Panelists

Catherine Asher, Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, University of Minnesota

Bio: Catherine Asher is a specialist in Islamic and Indian art from 1200 to the present. She is known for her work on the Mughal dynasty (1526-1858). Current work focuses on architecture provided by Hindus, Jains and Muslims. She is also interested in the shrines that develop around deceased Muslim saints, examining the appeal such complexes have for devotees. Her publications include Delhi’s Qutb Complex: The Minar, Mosque and Mehrauli, (2017); India before Europe,with Cynthia Talbot (2006; a second edition is forthcoming); TheArchitecture of Mughal India(1992); Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past, co-edited with Thomas Metcalf (1994).

Title: "The Sufi Shrines of Shah al-Hamid in South and Southeast Asia"

Abstract: This talk concerns a 16th century Sufi, Shah al-Hamid, whose dargah is in Nagore, Tamil Nadu.  He is credited with healing powers and safety in travel and his shrine is frequented equally by Hindus and Muslims.  Belief in the saint’s protective powers when crossing the Bay of Bengal was so great that Tamil traders built multiple shrines to Shah al-Hamid in Southeast Asia, a phenomenon in Islam that is extremely unusual.  I examine these shrines in an attempt to see what translates in terms of practice and physical appearance from the main dargah in Nagore to those in the diaspora. This project, still ongoing, is based on field work, archival work and interactions with people associated with these multiple shrines. 

Whitney Cox, Associate Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
Madhuvanti Ghosh, Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, Himalayan, and Islamic Art, Art Institute of Chicago

Bio: Whitney Cox’s main interests are in the literary and intellectual history of southern India in the early second millennium CE. Within that range, his research has concentrated on Sanskrit kāvya and poetic theory, the history of the Śaiva religion, and medieval Tamil literature and epigraphy, especially that of the Coḻa dynastic state. He is the author of Politics, Kingship, and Poetry in Medieval South India: Moonset on Sunrise Mountain(Cambridge UP, 2016) and Modes of Philology in Medieval South India (Brill, 2017; Primus Books, 2020). Forthcoming works include translations of Bilhaṇa’s Vikramāṅkadevacaritaand the third book of Kampaṉ’s Tamil Rāmāyaṇam, both for the Murty Classical Library of India, and a study of the interactions between Kashmir and India’s Tamil-speaking south over the medieval period.

Bio: Madhuvanti Ghosh is the Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian and Himalayan Art at the Art Institute of Chicago where she is responsible for the exhibition, collection, preservation and research of the museum’s permanent collections in these areas. Her current research interests include the art of the Pushtimarg sect; the Indian cultural doyenne Pupul Jayakar; and the textiles of Bengal.Ghose was previously Lecturer in South Asian Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She completed her doctoral dissertation from the University of London and then was a Research Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University.

Title: "A Rereading of the Art Institute's Nagapattinam Big Buddha"

Abstract: In this first tentative exploration of what we hope to be a series of collaborations between the South Asianists working at the University of Chicago and scholars at the Art Institute of Chicago, we offer a reconsideration of one of the museum’s iconic masterpieces. The largest stone image of the Buddha held in North America, the so-called Nagapattinam Big Buddha (AIC acc. no. 1964.556) greets viewers as they enter the AIC’s Alsdorf Galleries.  Beginning by contextualizing the image within the world of Coḻa-period Tamil country and within the exchanges that crosshatched the Bay of Bengal in the twelfth century, we will locate the work within a wider domain of Buddhist material culture. We then turn to a consideration of the unpublished inscription incised on the image’s back, present a preliminary reading and interpretation of it, and explain the ways in which this contributes to our collective understandings of the shifting evaluative regimes of early modern coastal South India.

Jazmin Graves, Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Bio: Jazmin Graves is Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She completed her doctoral research in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, "Songs to the African Saints of India," centers on the Sidi (African Indian) Sufi devotional tradition of Gujarat and Mumbai. 

Title: "Indians of African Ancestry: Historical and Contemporary Communities" 

Abstract: I give a basic overview of the African diaspora in India from the 13th-19th centuries, and I introduce the devotional tradition of Muslim Sidis (African Indians) of Gujarat. I detail how Africans of diverse ethnicities, dispersed in Gujarat in the 19th century, established a cohesive community around the tombs of African Sufi saints who lived in Gujarat in the 14th century. I explore the ways in which Sidis venerate these saints, and some of the elite African figures of 16th century Gujarat, as ancestor-saints of their community.

Navina Najat Haidar (keynote), Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Bio: Navina Najat Haidar serves as Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah Curator in Charge of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Met she has curated a number of special exhibitions, including Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700, Opulence and Fantasy (2015); Treasures from India; Jewels from the Al-Thani Collection (2014); and Divine Pleasures: Rajput Painting from the Kronos Collection (2016). Navina is planning a future exhibition on the Jahangir period and is concurrently working on a book on Mughal architecture.

Title: "Water and Ink: Art and atmosphere from the worlds of Islam"

Abstract: In the galleries for Islamic art at Metropolitan Museum works of art are presented in cultural, historical and regional contexts. However this film unexpectedly immerses us in a natural soundscape through which the art is encountered. Set to the music of nature, curator Navina Haidar and filmmaker Dev Benegal weave a visual and sonic experience through the Met's galleries to capture the objects in their spaces and evoke the intangible in-between.

Zoé Headley, Chargée de recherche, Co-directrice du CEIAS, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Bio: Zoé E. Headley is a social anthropologist working in Tamil Nadu. She is a research fellow and co-director of the CEIAS (CNRS -EHESS) and a research associate at the French Institute of Pondicherry (India). Her research is largely focused on the multiplicity of rural conflict management approaches in southern India (Tamil Nadu). She founded STARS (Studies in Tamil Studio Archives and Society) a multidisciplinary research collective which aims to investigate the history of Tamil studio photography between the 1880s and the 1980s as well as to protect and promote the rich and vulnerable photographic productions. 

Title: "Invisible Collections. Creating an Archive of Tamil Studio Photography"

Abstract: In this presentation, I will describe the historiographical context and fieldwork conditions which led me recently to initiate the creation of a digital archive of Tamil Studio Photography. This chapter in the world history of photography has not been written so far as its images were not deemed suitable or valuable enough to enter the collections of western archives from which the history of photography is largely written. This brief exploration of the making of the STARS (Studies in Tamil Studio Archives and Society) digital archive, comprising now 42 000 images, alert us that the specificities and modalities of appropriation of the photographic apparatus and the social uses of photography in South Asia will only begin to become apparent once we decenter our gaze from a handful of institutional archives and discard our stifled paradigms of ‘center vs periphery’ which cripple our engagement with the world history of photography.

Bertie Kibreah, Programming Coordinator, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, The University of Chicago

Bio: Bertie Kibreah is an ethnomusicologist (PhD, 2019, University of Chicago) whose interests include devotionalism in the performance of Bengali Muslim song traditions, the cultural economies of shrine circuits in Bangladesh, music and migration, music and gesture, music and film, the intersections of performance and text, and Sufi feminism. He sings in a variety of languages and plays a variety of instruments from South Asia, and is trained on the tabla drum in the tradition of the Lucknow Gharana. He has been directing the South Asian Music Ensemble in the Department of Music from 2015 through 2020.

[roundtable discussant]

Lars-Christian Koch (keynote), Director of the Ethnological Museum Berlin and Head of Collections for the Humboldt Forum of Berlin Abstract

Hari Krishnan, Professor, Dance Department, Wesleyan University

Hari Krishnan is Chair and Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University and is also the artistic director of the Toronto-based dance company, inDANCE. He is a dancer, choreographer, and scholar whose work focuses on Bharatanatyam, contemporary dance from global perspectives, queer dance, and the interface between dance and film studies. Krishnan's monograph, Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) recently won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno © First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. The book has been hailed as “an invaluable addition to the scholarship on Bharatanatyam.”

[roundtable discussant]

Kaley Mason, Assistant Professor of Music, Lewis and Clark College

Bio: Kaley Mason teaches in the Music Department and Asian Studies Program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His research examines how music serves as a vehicle for cultural dignity, mobility, and political activism in Kerala.  

Title: "Hearing Gulf Migration in Surround Sound"

Abstract: This talk considers how recent work in sound studies widens our frame for thinking about the sonorous worlds of Indian Ocean labor and mobility. Drawing on the stories of three lower caste families whose lives have intersected with the circular movement of migrant laborers from Kerala to the Gulf Emirates, I explore the social significance of high-end speakers, the development of music education curricula for private schools, and the aspirational dreams of reality music television. I also reflect on the ocularcentrism of early work on Gulf migration and caste mobility in the early 2000s.

Ameera Nimjee, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, School of Music and Asian Studies, University of Puget Sound

Bio: Ameera Nimjee (she/her) is a musician, dancer, scholar, and educator. Her scholarly research explores transnational economies of South Asian performance arts, and how practitioners navigate issues of citizenship, race, and gender. Currently, Ameera serves as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music and in Asian Studies at the University of Puget Sound.  

Title: "Performing Memory: Khoja Ismaili Muslims and the Indian Ocean"

Abstract: This paper considers some of the performance cultures that were born of, endured through, and reimagined the establishment of Khoja Ismaili Muslims in East and South Africa during the twentieth century. Referring to archival photographs, language practice, recipes, and music, I piece together performances of shifting memory that continue to contour how many members of the Khoja Ismaili Muslim community articulate their history with the Indian Ocean.

Ronald Radano, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

Bio: Ronald Radano is Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Studies and Music at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he co-directed the graduate program in ethnomusicology and collaborated in ACS’s new initiative in global black cultural studies. Radano is the author of two award-winning books, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique and Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music, and coeditor of Music and the Racial Imagination and Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique. His forthcoming, monograph, Alive in the Sound: Black Music, Value, Counter-History, proposes a new conceptualization of U.S. Black music’s processes of development. In Spring 2019, Radano was the Andrew W. Mellon/Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where he launched a new project on African sound recording produced during the period of imperial Germany’s colonial occupation before World War I. 

Title: “Black Sound-Objects and the Collection of Audible Aliveness” 

Abstract: I offer a snapshot of my recent research as it relates to the matters of collecting and collections, drawing attention to the other side of the Indian Ocean, to the east coast of Africa, and then moving north and farther west, to Europe and the United States, and finally to metropolitan cultures world-wide. I argue that what links this vast territory is not simply a particular cultural tradition, but rather a racialized, affective order brought into being via a key technology, the mechanical reproduction of sound. It is through this relation that the musical practices of Black people were turned into collectible objects, which, ironically, led to Black music’s occupation of the soundscape and sensory arena of the global modern.

Kenneth X. Robbins, psychiatrist, collector of South Asian art, and independent scholar

Bio: Kenneth X. Robbins is a collector-archivist specializing in local & regional Indian rulers as well as Indian minority groups, specifically Jews and Africans. He has already used the collection to complete eleven books and more than 120 articles with seven additional volumes in the works. His many Indian exhibitions have dealt with maharajas and nawabs, Sufis, Africans, Jews, movies, art, medicine, philately, and numismatics. He is developing a project documenting international crises in Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Asia from 1880 to 1930.

Title: "The Kenneth X and Joyce Robbins Collection"

Abstract: Examples from the Robbins collection focus on the agency and movement of Indians, Muslims, Africans, and Jews across the Indian Ocean.  The history of Africans in South Asia is not limited to that of poor villagers, but should consider their role as rulers, generals, musicians, and builders of great mosques.  The changing nature of Indian ocean trade is demonstrated by early Indian copper plates, a map showing exports and imports of the once great port of Cambay, Indian-Omani activities in Zanzibar,  business letters of Baghdadi Jewish traders, and medals and ephemera relating to trade through Egypt.

Pushkar Sohoni (Panel Keynote), Associate Professor and Chair, Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune. 

Pushkar Sohoni is an architectural and cultural historian, and is currently an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. His research interests include the history of the early modern Deccan, specifically the architecture of the sultanates. His last book was The Architecture of a Deccan Sultanate: Courtly Practice and Royal Authority in Late Medieval India (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). 

Title: "An early modern port: Chaul"

Abstract: Chaul was an important port for the Deccan sultans, and also for the Portuguese. The twin cities of Chaul, upper and lower, were two discrete settlements, often at war with each other. The sultanate settlement seems to comprise a core of Georges and William Marcais's much-critiqued essentialisation of an Islamic town, comprising mosque, bazaar, and hammam. But there are descriptions left behind by several visitors, from Venice, Bologna, England, Russia, and several other Arab and Persian traders. The land, sea, and river, have physically changed over the past few hundred years, and it no longer is the same port and harbour it once was, as we can see in the case of several ports of the Indian ocean.

Davesh Soneji, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Bio: Davesh Soneji is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie at the intersections of social and cultural history, religion, and anthropology. For the past two decades, he has produced research that focuses primarily on religion and the performing arts in South India, but also includes work on gender, class, caste, and colonialism. He is author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012). His new book project, Sundry Ragas: Genealogies of Musical Pluralism in Modern South India foregrounds social and religious histories of raga-based music that did not become part of “canonical Karnatak music” as it was conceived and mobilized in the second decade of the twentieth century in Madras. 

Title: "Tamil Circuits of Labour and Cultural Production in the Straits Settlements, c. 1890-1938"

Abstract: This talk examines what I call "para-Tamil" histories of cultural production by focusing on the movement of Tamil performing artists -- particularly hereditary women performers -- across the Bay of Bengal and into the Straits Settlements. I deliberate, using a range of sources, on the forms of corporeal exertion (ranging from plantation labor to sex work to cultural work) that characterized Tamil women artists' lives in the time of indenture.

Emma Natalya Stein, Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution

Bio: Emma Natalya Stein received her PhD in the History of Art at Yale (2017), and joined the National Museum of Asian Art’s curatorial staff in 2019. Her book, “Constructing Kanchi: City of Infinite Temples,” is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press (2021), and her forthcoming exhibitions include “Prehistoric Spirals: Earthenware from Thailand,” and “Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain” (from the Cleveland Museum of Art). She hascurated “Power in Southeast Asia,” and created a robust online resource for the Southeast Asia collections area. Emma’s research is grounded in fieldwork in India and Southeast Asia, where she documents and maps monuments in diverse landscapes.

Title: "Nagas Across Borders: Amplification of the Divine Serpent Motif"

Abstract: This paper explores the ubiquitous image of the naga (divine serpent) across South and Southeast Asia, and especially its continued prominence in Cambodia. Using the naga as a case study for the transformation of ideas and images, the presentation questions to what extent the naga can be considered a single entity across such a vast swath of space and time.