Dartmouth Events

Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760-1910

An ASCL Lecture Sponsored by the Joshi Family Curriculum Development Fund.

Thursday, May 12, 2022
5:00pm – 6:00pm
Carpenter Hall, Room 013
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Arts, Lectures & Seminars

In the eighteenth century, Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with, or fought against, each other to control western India. In this talk, which focuses on Dr. Shaffer's forthcoming book, she conceptualizes the artistic combinations that resulted as ones of “graft”—a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials. By tracing grafted arts from multiple perspectives—Maratha and British, artist and patron, soldier and collector—this talk charts the methods of empire building that recast artistic production and collection in western India and from there across India and in Britain.

Holly Shaffer is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University with a specialization in British and South Asian arts and their intersections. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Dartmouth College from 2015 to 2017 and received her PhD from Yale University in 2015. Her book, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760-1910, will be published by the Paul Mellon Centre with Yale University Press in Spring 2022; it won the American Institute of Indian Studies Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities. She has also edited the 2021 issue of Ars Orientalis on the Graphic Arts and has published essays in The Art Bulletin, Art History, Journal 18, Modern Philology and Third Text.

 

For more information, contact:
Hope Rennie

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.