In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Yael Rice (Amherst College / Short-Term Beinecke Fellow) focuses on South Asian albums (muraqqa‘s), the patronage of which originated among just a handful of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Mughal and Deccani royals. By the eighteenth century, however, the pool of album patrons exploded across the Mughal Empire, as had the number of albums.
No longer the purview of princes, emperors, and sultans alone, albums were now made for, collected by, and gifted to provincial governors, Europeans, and minor nobles. The same period also saw the focus of albums shift, as depictions of women—very often undressed or clothed in diaphanous muslin—came to occupy a much larger share of the codices’ pictorial repertoire. Focusing on the decades between 1720 and 1800, this talk asks how and why so many muraqqa‘s bearing such images were produced at this time, and it seeks to situate these materials within broader histories of empire, gender, and media in South Asia.
A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.
Image: Page from an album assembled in northern India, late eighteenth–early nineteenth century. British Museum, London, 1920,0917,0.12.6
In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Yael Rice (Amherst College / Short-Term Beinecke Fellow) focuses on South Asian albums (muraqqa‘s), the patronage of which originated among just a handful of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Mughal and Deccani royals. By the eighteenth century, however, the pool of album patrons exploded across the Mughal Empire, as had the number of albums.
No longer the purview of princes, emperors, and sultans alone, albums were now made for, collected by, and gifted to provincial governors, Europeans, and minor nobles. The same period also saw the focus of albums shift, as depictions of women—very often undressed or clothed in diaphanous muslin—came to occupy a much larger share of the codices’ pictorial repertoire. Focusing on the decades between 1720 and 1800, this talk asks how and why so many muraqqa‘s bearing such images were produced at this time, and it seeks to situate these materials within broader histories of empire, gender, and media in South Asia.
A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.
Image: Page from an album assembled in northern India, late eighteenth–early nineteenth century. British Museum, London, 1920,0917,0.12.6
