a depiction of the
Monk, who would arrive, but you have the depiction of the Portuguese merchants who have already arrived and who are at the mouth of the ocean.
So in some ways you have this entire displacement of what the threshold of these letters usually are.
And it's interesting that the the written letter has this entire poetry where it's
talking about the wealth of the city from the various kinds of people who are there.
So in a way, they are being used to entice the months to come.
But it also then makes a huge point about that.
The wealth of the city is something that is tied very much to the kind of deeds it performs in other spheres,
and it's for those deeds that you need to be present. So you have these ways which value too the question of mercantilism
is also something that is kind of very much at the heart of what is going on.
And again, if you track it, when that particular letter was sent in sixteen sixty six,
it is sent again at a point where you have a very important shift in the political economy of the city that was taking place.
letters that are sent in Seventeen ninety five from Surat are being sent exactly at a time when there is a
big riot that has taken place in the city that the British are trying to control,
that, you know, the question of who has mercantile control at that time and what is the,
you know, what is it that the local merchants are able to assert? So there's a very.
So there's this conversation which is going on in multiple spheres.
And that's the reason I think this kind of vernacular archives and I mean, let in at various levels is what I think is at the heart of that.
How do you write the art histories of this peried? How do they come in conversation with the kind of maps and the kinds of more elite
objects that we always look at to think about mobility and to think about other kinds of questions?
GB: One thing that you make clear in your analysis of these scrolls is that they offer multiple sensory experiences
and indeed the senses or sensory perception is the focus of your 2020 book 'The place of many moods'.
And in this book, if I could just sketch it out, you look at why certain paintings made in northwestern India conjure moods, emotions and sentiments.
So the first thing that struck me when I saw the theme of your book was, well,
this is another example of sort of affect studies, which seems to have swept over our field in the last ten years or so.
So I'm sure you must have been worrying about how do I enter that almost global
conversation now about what art history should do with the experience of affect and how.
But how do you deal with it that still recognises and acknowledges the specificity or localism of your particular examples?
So I'm just wondering, precisely this global and local relationship
that you just described that your invitational leaders is also engaged in?
DK: Yeah, I that again, you've really read my work carefully!
GB: It's not an exam exactly, Dipti, but
DK: Yeah, right. Well, these are the things I want to talk and think about.
Like, I'm not saying it's your exam or my exam, I'm wondering.
GB: I was I was interested because I know, I know that you stressed in the book the sort of specificity of this local painting tradition.
But on the other hand, you're obviously in conversation with sort of a larger shift in the field.
DK: Yeah, so I mean, I think, you know, at the heart of this book, as you say,
is tracking this category through these localisms that are very
powerful that shift the field of painting through this particular one,
the authors of a particular study do but how their work travels around and shifts practises across northern western India.
So it's this category that they are formulating and iterating,
and like hundreds and hundreds of books where the mood of a place is something
that becomes dominant in how they tackle a variety of subjects from portraiture,
from invitation letters, from, you know, from genealogical histories, just a variety of genres.
This mood of places, what pictorial mood of places is.
What structures it and, so that's one kind of end of it,
and the other end of it is that I'm trying to make a place in some ways for many moods to get to your question
about the specificity of it and the conversations we need to have with questions of affect or sensory tone.
Now, if I go to mood of the place, the word for it that is used as [INAUDIBLE] translates as feel, mood, emotion.
It also translates as what is the feel or emotion that leads to then a lasting aesthetic taste about something.
GB: When I was reading Wikipedia, always a good source also translated as becoming,
and I was struck by how a word that can mean emotion and mood can also mean becoming.
And I wondered if that is a significant part of why in India, this is an important aesthetic concern.
DK: Yeah, yeah. So it's and the concern itself is something that, in philosophical terms,
intellectual terms, literary terms, can take you back to archives from the third century onwards.
So there's a very long intellectual history and it is seen as the term, that is both a category.
But it is also, as you say, very much about an act of feeling and transformation of both the self.
Not necessarily just individually, but in a collective, if you will.
So it's also like a theory of reception of thought in some ways where.
The question of becoming and who is feeling is what starts defining this type of project.
So we have a very long intellectual conversation around it.
It seems to have structured all kinds of thoughts.
But then when we start thinking in terms of how specifically in terms of mediums,
how do you think about the conceptualisation and interpretation of these kinds of concepts and how they are taken to different directions?
It's not as if we are having that entire history written down in a source, so you're kind of piecing it together.
GB: I was going to ask you how I was going to ask you,
how does one know how a viewer in 1830 or in the 18th century, how they feel when they look at a painting?
How does one know those things?
DK: So it's so it's like you find these commentaries that are there often on the back of paintings that I look at, where
They describe what is depicted as depicting the mood of the place time events.
A certain kind of experience. You have this in enough number of works to know that is the mode in which it's being described.
In fact, the first time that terminology is used, it's used in 1610.
In an invitation letter that is sent from Agra.
That is how the pictorial project of the letter versus the scribes writing of
the letter is related, that if you want to get a sense of the mood of this place,
then look at the artist letter. So that's a very kind of clear signal.
So we have those kind of fragments that are there, but to me in any kind of affect studies or kind of fleshing out
of the question of emotions and mood and what it does is to historicize it, right.
And that is the kind of historicization that to some extent, Indian painting has been a little bit.
The feel of Indian painting has been doing it.
But it's been still fairly recent because to do that historicization, you need to step away from the painting as well,
and you need to be able to track it with these multiple kinds of sources, whether its literary sources, whether it's other kinds of political documents,
whether it's other paintings,
to think what is precisely the work of a certain mood that is being asserted over and over again, say in our time period,
say in one case between 1746 and 1751, that one kind of a specific is it doing.
That has been my methodology.
GB: Can I ask you, does that mean that certain pictorial conventions can induce one mood and at one point in time,
And a different mood, in another point in time? DK: Entirely so you have in that sense, conventions that are there say, for example,
the mood of the monsoon or the mood of spring is something that is very celebrated. Now,
You know, I'll give an example from the mood of the monsoon. If one is to think about the mood of the monsoon entirely from its poetic sources,
how it's the celebrated season in terms of love and longing and all of that,
then that is very helpful to think about the painterly effects and healthy painters that create and bring these moods.
But if we start thinking about it and say in relationship to the specificity of a place, well,
how did the monsoon environment matter for that place to actually function as a territory?
Then we start arriving at the precarity of the monsoon and was valued in a certain way and by the monsoon of a place was
made into such a big theme and that it was this monsoon that was sustaining something, was made into such a big theme.
So it is then we have to go to different architectural environmental methodologies,
but also other historical sources which actually are coming from the ground up from these travelling monks who are like writing that 'oh dear,
The monsoon this year is like so bad and this king hasn't done something'
Or 'still the merchants have tried to fleece the people'
So you then start getting to the historical specificity of why a monsoon in that sense, the aesthetics of it,
the political economy of it, the historical emotion of it is playing out at specific times.
GB: So, OK, let's talk. Then by what means does a painter evoke a particular mood?
I mean, is it iconographic if you wanted to? If you want to evoke a particular mood, you paint a monsoon.
If it was in the West, you'd be looking at colour as a kind of.
There's an assumption about a certain emotional states, you know, related to certain kinds of use of certain kind of colour. In Indian painting.
Yeah. By what means two painters evoke particular moods? DK: So iconography is one way.
So the iconography of the monsoon would include peacocks and would include elephants, you know, but it would include.
And these were all actually defined as the (INAUDIBLE).
That is that these were the underlying factors that could lead to an emotion of joy in the monsoon,
which you can then see through the subjectivity of non-humans or the becoming of non-humans as well.
But painterly effects play a very, very important role in kind of like capturing that feeling of a monsoon of a cloud
bursting or how the texture of water and rain can be very different in spring.
And that sense like the kind of exploration you have with roses and lotus flowers and this kind of red powder,
which is used for spring festivals.
And so you find painters like really making paintings that are that are a commentary in that sense on colour on 'rang' itself,
which is the word for colour, which is again an aesthetic word as well, in terms of that, it colours your mood.
GB: is the colour indexical rather than symbolic? DK: I would say yes.
And in some ways, like again, I feel that there is an entire discourse on the relationship between colour and
mood that is now unravelling in a variety of studies and in some ways,
taking off from the earlier histories that some of these questions where there was
only a kind of a general symbolic discussion around because you had, say,
for example, the red colour used often as the background of these arch (INAUDIBLE).
You had the meeting of the lovers and related to the erotic experience, (INAUDIBLE).
So then there was this kind of discussion, of this one to one mapping, if you will, of colour and emotions and moods.
And it's not like that is not there. But it's I would say that it's true, it's too little and it's changing and it has to be more specific.
You also have a conversation if you're talking about how they showed mood
at least what I have found is in terms of the conversations artists establish with contemporaneous poetry,
and some of that poetry may not be inscribed per se.
But there are ways in which there are overlapping tropes that enable you to think
about how moods attached to places or times or seasons are evoked in that sense.
How the question of a sensory in one medium is about sound, iteration, rhythm.
You know how memory is formulated, how does it stick with you, how they engage that in terms of manipulating scale and painterliness?
So there's that as well.
So, yeah, I would say that in my work, I've found that the components and the constituents can be stretched in multiple directions.
And in some ways, you have to get to the specificity of each conglomeration of things you put together to be able to extract that question.
And that's the reason you have to work across medium and across time periods as well to be able to then get to that specificity.
GB: When I was reading cursorily your book,
I was struck that that the that the audience for these kinds of paintings seemed to be elite men.
Were these paintings also made for women? I mean, is there are there women's moods, if you like?
DK: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, means that are there are definitely, you know, women are protagonists in how many of the moods,
especially related to the question of the question of both.
You know, the question of love and longing in some ways is what is highlighted.
It's happening in slightly different genres, but you know,
there's some very interesting new research that is trying to think about that are some of these
paintings which are emphasising moods of women and to think from their perspective and not just to think in terms of idealised women,
but that they are the key patrons of many of these works, that they are the key consumers of many of these works in the novel.
GB: Do we have evidence? Do we have evidence that they are key consumers? DK; Yeah, yeah.
I means I think we are finding that evidence. And I think one way that I've been actually entering it with a group with a new group of
books is that I've started actually focussing on the figures of the musicians and the
dancers and how they appear in these elite settings when the consumption of these moods
are taking place and how they are the ones who are creating these moods and that sense,
and all because of the repetition of some of these figures that I've been able to
find within a very tight group of things between seventeen sixty one and 1767
I'm actually now able to get into a history of thinking,
from the perspective of these very specific depictions of these specific dancing girls that are there.
You know, dancing girls is one way to describe them, but they are the ones who are really kind of holding that mood together.
They are the ones who are crossing social boundaries.
They are the ones who, you know, in some ways holding musical knowledge together and shifting the mood of an assembly,
as well and there is very good work on this. By Katherine Shonfield, who is a historian of music at King's College London.
So I'm able to build on that by looking at these specific case studies.
So there's a lot happening in terms of thinking through these specific case studies.
GB: I'll ask you one of the things that you say is that to appreciate these paintings, a viewer had to become proficient in the art of sensing.
How does how did how did one become so proficient? When did you have to be trained to appreciate these nuances?
DK: That is the sense we get, right, because that is the sense we get from the deeper histories of how connoisseurship
for elite male men and women was something that was part of becoming the political,
ethical self, in that sense. And that's discussed in kind of a variety of genres of writing.
But you also see that kind of enacted through these conventions that are used for painting.
And I think in that sense,
it's that iteration of those conventions in some ways where you see that displaying that becoming is something which is really elevated.
It's interesting when you get out of the court as well to some of the mercantile material or some of the like the low brow material.
Then again, you see how that sensing self is.
Something that is used is depicted to make a certain kind of point.
It actually becomes very, very important in the 18th century, you know, Rosalind Hand Hanlon, who was at Oxford, has done some excellent work on this,
where she actually talks about becoming this kind of male elite was key in the 18th century political scenario,
as you had the Mughal Empire decentralising, not so powerful you had several regional players.
And how were they kind of asserting their authority and what was the cultural terrain and the aesthetic
terrain that was equally important to be able to enter certain political networks or certain boundaries or to assert themselves?
In that sense, it's very comparative to the larger 18th century story, as one might think about it from various locales
So that's another conversation that I'm very, very interested in, which also kind of marks,
which is also like the reason one is getting into the question of place of many moods,
not just the mood of the place, because the time period that I'm talking about, if one is thinking from the question of landscape, then.
The mood that is told through British landscapes,
which circumscribes or has largely circumscribed study of depiction of place within South Asia and many,
many other colonised places. There, it's a different kind of it's the mood of the sublime.
It's the mood of desolate spaces, the mood of ruination, which has its own poetics and politics and embodiment that is ongoing.
So in some ways through this archive, I'm also able to talk about the place for many moods at that time period to think through it.
So that's how it becomes part of the important territorial story that is unfolding as well.
At the same time in which landscape and place and the mood of a place is at the heart of that political story.
GB: OK, I want to ask you more, but I just want to remind our audience that if they themselves have questions for Dipti,
they're welcome to add one in the chat and I will pass it on to her and we'll interrogate her some more.
But I'm very interested in the politics of mood. So these paintings, these sort of sensate paintings, how did they function politically?
It sounds like they helped affirm an elite group in their sense of self.
But did they have other kind of political agency as well?
How were they used, for example? DK: Yeah, so from what we see that their subjects become,
it seems that the question of territorial assertion is something that is central to their territorial assertion in terms of
what are the places that are featured and what are the moods of those places that are then iterated in different time periods.
And so in that sense as well, like, you know, the letters that people are talking about,
those are very useful because they are also telling us how this concept was taken outside of the space of the court,
how it had a valence there in order to make an important territorial political claim of what is possible.
So this question of temporality that what is being depicted in them is about the here and now,
but because they are constantly also kind of pulled in directions of tropes and idealisations in some ways.
There's also like this aspirational aspect of of that historical moment that is embedded in them.
So, you know, so territories are proclaimed in terms of, say, for example,
Through the places that are depicted, say, lake palaces depicted in the centre of a lake that are highlighted because that has
been you're able to create a certain kind of network from where you can be looking out to anybody. Specific temples,
specific landscapes, specific lakes, hills in 1810 or journeys to specific temples that take place in the context of
the British Durbar that has already declared that shift in territoriality in 1830.
And so why then going to pilgrimage sites outside becomes important?
But also why kind of painting them at a certain scale by an artist none other than Kassi (?)
Who is someone who's painting for the British colonial agents,
making the architecture drawings that they demand for their histories that are being written and also shifting the centrality, kind of like,
how can he mind moods again to claim territory for this king?
There's that going on.
So I think that is completely part of the story, which is always the case in any kind of assertion of knowledge or territory, we may think.
You know, the question of emotions and subjectivity is out of work, but you know,
that's a conversation about embodied visions that we've been having for two very long time.
But I think it's entangling these different embodied visions to think about the question of territoriality.
And aesthetics is what we've not been having enough.
And so I think those are the discussions to think about the comparisons, to think about the connections,
to think about the entanglements. GB: We have a question Dipti from one of our DPhil students:
Hi Dipti thank you for coming. I really enjoy your work. Building on Geoff's question on the politics of mood you cite, Sarah,
Is it Ahmed? DK: Yeah. GB: In the introduction to your book, and I was wondering what you thought about her philosophies,
applications to art, historical practise or just your thoughts on her work in general?
DK: Yeah, I. Thanks for the question, and thanks for reading my work.
You know, Ahmed's work is very,
very helpful to me because she actually talks about that capacity of mood to go to historical spaces, experiences, grievances.
And she talks about it and thinks about it to try to think about marginalised
Feelings and grievances, as I said, but she also really emphasises the question of mood work,
right, and mood work in that sense, always being about creating a certain kind of a collective.
That's how mood works, a certain kind of a collective feeling which then in some ways has the ability to push certain things forward,
even if we are thinking. So in that sense, if we are thinking about art history and thinking about see how you know,
the 2020 the summer of 2020 tapped on to the streets in the US,
the George Floyd moment, or we are thinking about how that tapped into the 2015 Cape Town moment, you know, as statues were toppled, right?
And so in that sense, it's that layering the thickness of collective moods, right?
And it's that kind of mood work that then enables you to push something in the local ground of a place.
So that is something which I find maybe useful to think with and to keep this with the specificities of that to my
own art is how they are devising some of these things to think about the capacity of these objects in that sense,
which of course, you know, with very specific sources,
but also in terms of thinking about the historiography of the field and how it goes through these ebbs and flows.
And it's not like we have we've had various kinds of radical moments and how are they different from the one before?
And what is the mood that enables to then push it farther so that you take it a step further?
So I don't want that directly answers your question,
but perhaps it gives you some sense of how I find, how I find these kind of conversations need to
happen across disciplines through the specificity of different kinds of archives and time periods.
GB: Interesting that you're sort of talking about a philosophy of mood almost by the sound of it,
which can be conveyed across different fields. We have another question from another guest: You talk about - you have to correct my pronunciation-
Baav (?), but you don't talk about Raza (?) and the Rasta (?) to Raza (?) as it were.
Is there a reason? Perhaps you could explain the question, but you also have to come back on screen now.
DK: Yeah, I know something happened as I was trying to go up to the question and then I tried to leave.
Yeah, come back, OK, I'm back here. So, yeah, so please fill the question.
And I think I got. I was trying to look at your name, but then I didn't do well and going between the screens, so.
Yes. Raza (?), you know, translates as aesthetic taste, and Raza (?) has, of course, been seen as the centre of defining aesthetics, right now.
The reason I talk about Raza (?) less is.
Because of two things, one is that as Raza (?) was formulated in the third / fourth century and as the discussions continued,
you know, in the long due to the 10th / 11th century, so on, that was the world, the systemization of Raza(?), types of Raza(?)
of thinking about the Raza(?) of love, thinking about the Raza(?) of fear and so on and so forth.
And but if one starts thinking through that kind of written sources and literary sources that we have from the 16th / 17th century onwards,
the interest is not that much in classification and systematisation, but in exemplification,
you know, this is traced very well by the late scholar Alison Bush.
And so it's in this exemplification and the feeling of Raza(?) that Paab(?) really comes.
And what causes certain emotions really becomes a bigger centre stage.
Now, from my very particular archives, I have found that when one is thinking, when one is looking at
Genres which are not just illustrated poetry, that is talking about specific, you know, aestheticised.
You know, these systematic Razas(?).
What I'm finding is that the emphasis in that sense is more on Paab, is more on, which can be applied, which is more it seems to be more porous.
At least that's how it's treated, that it can be applied to a variety of things.
And it's this porosity that in a way is what I have found and in a way which I've found
applied to place and time that enables me to get into the history that I'm getting into.
So it is this specific shift, which is a starting place. GB: Thank you so much.
Typically, we run out of time. Thank you so much for the conversation today.
We've just scratched the surface of your work, and I encourage people to indeed check out your book, 'The Place of many Moods'.
But also, I should let our audience know that you've been working on what I assume is quite a major exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
When does that open Dipti? GB: Yeah, thank you so much for that plug
It opens November 19 2022, but it'll be in Washington, D.C. for six months until the middle of May 2023.
And then it'll travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art for another three months -
- that's where the main exhibition format, we are actually really trying to think about the question of sensing
histories in terms of the works and themes that goes beyond what is covered in the place of many moods.
But it's also really trying to think about what does it mean to bring the sensory
into an exhibition space and to historicise it for contemporary viewers,
that question that you asked between? You know, this kind of interest in affect that is there in art history and museums and immersive ness.
How do you how do you have the conversation with that also through specificities and how do you evoke it
and how does that change or objects that have not been exhibited actually in this format ever before?
Happy to talk about that more at another time. I realise that we are over time. GB: Sounds fantastic.
And there's a I'm assuming a catalogue that comes with it, yeah, it must be an interesting experience to be able to return in a way to,
you know, to your earlier project and but at a later time, if you know what I mean with a little more reflection.
Interesting to read the book and the catalogue side by side and see how you shifted your own thinking in that chapter.
DK: I like your choice to call it interesting when I am in the middle of trying to meet that deadline. All I think of if sleeplessness.
And I'm going to find that interesting tonight. GB: Well, everybody, everybody will look out for it with that in mind.
Well, thank you so much for talking with us today. It's been a great pleasure and I've learnt an awful lot about India and Indian culture,
just from the conversation and from reading about you, reading your work. So it's been a really good experience for me.
Thank you so much. DK: And likewise, thank you so much.
Thank you again for the opportunity, and I look forward to continuing the conversations with your students.
It's great to see so many of them here. GB: Great. Thank you.
Bye bye.