History of Art Lecture Series: Dipti Khera, New York University

Prof. Dipti Khera will present a talk title, " Unfurling: Bazaar Archives and Art Histories of Urbane and Laboring Lives, c. 1600-1900." Abstract: In the early seventeenth century, painters and scribes working in Mughal Agra transformed vijnaptipatras—invitations written on palm leaf folios—into visual-textual letters featuring urban precincts and peoples that unfurled on paper scrolls. Sent collectively by local merchants to eminent Jain monks, each invitation sought to entice recipients to travel and reside during the forthcoming monsoon season in their flourishing, devout towns. As these letters proliferated, most prominently across the port cities of Gujarat and the inland entrepôts of Rajasthan, they created a new epistolary archive tethered to bazaars, registering shifts in political economy amid expanding East India Company settlements. Drawing on the insights of monk-scholars and paper conservators, the “material unfurling” of scrolls up to 70 feet long reveals painted streets structured by thriving shops and artisanal communities across class, caste, gender, and devotional affiliation. In turn, this relational visibility of urbane and laboring lives brings into view the collections and canonical values through which art histories of coloniality, globality, and mobility have been written. Bio Dipti Khera is Associate Professor in the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History at New York University. Khera’s The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020) was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in Indian Humanities. Her co-edited volumes include the catalogue for A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (Hirmer Publications, 2022), an exhibition she co-curated at the National Museum of Asian Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art; “The ‘Long’ Eighteenth-Century?” Journal18 (December 2021); and Readings on Painting: From 75 Years of Marg (Mumbai: Marg Publications, June–September 2023). Recently, she has held a Senior Research Fellowship awarded by the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru (2026), and the American Institute of Indian Studies–National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship (2023–24), in affiliation with the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. These awards supported her research on visual-textual letter scrolls sent from local bazaars of early modern and colonial India. Committed to learning through collaborations, her current projects include provenance research on these letters with custodians from Jain communities and conservators, a co-authored history of mapping practices in precolonial South Asia and related digital resources, and a co-edited translation of eighteenth-century historical poetry. She has found connecting with new students, scholars, and primary sources while teaching in interdisciplinary summer schools organized by the Rajasthani Bhasha Academy over the past three years immensely rewarding.