Dartmouth Events

Paper is increasingly being replaced by screens, but it has been the material of conveying knowledge for millennia. As a motto written on manuscripts in an Indian archive dictates, a book should “be adorned like a dear son…safeguarded like a good plot of land…purified daily like one’s own body…and looked upon…like a good friend; it should be tied fast like a culprit sentenced to death and should always be remembered like the name of God.” The book is the material recording and dictating society, to be tended to and penalized, revered and conversant, but it is also vulnerable. Only if the book is preserved and protected will it escape from a “state of deterioration.” For the weakness of paper is in its fibers: delicious to insects, fading in sunlight, easy to tear, dampen, and decay.

In this exhibition, curated by Holly Shaffer, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, and her students in Art History class 17.14, Art and Industry in South Asia, 1800 to the present, and drawn from materials in Baker-Berry Library and Rauner Special Collections Library, we examine the history of paper in South Asia (including present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) through the materials that chronicle it in four cases. First as a product in the case titled “Paper Made,” then as a vehicle for 19th-century British colonial bureaucracy in “Paper Empire.” Third, as a “Paper Revolt,” a 20th-century method of disseminating an anti-colonial, nationalist movement for independence, and finally in the contemporary artist Dayanita Singh’s photographs of archives. Here, “Post Paper,” bundles, stacks, files, and folders seem to wait patiently for a reader, slowly turning to dust. Paper not only creates and disperses history, but also becomes the source for its own documentation and demise.

Sponsored by the Art History Department, Baker-Berry Library, the Leslie Center for the Humanities, and Rauner Special Collections Library