[
Wesleyan Home Page
] [
WesMaps Home Page
] [
WesMaps Archive
]
[
Course Search
] [
Course Search by CID
]
Academic Year 2001/2002
Empire and Erotica: Painting from the Courts of India
ARHA 386 FA
The history of North Indian painting from the 16th through the 19th centuries is dominated by two distinct, stylistic traditions, one flourishing at the court of the Mughal empire, the other at courts of the various
Rajput dynasties that held sway in
regions beyond the Mughal domain. Despite complex historical relationships between the two traditions, modern scholarship has tended to emphasize their separate identities as distinct, isolable schools with mutually
opposing stylistic and aesthetic ideal
s. Mughal painting is characterized as naturalistic, rational, political; contemporary Rajput work is seen as lyrical, erotic, and spiritual in approach. In this course we will approach Mughal and Rajput painting by
examining some of the fundamental
assumptions and methods upon which modern historiography of these schools rests, dealing with the relationship between painting and literature, the structure of patronage and the degree of the patron's influence in
shaping style, and the extent to which t
he Mughal style was influenced by 16th-century European prints and paintings. One of our guiding purposes will be to come to terms with Mughal and Rajput as easthetic categories. To what extent does this binary
stylistic taxonomy rest on formal stylisti
c qualities, and to what extent has it been shaped by the Hindu-Muslim communal discourse of modern India?
MAJOR READINGS
W.G. Archer, THE LOVES OF KRISHNA IN INDIAN PAINTING AND POETRY Milo C. Beach, "The Context of Rajput Painting," "The Gulshan Album and its European Sources" Milo C. Beach and Ebba Koch, KING OF THE WORLD: THE
PADSHAHNAMA Moti Chandra, STUDIES IN
EARLY INDIAN PAINTING Pramod Chandra, "Ustad Salivahana and the Development of Popular Mughal Art" Pramod Chandra and Daniel J. Ehnbom, THE CLEVELAND TUTI-NAMA MANUSCRIPT AND THE ORIGINS OF MUGHAL PAINTING Ananda
K. Coomaraswamy, RAJPUT PAINTING
Visakha Desai, LIFE AT COURT: ART FOR INDIA'S RULERS, 16TH-19TH CENTURIES Visakha N. Desai, "Painting and Politics in Seventeenth-Century North India: Mewar, Bikaner, and the Mughal Court" Ebba Koch, "The Influence
of the Jesuit Mission on Symbolic
Representations of the Mughal Emperors" Anand Krishna, "A Reassessment of the TUTI-NAMA Illustrations in the Cleveland Museum of Art (and Related Problems on Earliest Mughal Paintings and Painters)" Jeremiah P.
Losty, THE ART OF THE BOOK IN INDIA
Pratapaditya Pal et al., PLEASURE GARDENS OF THE MIND: INDIAN PAINTINGS FROM THE JANE GREENOUGH GREEN COLLECTION Stuart Cary Welch, ed., GODS, KINGS, AND TIGERS: THE ART OF KOTAH
EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS
Regular attendance and reading of all assigned materials. Active participation in class discussions. Several short essays; class presentation; term paper.
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS and/or COMMENTS
Permission of Instructor. Unless preregistered students attend the first class meeting or communicate directly with the instructor prior to the first class, they will be dropped from the class list. NOTE: Students must
still submit a completed
Drop/Add form to the Registrar's Office.
COURSE FORMAT:
Lecture
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
Level:
UGRD
Credit:
1
Gen Ed Area Dept:
NONE
Grading Mode:
Graded
Prerequisites:
NONE
Links to Web Resources For This Course.
Last Updated on MAR-19-2002
Contact
wesmaps@wesleyan.edu
to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459