The Place of Many Moods - by Dipti Khera (Hardcover)

About the Book

"India retains one of the richest painting traditions in the history of global visual culture, one that both parallels aspects of European traditions and also diverges from it. While European artists venerated the landscape and landscape paintings, it is rare in the Indian tradition to find depictions of landscapes for their sheer beauty and mood, without religious or courtly significance. There is one glorious exception: Painters from the city of Udaipur in Northwestern India specialized in depicting places, including the courtly worlds and cities of rajas, sacred landscapes of many gods, and bazaars bustling with merchants, pilgrims, and craftsmen. Their court paintings and painted invitation scrolls displayed rich geographic information, notions of territory, and the bhåava, or feel, emotion, and mood of a place. This is the first book to use artistic representations of place to trace the major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts in South Asia over the long eighteenth century. While James Tod, the first British colonial agent based in Udaipur, established the region's reputation as a principality in a state of political and cultural deterioration, author Dipti Khera uses these paintings to suggest a counter-narrative of a prosperous region with beautiful and bountiful cities, and plentiful rains and lakes. She explores the perspectives of courtly communities, merchants, pilgrims, monks, laypeople, and officers, and the British East India Company's officers, explorers, and artists. Throughout, she draws new conclusions about the region's intellectual and artistic practices, and its shifts in political authority, mobility, and urbanity"--

Book Synopsis

A look at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century, and what they reveal about the political and artistic changes of the era

In the long eighteenth century, artists from Udaipur, a city of lakes in northwestern India, specialized in depicting the vivid sensory ambience of its historic palaces, reservoirs, temples, bazaars, and durbars. As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. The Place of Many Moods explores how Udaipur's artworks--monumental court paintings, royal portraits, Jain letter scrolls, devotional manuscripts, cartographic artifacts, and architectural drawings--represent the period's major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts. Dipti Khera shows that these immersive objects powerfully convey the bhava--the feel, emotion, and mood--of specific places, revealing visions of pleasure, plenitude, and praise. These memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence, shaping how a culture and time are perceived.

Illuminating the close relationship between painting and poetry, and the ties among art, architecture, literature, politics, ecology, trade, and religion, Khera examines how Udaipur's painters aesthetically enticed audiences of courtly connoisseurs, itinerant monks, and mercantile collectives to forge bonds of belonging to real locales in the present and to long for idealized futures. Their pioneering pictures sought to stir such emotions as love, awe, abundance, and wonder, emphasizing the senses, spaces, and sociability essential to the efficacy of objects and expressions of territoriality.

The Place of Many Moods uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place.

Review Quotes

"[Khera is] at her considerable best when engaging directly with artworks. Here her writing becomes like a magnifying glass pick­ing out details that might otherwise have gone unnoticed and explaining their significance."---Peter Parker, Apollo Magazine

"Excellent."---John E. Cort, History of Religions

"Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association"

"Shortlisted for the BASAS Book Prize, British Association for South Asian Studies"

"Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University"

"Winner of the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize, American Institute of Indian Studies"

About the Author

Dipti Khera is associate professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Twitter @KheraDipti