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.
Speaker(s)
Anna L Seastrand
Anna L Seastrand is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota and her research has focussed on early-modern South-Eastern India, with a broad interest in the embodied experience of sacred space. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where she is part of a multidisciplinary team focused on the “interwoven” sonic and visual histories of the Indian Ocean world. She is also part of a research team collaborating on publication of a set of interconnected temples in south-eastern India.
