Image and Imagination: Wall Paintings in Early Modern Southern India

22 January 2021

This talk focuses on the culturally and linguistically diverse Nāyaka courts of the Tamil region. Their “diversity” was in part the product of the highly interconnected early modern world, in which South India was an important node. Yet, even as the world changed, the representations of contemporary figures insisted on their simultaneous embeddedness within puranic times and places. This talk highlights connections to and through the Deccan in literary and visual approaches to portraiture in 18th-century southeastern India.