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Academic Year 2003/2004

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 ideals. 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 the 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 the 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 aesthetic categories. To what extent does this binary stylistic taxonomy rest on formal stylistic 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 Jo hn Seyller, WORKSHOP AND PATRON IN MUGHAL INDIA. 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.

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-19-2004

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