Session at ECSAS 2020; the 26th European Conference on South Asian Studies

How can interdisciplinary approaches shed new light on early-modern and colonial-era South Asian arts? This panel considers how to engage holistically with visual, sonic, spatial, and embodied arts.

Convenors:

  • Richard David Williams SOAS University of London (London, United Kingdom)
  • Giles Tillotson Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, Jaipur (Jaipur, India)

How can interdisciplinary approaches shed new light on early-modern and colonial-era South Asian arts? This panel considers the intersections of different artistic and performance practices in order to appreciate the underlying aesthetic systems cultivated by musicians, visual artists, architects, and poets over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While miniature painting, musical genres, material culture, photography and literature are conventionally studied separately, these categorical divisions are artificial and misleading. This panel considers how motifs and styles from one medium may illuminate or even directly influence those in another. Possible areas of focus include: paintings depicting music or dance performances and so communicating sound; dances that responded to architecture or spaces designed for dance; the use of photography within court cultures to capture architecture and performance.

We invite papers that reflect on the challenges of interdisciplinary research; engage with the production, consumption, and reception of works of art (broadly defined); or pre-modern approaches to aesthetics. Papers might consider the expressive arts in courtly domains from across South Asia.