American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) Symposium XXII

The symposium venue is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.

All events will take place in the Meyer Auditorium (Freer Gallery of Art/NMAA West Building) unless otherwise noted.

Lunch and coffee/tea breaks will be provided each day.

A catered reception at the museum will follow the evening keynote on Thursday, May 7.

For attendees planning your trip, please see our Washington, D.C. Guide: A Freer Research Center Resource with recommendations and detailed information on lodging, local transportation, dining, and instructions for accessing the National Museum of Asian Art.

• Debra Diamond (National Museum of Asian Art)
• Emma Natalya Stein (National Museum of Asian Art)
• Rebecca Brown (Johns Hopkins University)
• Robert diCaroli (George Mason University)
• Deepthi Murali (George Mason University)
• Mika Natif (George Washington University)
• Karin Zitzewitz (University of Maryland)

Thursday, May 7
ACSAA Symposium XXII: Keynote Panel and Reception

National Museum of Asian Art, West Building (Freer Gallery of Art), Meyer Auditorium

3 p.m. Registration Opens

4 p.m. Welcome and Introductory Remarks

4:30 p.m. Keynote Panel: In the Realms of Friendship: Emotion, Devotion, and Status in the Visual Arts

• Vidya Dehejia (chair), Columbia University
• Annapurna Garimella, Independent scholar
• Heidi Pauwels, University of Washington
• Molly Emma Aitken, The City College of New York

6:30 p.m. Reception

8 p.m. Reception Concludes

Friday, May 8, 2026
ACSAA Symposium Day 1

National Museum of Asian Art, West Building (Freer Gallery of Art), Meyer Auditorium

10 a.m. Arrival and Coffee

10:10 a.m. Welcome and Overview

10:15 a.m. Panel 2: Old Worlds, New Views

• Deepthi Murali (chair), George Mason University
• Salila Kulshreshtha, New York University Abu Dhabi
• Krishna Shekhawat, University of California, Berkeley
• Anooradha Siddiqi, Barnard College, Columbia University
• Liza Oliver, Wellesley College
• Alexandra Kaloyanides, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
• Seher Agarwala, Columbia University

11:45 a.m. Break

12 p.m. Panel 3: Art History at the Crossroads: Reconsiderations of Temple, Monastery, Reliquary, and Image

• Rebecca Brown (chair), Johns Hopkins University
• Abhishek S. Amar, Hamilton College
• Munazzah Akhtar, University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore
• Naveen Zaman, Independent scholar
• Alice Casalini, University of Chicago
• Naman P. Ahuja, Jawaharlal Nehru University

1:30 p.m. Lunch

Lunch provided for all registrants

3 p.m. Panel 4: Rivers, People, Temples

• Padma Kaimal (chair), Colgate University
• Tamara I. Sears, Rutgers University
• Divya Agarwal, Independent scholar
• Sara Varanese, Independant scholar
• Mary Beth Heston, College of Charleston

4:30 p.m. Break

4:45 p.m. Panel 5: How a Nation Remembers: Archives, Museums, Visual Art, and Material Culture from Pakistan and India

• Sonal Khullar (chair), University of Pennsylvania
• Komal Afzaal, Tufts University
• Atteqa Ali, Newark Museum of Art
• Daniel Waqar, Tufts University

6:15 p.m. Closing Remarks

6:30 p.m. Program Concludes

Saturday, May 9, 2026
ACSAA Symposium Day 2

National Museum of Asian Art, West Building (Freer Gallery of Art), Meyer Auditorium

10 a.m. Arrival and Coffee

10:10 a.m. Welcome and Overview

10:15 a.m. Panel 6: Connecting the Arts and Material Cultures of South, Southeast, and East Asia ca. 1500–1900

• Sylvia Houghteling (chair), Bryn Mawr College
• Heeryoon Shin (chair), Bard College
• Joyce Yusi Zhou, Yale University
• Alexandra Dalferro, University of California, Berkeley
• William Ma, Louisiana State University
• Holly Shaffer, Brown University
• Hawon Ku, Seoul National University

11:45 a.m. Break

12 p.m. Panel 7: Making, Meaning, and Method in South Asian Art

• Mika Natif (chair), George Washington University
• Sonya Rhie Mace, The Cleveland Museum of Art
• Ariana Pemberton, University of California, Berkeley
• John Cort, Denison University
• Elena Pakhoutova, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art
• Akshaya Tankha, University of Washington

1:30 p.m. Lunch / ACSAA Members Business Meeting (optional, 1:45–2:45)

Lunch provided for all registrants; all are welcome to attend the meeting
S. Dillon Ripley Center

3 p.m. Panel 8: Goddesses and Women

• Hillary Langberg (chair), Bard College
• Robert DeCaroli, George Mason University
• Dessie Vendova, College of the Holy Cross
• Yagnaseni Datta, Worcester Art Museum
• Vaishnavi Patil, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Khushmi Mehta, The Graduate Center

4:30 p.m. Break

4:45 p.m. Panel 9: Practices of Representation: Image, Matter, and Mediation

• Karin J Zitzewitz (chair), University of Maryland
• Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen, The University of Rochester
• Shivani Sud, Reed College
• Anjali Duhan Gulia, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, Haryana
• Anchit Jain, University of Delhi
• Anna Seastrand, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

6:15 p.m. Closing Remarks

6:30 p.m. Program Concludes

Sunday, May 10, 2026
ACSAA Symposium XXII: Curator-led Tours

National Museum of Asian Art, East Building (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery), Washington, DC

10 a.m.

• Tour of Of the Hills: Pahari Paintings from India’s Himalayan Kingdoms
  Debra Diamond, National Museum of Asian Art
• Tour of Vishnu’s Cosmic Ocean
  Emma Stein, National Museum of Asian Art

11 a.m.

• Tour of Of the Hills: Pahari Paintings from India’s Himalayan Kingdoms
  Debra Diamond, National Museum of Asian Art
• Tour of Vishnu’s Cosmic Ocean
  Emma Stein, National Museum of Asian Art

12:30 p.m. Graduate Student Lunch

Thursday, May 7, 2026
ACSAA Symposium XXII: Keynote Panel and Reception

Keynote Panel: In the Realms of Friendship: Emotion, Devotion, and Status in the Visual Arts

1. Vidya Dehejia (chair), Columbia University

Vidya Dehejia is the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University in New York and author of a range of books that connect the archaeological, visual, and literary arts of India. Her writings have ranged from Buddhist art of the centuries BCE to the esoteric temples of North India and from the sacred bronzes of South India to art under the British Raj. Between 1994 and 2002, she served as chief curator, deputy director, and acting director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC.

Gita Govinda as the Archetypal Sakhi Text
Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda (Song of the Cowherd Lord), a twelfth-century Sanskrit poetic composition on the passionate love of Radha and Krishna, is among India’s most popular works on Krishna. The theme of its twenty-four songs is viraha in sringara, or the pangs of lovesick separation, which are suffered by Radha for Krishna and in turn by Krishna for Radha. A key role is played by Radha’s sakhi, her friend, messenger, and guide, with as many as fifteen of the Gita Govinda’s twenty-four songs either sung by the sakhi herself or addressed to her. And in more than one song that Radha sings, she addresses her friend as sakhi, thereby reinforcing their closeness. The human angle of this sakhi-to-sakhi relationship is the focus in this paper. While the sakhi, as the heroine’s friend, confidante, and messenger, appears in earlier poetry, none of them—not even the famous Shakuntala’s sakhis, Priyamvada and Anasuya—ever took on as crucial a role as Radha’s sakhi in the Gita Govinda. Jayadeva clearly rejected the use of his own voice as narrator except for the first and last songs (numbers 1, 2, and 24) that bracket the story; instead, he gave center stage to an insider who, while sympathizing with his heroine, could force her to confront Krishna’s infidelities and scold her, calling her a fool. The sakhi was that sub-heroine who would enable Jayadeva’s poetic work on the love of Radha and Krishna to reach its fullest and finest expression.

2. Annapurna Garimella, Independent Scholar

Annapurna Garimella is an art historian and designer whose research focuses on late medieval Indic architecture and vernacular visual and built cultures in post-independence India. She is managing trustee of the Art, Resources and Teaching Trust, which runs a research library and conducts independent research and teaching. She also heads Jackfruit Research and Design, specializing in design, research, and curation. Jackfruit’s most recent curatorial project is The Past has a Home in the Future: Dhoomimal Gallery and Connaught Place (2024). Garimella’s newest book is The Long Arc of South Asian Art: A Reader in Honor of Vidya Dehejia (2022), and she recently developed and taught “A History of Indian Craft: 1850s to the Present” for MAP Academy.

Intimate Distance: The Artist Nainsukh and Raja Balwant Singh
Raja Balwant Singh of Jasrota, a small state in the Pahari region of the western Himalayas, had himself painted over many years by the artist Nainsukh. He was also painted by other artists, most likely members of Nainsukh’s family, when he was younger. Those earlier images are ceremonial and he is resplendent; there is a stillness in the images that suggests steadiness and a serene energy. However, in the images painted by Nainsukh, Balwant Singh is much more open, and the compositions are much riskier. He can be shirtless while writing a letter, bundled in a razai in a baradari while listening to an older woman singer sitting down below (Nainsukh even gives the opening line of her song), or standing on top of gigantic palace, a miniscule yet unique figure on an otherwise empty structure. These shifts in scale, sartorial state, the season, the song, etc., are elements that indicate intimacy. They also suggest that Nainsukh was allowed the capacity to have such proximity and liberty with his patron. Yet there is also deference in these images—never is Balwant Singh’s augustness and composure compromised. And in some paintings, Nainsukh includes himself, and in those he always maintains his own dignity by placing himself at a measured distance from Balwant Singh. I will explore this archive of paintings to show what kind of intimacy is made visible and possible between an artist and a patron in a specific moment and place.

3. Heidi Pauwels, University of Washington

Heidi Pauwels is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. Her publications include two monographs on sixteenth-century Hindu devotional literature; The Goddess as Role Model (New York: OUP, 2008), which compares classical Sanskrit, early modern Hindi, and contemporary film and television retellings of the stories of Sita and Radha; and a trilogy on Kishangarh art and poetry: Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-century India (Berlin: E.B. Verlag, 2015), Mobilizing Krishna’s World (Seattle: UW Press, 2017), and The Voice of the Indian Mona Lisa (Cambridge: CUP, 2023). She has been awarded Guggenheim, AIIS and NEH fellowships.

Transcending Gender, Transcending Social Status? The Case from Kishangarh
What happens when patrons and artists collaborate to blend the realms of the human and the divine? While idyllic realms of harmony take shape on the canvas, do social divisions between the visionaries and creators relax in the process? Catalogue entries are silent on the subject. To peek behind les belles images, we have to look elsewhere. A focus on the intersection of visual, literary, and performing arts can reveal moments of articulation of such transformations. As devotees of the divine are transformed into sakhās and sakhīs, united in adoring the divine pair Radha and Krishna, is there scope for friendship in the real world? In other words, could joined creative engagement lead beyond the asymmetrical class and gender relationships of patron, painter, poet, and performer? This essay builds on recent methodological breakthroughs to investigate evidence from the small Rajput principality of Kishangarh on the road between Jaipur and Ajmer.

4. Molly Emma Aitken, The City College of New York

Molly Emma Aitken is an associate professor in the Art History Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and in the Art Department at the City College of New York, CUNY. Her book publications include When Gold Blossoms: Indian Jewelry from the Susan L. Beningson Collection (London: Asia Society and Philip Wilson Publishers, 2004) and The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012. Aitken is currently working on a monograph about gender, eros, and play in Mughal painting with the working title “We Are All Women.” She is a 2025–2026 Smithsonian Institution Fellow at the National Museum of Asian Art.

The Psychic World of Mughal and Rajput Friendships
Mughal-era depictions of female intimacy were iconographically multivalent and emotionally complex. The iconography of these depictions is readily legible to us today because it drew on a range of well-known Persian and Hindustani pictorial motifs and genres on earlier paintings and on poetry and performance. The historical conditions that contributed to their proliferation included the diminution of empire in the eighteenth century, the rise of woman regents and rulers, and the growing influence of courtesans and entertainers on the arts. Although the emotional hold that the theme had over cosmopolitan society resists precise description, a robust scholarship on the history of emotions in early modern South Asia has delineated a psychic domain within which we begin to understand—women’s intimacies provided, in addition to beauty and arousal—a compelling paradigm for subjectivity and relating. This talk, which draws on a larger project, considers idealized representations of women’s intimacy as means to think about men’s as well as women’s subjectivities. Depictions of women with women gave pleasure that bonded viewers within and across communities defined by gender, class, and religion. The proposition in this presentation is that the nature of the enjoyment they aroused was context dependent and engaged a variety of fantasies and biases that shifted over time and from region to region. Ultimately their erotic play thematized power dynamics of keen interest to later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century connoisseurs. They were about the power dynamics of mixture: masculine with feminine, elite with non-elite, Mughal with Rajput, and Persian with Hindi and Sanskrit.

Friday, May 8, 2026
ACSAA Symposium XXII: Day 1

Panel 2: Old Worlds, New Views

1. Deepthi Murali (chair), George Mason University

Dr. Deepthi Murali is an assistant professor at the Department of History and Art History and affiliate faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University. An art historian of South Asia, her research examines transcultural processes of production of wood and ivory objects from southwestern India and cotton textiles from southeastern India and their use across the broader Indian Ocean World. At RRCHNM, she is co-principal investigator of Connecting Threads, a born-digital project tracing the production and circulation of checked cotton textiles from India and their role in constructions of fashion and identity amongst free and enslaved communities of color in the Greater Caribbean region. She is also the principal investigator at GMU for the Smithsonian-led History and Culture Access Consortium’s HBCU digital archive project. In addition to her scholarly research, Deepthi is deeply engaged in the practice of digital public history with a focus on underrepresented archives, non-neutral metadata, and Black and diasporic knowledge production. Deepthi’s work has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, Arts & Humanities Research Council, Mellon Foundation, American Institute of Indian Studies, and Yale Center for British Art.

2. Salila Kulshreshtha, New York University Abu Dhabi

Salila Kulshreshtha teaches in the History and Art History programs at New York University Abu Dhabi. Trained as a historian of South Asia, Salila’s research is interdisciplinary, making connections between history, archaeology, art history, and heritage studies. She received her PhD in History from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been a Shivdasani Fellow at the Oxford Centre of Hindu Studies, University of Oxford. Salila is the author of the book From Temple to Museum: Colonial Collection and Uma Mahesvara Icon in Middle Ganga Valley (Routledge, 2018). She has also co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Hindu Temples (Routledge, 2023). Salila’s research interests include the religious history of South Asia, colonial archaeology, the history of museums, and Indian Ocean studies.

Ancient Shrines in an Urban Cosmopolis: The Temples of Mumbai
The presentation will examine a series of ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples embedded within Mumbai’s sprawling urban landscape. Dating from the first to the tenth centuries, these shrines predate colonial land reclamation projects, when Bombay existed as an archipelago of seven islands. The shrines encompass a range of architectural forms, including natural and manmade caves as well as structural temples. Drawing on material evidence such as architectural remains, sculptures, inscriptions, etc., the presentation will argue that the shrines functioned as active nodes within interconnected ritual and mobility networks. While they served local communities, they were also frequented by itinerant groups moving along the western coast of India and the wider Indian Ocean World. By foregrounding their geographical positioning, the paper reconstructs patterns of circulation that linked the islands to one another and to the mainland. Finally, given the prolonged usage of these places of worship by diverse communities, the presentation will investigate the afterlife of these shrines, some of which are now inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

3. Krishna Shekhawat, University of California, Berkeley

Krishna Shekhawat is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies the eco-art histories of South Asian art and architecture. In particular, she focuses on the Mehrangarh Fort at the periphery of the Thar desert in northwestern India. By studying the site through four conceptions of time—historic, geologic, cyclic, and anthropogenic—Krishna seeks to assess how shifting timescales changes the visual perception of the same site as well as shifts emphasis on different material to evoke varying temporalities. Krishna was previously assistant curator at Mehrangarh Museum Trust, India, and a fellow with the Professional Alliance for Curators of Color at the Association of Art Museum Curators, New York. She completed her honors in history from Miranda House, University of Delhi, in 2017 and was a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University in 2017–2018.

Between Containment and Flow: The Political Ecologies of Hydro-Architecture in Jodhpur, ca. 1459–1562
This paper explores the political ecologies of water architecture in Jodhpur, the Rathore dynasty’s capital city. Situated at the periphery of India’s Thar desert, the region has historically depended on rainwater from the ephemeral monsoon. By controlling where the rainwater fell and flowed, how it was contained, and who had access to it, the Rathore state assumed a hydraulic monopoly by regulating water’s spatial and temporal flows to mold social hierarchies and state-subject relationships.

Between the mid-fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, Jodhpur’s earliest water system was designed to dam the bulk of rainwater flowing down the surrounding hills in two lakes: first, the royal lake inside the city’s fort, which, when full, spilled beyond the fort wall and into the second, adjacent lake for the exclusive use of the Brahmins residing in the city’s Brahmapuri neighborhood. Using a hydrogeologic analysis, this paper traces how the groundwater seepage from these lakes moved, by sheer force of gravity, further down into the city through underground rock fissures—tapped through wells for Brahmanical use. But how did other people in Jodhpur access water? Indeed, the state granted conditional denial and access to water, which in turn sustained Brahmanical privilege but spatially marginalized subaltern communities such as the Bhishtis (water carriers). Despite their integral professional role in the city’s water distribution networks, the Bhishtis lived beyond the city walls with no access to state-sponsored water sources for personal use, revealing a paradoxical logic of inclusion through exclusion.

By studying architectural punctuations such as embankments, overspill pathways, wells, stepwells, and fort and city walls, this paper offers insights into the constitution of nature and power not just through grand but also small and even invisible spaces of pre-colonial South Asia.

4. Liza Oliver, Wellesley College
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Barnard College, Columbia University

Liza Oliver is an associate professor of Art History, chair of the Art Department, and affiliate faculty of South Asia Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Art, Trade, and Imperialism in Early Modern French India (2019) and is currently working on her second book project, “Technocratic Seeing: Photography, Ecology, and Famine in Colonial India.”

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an associate professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (2024, SAH Alice Davis Hitchcock Award winner), Minnette De Silva: Intersections (Mack Books, 2024), and is currently working on her second scholarly monograph, “Ecologies of the Past.”

Making and Knowing: Labors of Water and Earth
This paper traces labor practices in the construction and reshaping of the environment, understanding them historically as radically altering environmental visualization and as latent formations of environmental knowledge. We examine making and knowing through labors of water and earth at two scales: colonial intellection manifest through engineered landscapes, and intergenerational knowledge hidden in ecologically embedded handicraft.
We consider nineteenth-century Raj photographic albums of irrigation projects, examining awe-inspiring views of seemingly wild nature that emerge as the result of British infrastructure.

These albums construct a new sublime, determined by landscapes engineered for the purposes of scientized agricultural intervention. This technocratic figuration marks a shift away from the picturesque that defined earlier European conventions for capturing India’s landscapes. Moving to a twentieth-century survey, we examine architect Minnette de Silva’s recuperation of ancient Sri Lankan earthworks and constructions in her decades-long research “A Comparative History of Asian Architecture,” which consolidated pan-Asian ecological knowledge in new global histories of the built environment. Alongside this writing, her architectural designs quoted monumental ecologies and constructed environments, especially those nurturing hereditary craft practices and vegetal and earthen components for form, whether reeds for mat weaving, cotton for the textile loom, or clay for pottery.

We draw on such variant studies to note historical commensurabilities, finding parallel knowledge formations and related methodological frameworks of systematicity and subjectivity embedded in man-made ecological transformation. These studies demonstrate how labors of water and earth created new environmental systems, giving rise to novel modes of seeing, epistemic interventions, and altered hereditary understandings.

5. Alexandra Kaloyanides, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Alexandra Kaloyanides is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her first book is Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia University Press, 2023). Her new book project, “Resourcing Religion: Burmese Religions and the Environment,” explores the ways that Burmese kingdoms extracted resources like rubies, jade, and teak to develop a distinct form of Buddhism. It is inspired by a 2023–2024 exhibition she worked on at the British Museum titled Burma to Myanmar.

Rubies and Burmese Buddhist Sovereignty
This paper explores the role that rubies played in displays of sovereignty by Burma’s Konbaung dynasty (1752–1885). It focuses on artifacts such as the golden letter King Alaungpaya sent to introduce himself to the British king George II in 1756, which was inset with twenty-four rubies. It pairs attention to dazzling objects with an examination of royal inscriptions and orders addressing the discovery and use of rubies, such as an order from King Mindon on January 18, 1857, that declares the new appearance of ruby mines is the result of the accumulated merits of the king’s former lives. This paper contextualizes these examples in the history of gemology in Burmese courts, which incorporated South Asian traditions of understanding the special properties of rare crystals. It also considers the role of Buddhism in practices of extraction and display. This paper asks: What can artifacts featuring rubies and texts describing them reveal about how Konbaung kings used precious stones to assert control of the Southeast Asian country? How did these rulers connect rubies with Buddhist teachings on karma and merit? And how did they draw on larger South and Southeast Asian practices of kingship and gemology? This paper argues that Burma’s possession of the world’s most valued rubies helped shape the country’s distinct form of Buddhist imperialism. It seeks to contribute to other scholarship exploring the relationship between natural resources and religion with attention to the fascinating case of Konbaung rubies.

6. Seher Agarwala, Columbia University

Seher Agarwala is an art historian specializing in Islamic and South Asian art, with a particular focus on manuscript cultures, calligraphy, and the intellectual and ethical dimensions of visual production between 1200 and 1850. She earned her PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia University in 2023 where her dissertation examined the relationship among text, image, and imagination in sixteenth-century Persian-language manuscripts.

From Stone Pillar to Golden Minaret: Description and Paintings of an Ashokan Column in the Sirat al-Firoz Shahi
Constructed in the third century BCE, Ashokan columns marked the beginning of monumental art in the subcontinent. These pillars have a significant legacy, as Hindu and Muslim rulers repurposed them by inscribing royal genealogies and relocating them to prominent sites, such as palaces and mosques. Art historians view their reuse as a symbol of political authority that transcends religious boundaries. Nonetheless, many medieval and early modern Persian-language manuscripts describing Muslim interactions with these columns are often overlooked. One such work, the Sirat al-Firoz Shahi (Customs of Firoz Shah) by an unknown author, describes Sultan Ferozshah Tughluq (d. 1388) of the Delhi Sultanate restoring the pillar in his citadel at Firozabad in 1358. The only existing copy of this manuscript, an extraordinarily illustrated Mughal volume from 1593, is located in the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna. While the manuscript uses prose, poetry, and religious verses to discuss the monolith’s origins and visual appeal, emphasizing the emperor’s ingenuity, technical skill, and strength in transporting and reinstalling it, its thirteen accompanying illustrations depict the complex process of removing and replanting the pillar beside his Friday Mosque inside Firozabad. My paper closely analyzes the words and images of this unique manuscript, showing how the medieval Muslim world viewed pre-Islamic monuments as aesthetic wonders and integrated non-Islamic structures into their Quranic worldview.

Panel 3:
Art History at the Crossroads: Reconsiderations of Temple, Monastery, Reliquary, and Image

1. Rebecca M. Brown (chair), Johns Hopkins University

Rebecca M. Brown is a professor of the history of art and chair of the Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management programs at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in art, architecture, and visual culture of the eighteenth century to the present, with particular expertise in South Asia. She has published numerous articles, three books, and seven co-edited volumes. She is currently thinking with the southern Indian painter KCS Paniker (1911–1977), tracing his errant journey to unfold a language of painting in the 1960s and 1970s; her book Modernism in Relation: KCS Paniker’s Written Pictures will be published by the Getty Research Institute in late 2026.

2. Abhishek Singh Amar, Hamilton College

Abhishek Singh Amar is a professor in the Asian Studies Program at Hamilton College, New York. He specializes in the archaeological history of Buddhism in India. Amar has held fellowships in the US, Germany, UK, and India. Amar is currently working on multiple projects including the history of Buddhist monasticism (Vihāra project) and co-directing a digital project Indian Buddhist Monasteries Database to create databases of Buddhist material remains.

Rethinking Patronage and Devotional Practices in the Early Medieval Magadha
The Magadha region was marked by intense religious activity between the sixth to twelfth centuries. Buddhism was a well-established tradition in this region, which is evident in the presence of a network of Buddhist monasteries such as Bodhgaya, Nalanda, Telhara, and Kurkihar. This is further attested by the archaeological remains, inscriptions, and sculptures from multiple monastic and shrine sites. From about the fifth century onward, Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism also emerged as vibrant forces in this region. A poignant indicator of these developments was the emergence of Gaya as a key Vaiṣṇava place of pilgrimage, as well the large-scale distribution of Vaiṣṇava, Śaura, and Śaiva sculptures from the village shrines of this region. These developments raise several questions. How did the emergence of these Hindu traditions affect the patronage of Buddhist monastic institutions? What strategies were developed and adopted by the Buddhist monastic institutions to retain and broaden their social support base? The availability of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava sculptures from almost every Buddhist monastic site of this region may have been one such strategy, but it also raises questions about the associated rituals and legitimacy of such practices to the Buddhist monastic and lay communities? How did the lay community react to such innovations? Based on my archaeological survey of the Bodhgaya and Nalanda regions, I will examine how these traditions interacted and challenged each other.

3. Munazzah Akhtar, University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore
Naveen Zaman, Independent Scholar

Dr. Munazzah Akhtar, chairperson and associate professor of architecture at the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, specializes in the transcultural and transregional influences on the artistic and visual culture of South Asian Muslim communities, particularly in the pre- and early modern periods. She is also interested in exploring innovative approaches to architectural heritage studies. A recipient of prestigious awards such as the Barakat Trust Major Award (2025) and USAID’s HESSA Women’s Leadership Award (2024), Dr. Akhtar also serves as assistant editor of International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) and as an educational advisor (2025–2027) to Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners (PCATP).

Naveen Zaman is an architect, academic, and researcher whose work explores identity, culture, and religion through architecture and sociology. His interest in architectural heritage developed during his undergraduate studies, culminating in a distinction-awarded thesis on the historic hill station of Murree. His master’s degree in architecture from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, deepened this focus, with research centered on cross-cultural interactions, transculturation, and hybridity in South Asian architecture. Alongside practice, he contributes to architectural discourse through writing and leads Lahore Awargi, an initiative dedicated to promoting awareness and preservation of local architectural heritage.

Of Merchants, Maidens, and Mermaids: Decoding the Pranami Temple Complex (ca. 1733) at Malka-Hans, Pakpattan
Positioned along the road connecting Sahiwal and Pakpattan in Punjab, Pakistan, lies Malka-Hans—a small historic agrarian town whose cultural significance far outweighs its modest size. Though widely recognized for its association with the eighteenth-century Punjabi Sufi poet Waris Shah, author of the seminal Heer Ranjha, the town conceals a lesser-known gem: the Pranami Temple Complex, hidden between encroaching residences.

The Pranami sampradaya emerged in seventeenth-century western India as a millenarian movement led by Mahamat Prannath (1618–1694). The order expanded rapidly among mercantile communities, advancing a distinctly transcultural theology that fused Krishna-centered Vaishnavite devotion with Muslim Sufi imagery and Shiʿa millenarian ideas, thereby transcending conventional South Asian religious identities.

This paper examines the Pranami Temple Complex at Malka-Hans, commissioned around 1733 by a merchant disciple of Prannath and largely undocumented until now. Focusing on spatial planning, it analyzes the complex as organized around a central courtyard, featuring a rich decorative programme of carved images and wall frescoes depicting mermaids, angels, musicians, dancers, and patrons. Its most striking element, however, is the highly ornate three-tiered portico, which preserves at its middle level what is possibly the only South Asian example of caryatid columns. While anthropomorphic caryatids are typically associated with ancient Greek architecture, those at Malka-Hans display distinctly Indianized characteristics, supporting a European-styled scroll pediment. Tracing the iconography of these elements, the paper ultimately connects the transcultural nature of Pranami theology with the appropriation and localization of Western architectural motifs, for which this complex stands as a remarkable testament.

4. Alice Casalini, University of Chicago

Alice Casalini specializes in the Buddhist art and archaeology of Central and South Asia. She is completing a PhD in art history at the University of Chicago while holding the 2024/2026 Ittleson Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She has been a full member of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan since 2023, and she has recently been elected as a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

How to See Higher Dimensions: Hyper-Perspective in a Gandhāran Buddhist Reliquary
The architecture of Gandhāra in northwestern Pakistan has often been examined in purely iconographic and stylistic terms. The many lemmas of its visual language have been described and categorized into types according to ethno-stylistic features—from the Achaemenid legacy of the Persepolitan columns, to the Corinthian and Ionic capitals of Greek and Roman flavor, to the graceful śālabhañjikās and nāgas of local Indian traditions acting as frames to friezes and relief panels. This paper seeks to redefine the terms of the question by forgoing issues of style and investigating instead the role and function of such elaborate architectural forms in the context of the Buddhist Mahāyāna currents developing around the first century CE in the region. By taking a reliquary in the shape of a miniature shrine excavated at the site of Shaikhan Dheri in Charsadda (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) as the main case study, the paper shows that architecture in Gandhāra was a vibrant locus of religious imagination. It situates the reliquary within the architectural longue durée of the South Asian subcontinent to show that the miniature building was made to intentionally play with perspective, orientation, and dimensions to disrupt the illusion and expectation of a correct or preferred point of view of reality. The object instead embraces multi-directionality and hyper-spatiality to initiate the devoted beholder into a cosmological space of spiritual enhancement in accordance with the Mahāyāna visions of the cosmos developing at the time in the region.

5. Naman Parmeshwar Ahuja, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Naman Parmeshwar Ahuja is a professor of Indian art history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the general editor of Marg. His publications and exhibitions examine the foundations of Indian visual aesthetics, transculturalism, issues around gender, and the decolonization of museums. His publications include The Art and Archaeology of Ancient India: Earliest Times to the Sixth Century (Ashmolean, 2018), The Body in Indian Art (Ludion, 2013), The Making of the Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman (Routledge, 2011), India & the World (Penguin, 2017), and The Arts & Interiors of Rashtrapati Bhavan (Publications Division India, 2016). Key edited volumes for Marg include Gandhara: A Confluence of Cultures (2017 and 2026), Phanigiri: Interpreting a Buddhist Site in Telangana (2021), A Mediated Magic: The Indian Presence on Modernism 1880–1930 (2019), Indian Tattoos: Only Skin Deep? (2025), and most recently, Crystal & Ash: The Buddha at Piprahwa (2026).

Revisiting “The Origin of the Buddha Image”
This paper focuses on the discoveries of ancient terracotta and ivory images of bodhisattvas (including Siddhartha) and perhaps even some other Buddhas that were made largely between the first century BCE and the third century CE in northern India. They expand our view of the ways in which Buddhist legends (including the Buddha’s biography) were shown. Their depictions on plaques, pots and a variety of other small finds are intricate and reveal iconographic concerns that are familiar to art historians. Yet their styles and forms are different from imagery at Mathura, Gandhara, and Amaravati that form our normative understanding of the field. These objects bring to attention a wider array of gestures (mudras), contexts for worship and representations in art. Accommodating them into the longstanding history of the early development of “the” image of the Buddha adds to what we know about the varieties of Buddhism in the public sphere and the various forces that impacted theistic anthropomorphic worship in these Buddhisms—the divinity accorded to kingly figures, the accommodation of older chthonic deities, and the history of performances by embodied actors. And finally, they also allow us to consider the purposes to which images were put in new ways.

Panel 4: Rivers, People, Temples

1. Padma Kaimal (chair), Colgate University

Padma Kaimal’s research questions common assumptions about early temples in the Tamil region. Did kings build the only architecture that matters? Did men? Are the boundaries of India’s modern states meaningful for understanding tenth-century architecture? How do narrative sculptures tell their stories? Are fierce goddesses demonic? Are museums the problem, the solution, or both to contentions over cultural property? Her Opening Kailasanatha reads material form to piece together an eighth-century thought world. Her Scattered Goddesses challenges categories of East and West, victim and thief, as it traces the worship, ruination, dispersal, and re-enshrinement of goddess sculptures from a ninth-century temple.

Listening to Water: The Kaveri River and Its Temples
That over one hundred temples built in the ninth to tenth centuries cluster along the long banks of the Kaveri River has been recognized since Burton Stein’s Peasant State and Society (1980). My visits to many of these temples over the last forty-five years have confirmed this pattern and supported the hypothesis that surplus wealth, and the artistic elegance it could purchase, increased in direct correspondence to temples’ proximity to the river. Now I propose to interrogate this group of temples more closely for a fuller picture of what enabled this burst of creativity and what roles water may have played in that process. Can we trace the movements of different artisan workshops? Did they rely on the river to move themselves or their materials? I will demonstrate the database I am building to explore these questions: an online resource that makes my research photo library and metadata publicly available for fair use.

2. Tamara I. Sears, Rutgers University

Tamara I. Sears is an associate professor of art history at Rutgers University. Her first book, Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India (Yale University Press, 2014), received the PROSE award in Architecture and Urban Planning. She is currently completing a second book that examines the relationships among architecture, environmental history, and travel on local, regional, and global scales. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Clark Art Institute.

Following the Flow of Water: Looking at Temple Towns Through Topography and Text
In describing the ancient city of Padmavati in the eighth century, the Sanskrit poet Bhavabhuti evokes the power of the rivers that girdle its buildings. Situated between the translucent waters of the Parvati and Sindh, the “lofty mansions, temples, and town gates” glisten in the reflecting sunlight, appearing as if they had “possessed the sky.” Such literary tropes highlight the significance of rivers in calling to mind romanticized perceptions of rural places as conveyed dramatically to elite courtly audiences. In this presentation, I take this idea as a point of departure to examine the roles that rivers played also in the pragmatics and actual practices of village and town planning in medieval India as they unfolded on the ground. I do so by drawing upon two distinct yet interrelated sources. The first are architectural treatises, which have been mined most frequently either for information regarding temples or the structure of idealized city, town, and village plans. The second draws from my mapping of the distribution of monuments, inscriptions, and fragments along the streams and tributaries of the Sindh River in central India, which suggests that builders took care to leverage not only the flow of local rivers but also a hilly landscape that facilitated the catchment of the seasonal streams formed by monsoon waters. In the process, they also reshaped the relationship between rivers and built environments, transforming the flow of water into a cultivatable resource in ways that transformed the relationship between water and land.

3. Divya Agarwal, Independent Scholar

Divya Agarwal’s work examines how sacrality is shaped through the interplay of ecology, belief, and lived practice, with a focus on the Brahmaputra River and temple culture in Assam. Her interdisciplinary practice draws on a background in engineering, decades of culture strategy, and the formal study of Indian aesthetics. A former chief strategy officer, her work has been recognized at Cannes Effectiveness, Effies APAC, and WARC. She is developing 91East Ventures, a platform for driving narratives from the underrepresented region of Northeast India; and Brajāntrā, a collective exploring rendition of Braj across regions in South Asia. Born close to the Brahmaputra, she returned to Guwahati after years in global practice, a homecoming that shapes her current scholarship.

The River’s Permission: Ecology, Ritual, and Sacrality Along the Brahmaputra
Unlike the canonical seven sacred rivers of the Hindu tradition, each feminine, each maternal, each inviting ritual immersion, the Brahmaputra is masculine. It is a son of Brahma rather than a daughter of the mountains. Dotting the landscape of Assam, it is defined by scale, volatility, and shifting channels. The region’s devotional culture reflects this material distinction at every level. This paper argues that the Brahmaputra’s ecology is not merely the backdrop to its sacred life but its most decisive agent: shaping which temples rise and endure, which islands survive, and which rituals are possible at all.
Drawing on Puranic literature, regional historiography, and ecological and geological scholarship, the paper traces the river’s sacred world across four sites: Majuli, the world’s largest inhabited river island, where Neo-Vaishnava reformist culture found refuge and now fears erasure amidst constant erosion; Kamakhya temple, where the goddess’s aniconic worship is expressed through the fertility of water; Urvashi Kund, once a site of ritual bathing now submerged, surfacing intermittently in the river’s dry season; and Ashokastami, an annual ritual where myth and hydrology converge and sacred immersion becomes possible on the river’s terms.

As climate change accelerates, ecology becomes an ever more decisive force in the making (and unmaking) of culture. The Brahmaputra has always known this. This paper maps that symbiosis, asking what we might learn from reading rivers as active agents rather than passive settings of sacrality.

4. Sara Varanese, Independent Scholar

Sara Varanese received her PhD in art history from Rutgers University in the fall of 2026 and her master’s in art history and archaeology at SOAS, London. Her background is in architectural and landscape heritage and conservation, which she studied at the Polytechnic University in Turin, Italy. While traveling regularly to Bhubaneswar to train in Odissi dance, she developed an interest in the local temples and their iconography. This led her to shift her focus to South Asian medieval architecture.

Water Architecture as Landscape Engineering in Early Medieval Bhubaneswar (6th–15th Century)
The temple town of Ekamra, modern-day Bhubaneswar, was established close to a ford on the Mahanadi River at the intersection of a route connecting northern and southern India and a riverine connection between port towns on the coast and inland plateaus beyond the Eastern Ghats. As it grew into a pilgrimage center between the sixth and fifteenth centuries, the city also engaged with the water landscape at a much more granular level.

The religious communities that fashioned Ekamra into a forest hermitage, then into a monumental kshetra, did so by continuously engaging and negotiating with the ecology of the site and its abundant waters, represented and ritually harnessed throughout the city with the iconography of lingas and nagas. Early temples were established in correspondence of preexisting water sources and hydraulic systems. The city then grew and became more densely built through clusters of temples and water tanks. Monumental temples were closely associated with the establishment of water architecture in order to drain and contain the high ground waters that characterized the site. Water tanks and embankments were not only built to provide resources for a growing population, they were also essential to support the foundations of massive temple complexes. In my research, I approach temples and water architecture as equally important components of the built landscape, a sophisticated system through which a human community established and maintained a settlement in a challenging site where water was not only a resource but also an unpredictable environmental agent.

5. Mary Beth Heston, College of Charleston

Mary Beth Heston is professor emerita of Asian art and architectural history at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. Her research has focused on the art and architecture of the Kerala region of South India, especially mural painting, bronze sculpture, and palace architecture, emphasizing Kerala’s distinct artistic and architectural contributions to South Asian art, architecture, and culture. Her current work examines and analyzes the intersection of the local and the colonial in early modern and modern architecture, in particular in royal architecture, in the former Kerala kingdoms of Kochi and Travancore. She now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The Shape of Water: The Natural and Built Environment of Kerala
This paper argues for the singular role of water in shaping the region of Kerala, today a state situated on the southwestern coast of India. Kerala is characterized by water in abundance, and I describe the nature of that abundance and the ways in which this has shaped population, settlement patterns, and the economy as well as the built environment. The distinctive architecture of the region, I suggest, can be seen as both a product of and a response to both the shape and the character of water’s abundance.

Panel 5: How a Nation Remembers: Archives, Museums, Visual Art, and Material Culture from Pakistan and India

1. Sonal Khullar (chair), University of Pennsylvania

Sonal Khullar is the W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (2015) and editor of Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia (2023). Her monograph The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia (University of California Press) and co-edited volume Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia (Routledge) will appear in 2027.

Opening the Gates: History, Memory, and Contemporary Art in Lahore, Pakistan
“Why do memorials have to be monumental? Why do we not have a partition memorial?” the artist Nisha Hasan summarized the impetus for her site-specific installation at 11 Temple Road, a home-turned-art space in Lahore, in 2022. This paper analyzes artworks executed between 2016 and 2024 by Hasan, Bani Abidi, Farida Batool, and Risham Syed, which imagine a city beyond “high walls and closed gates,” to use the critic Hajra Haider Karrar’s language for the privatization and securitization of urban space in twenty-first-century Pakistan. These projects combine media—painting, sculpture, video, sound, and installation—and take up subjects that have been occluded or effaced in official narratives of the city and nation, including civilians, refugees, gardeners, and musicians. They offer a feminist critique of monuments, memorials, and museums constructed by the state and civil society through an aesthetics of absence, fragmentation, dispersal, and failure. In so doing, they heed Kamran Ali and Asad Ali’s call for “people’s histories in Pakistan” and contribute to a growing body of counter-monuments, counter-memorials, and counter-archives in South Asia.

2. Komal Afzaal, Tufts University

Komal Afzaal is a PhD candidate in history at Tufts University and a Fulbright Scholar. Her research focuses on South Asian history, museum studies, and how identity and memory are shaped through heritage in Pakistan. Her MPhil thesis explored the transformation of the Lahore Museum from a colonial to a postcolonial museum after the Partition of India. Komal is interested in research and collaboration in postcolonial historiography and public history representation.

The Lahore Museum and the Unofficial History of Pakistan
After the Partition of British India in 1947, Pakistani historians and archaeologists played a central role in constructing an official national history that often marginalized the region’s non-Islamic pasts. This state-sponsored narrative typically traces Pakistan’s origins to the seventh century and the arrival of Islam in the Indian subcontinent while overlooking the region’s millennia-old cultural and commercial exchanges. Scholars like Ayesha Jalal and Andrew Amstutz have argued that such narratives erase the subcontinent’s pluralistic heritage to position Pakistan as an exclusively Muslim homeland. This selective memory has shaped public institutions, including the Lahore Museum. As Shaila Bhatti observes in her ethnographic study Translating Museums (2012), the museum has long been a site of negotiation between colonial legacies and nationalist reinterpretations. Since the 1960s, official guidebooks have reclassified the museum’s collections to align with the ideological project of the Pakistani state, often sidelining Hindu, Sikh, and Jain histories. Yet the museum’s diverse collection quietly resists this singular narrative. Objects such as Hindu and Jain icons, portraits of Sikh Gurus, and the statue of Queen Victoria remain on display, unsettling the homogenous vision of Pakistan as the “land of the pure.” These displays function as counter-memories that challenge the official historiography and reopen space for a more inclusive understanding of Pakistan’s past. This paper examines the Lahore Museum as a space where national identity is not only constructed but also continuously reimagined through competing interpretations of history, memory, and material culture.

3. Atteqa Ali, Newark Museum of Art

Atteqa Ali is an associate curator of Arts of Global Asia at The Newark Museum of Art. Her curatorial work at the museum includes Risham Syed: Destiny Fractured (2025) and reinterpreted permanent collection galleries (2028). Prior to joining the museum, she curated more than a dozen exhibitions at venues around the world. Her publications include Collaborative Art Praxis and Contemporary Art Experiments in the MENASA (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Play: Subversive Contemporary Art in Pakistan and the Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Risham Syed: Fracturing Environmental and Colonial Histories
Artist Risham Syed was invited to consider The Newark Museum of Art’s collection of more than 300,000 objects comprised of artworks, daily use items, religious articles, and scientific specimens. The resulting body of work was presented in May 2025, and the exhibition will continue until March 2028. Destiny Fractured juxtaposes past and present depictions of nature to provide an alternate lens to consider the relationship of colonialism, capitalism, and climate change. Syed’s mixed media art often reflects upon such serious concerns, all the while being quiet and eye-catching and luxuriating in comfort.

Conceived as a room-sized installation, Destiny Fractured offered a plush “total work of art” as a grouping of textiles, videos, trinkets, teapots, furniture, paintings, wallpaper, figurines, taxidermized birds, and a newspaper. Incited by the Pakistan flooding of 2022, the exhibition explores the history and impact of climate change. Pakistan and other postcolonial nations are often the victims of former colonizers’ blatant disregard for the environment. Their polluting processes initiated during colonialism when colonizers brought progress and development to Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This ruse has long been uncovered, but its damaging effects are yet to be understood fully from the environmental viewpoint. Syed’s exploratory offering in Destiny Fractured treads the water.

4. Daniel Waqar, Tufts University

Daniel Waqar is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Tufts University. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the legal history and social practice of “unlawful assembly” laws across colonial and postcolonial South Asia. His research has been supported by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. He was recently named an Emerging Scholar by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for his research on a “salient aspect of violence.” He received his MPhil in modern South Asian studies from the University of Oxford and his BA in history summa cum laude from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where he was awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship for public service.

An Archive of Dissent: Section 144, Visual Culture, and “Unruly” Political Assemblies in South Asia
Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Codes of both India and Pakistan is a British colonial-era law that bans small public gatherings of five or more people to protect “public tranquility” from “unruly” crowds. While most state archives across Britain and South Asia depicted these crowds as criminal, this paper uses a different visual “archive of dissent” to show how many crowds challenged these state appellations. Examining visual-material cultures on dissent in post-1980s South Asia, this paper works through a bricolage of visual culture, including photography from protest sites, posters from protest marches, music videos, and cinema to show the law’s effects on everyday life across increasingly authoritarian landscapes.

Despite Section 144’s ubiquity within state archives, marginalized groups’ voices within these archives were largely flattened there as criminal. Visual-cultural materials produced by these groups broke this silence with resistance and courage. First, the posters and calendars from the Women’s Action Forum in Pakistan, developed by female activists and artists to resist General Zia ul-Haq’s military dictatorship, memorialized pivotal protests by centering women’s defiance of police brutality meted on them through Section 144. Additionally, music videos and cinema (e.g., Pakistani pop singer Abrar ul-Haq’s song Billo de Ghar and the Indian Tamil comedy film 144) depicted the law’s absurdity by showing its effects on curfew, love, and crime across both urban and rural settings. The creation and circulation of this “archive of dissent” shows how crowds resisted (post)colonial rule by revealing the everyday illogicalities and brutalities of legal and police violence.

Saturday, May 9, 2026
ACSAA Symposium Day 2

Panel 6: Connecting the Arts and Material Cultures of South, Southeast, and East Asia ca. 1500–1900

1. Sylvia Houghteling (chair), Bryn Mawr College

Sylvia Houghteling is an associate professor of the history of art and the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies program at Bryn Mawr College where she teaches courses on early modern art, South Asian art and architecture, and textile history. Houghteling’s recent research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Yale University Art Gallery. She is the recipient of a 2026–2027 ACLS Fellowship. Houghteling is the author of The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022), which was the recipient of book awards from the College Art Association, The Textile Society of America, and the Association for Asian Studies. Her ongoing work focuses on natural dyes and the material histories of the eastern Indian Ocean trade.

2. Heeryoon Shin (chair), Bard College

Heeryoon Shin is an assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, New York. Her current book manuscript explores architectural revival, mobility, and cross-cultural exchange in eighteenth-century India through the lens of temple architecture in the pilgrimage city of Banaras. She is also developing a second project on the global circulation of blue and white ceramics and their interaction with local production and use in South Asia.

3. Joyce Yusi Zhou, Yale University

Joyce Yusi Zhou is a historian of art specializing in the art and material culture of the early modern Dutch colonial world. She recently defended her dissertation “In the Company of Her Things: Women, Art, and Material Culture in Early Modern Batavia” in the History of Art Department at Yale University. Her conference paper emerges from that project, which reconstructs the lived experiences of non-European women in early modern Batavia through the objects they made, used, or marked. Upon graduation, she will join the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore as curator of Asian export and cross-cultural art.

Patchwork Memories: Japanese Women and the Material Culture of Displacement in Early Modern Batavia
In the mid-seventeenth century, a carefully wrapped gift of tea embarked on a journey from Batavia (Jakarta, Indonesia) to Hirado, Japan. The gift came from Koshoro, one of twenty-six Japanese women and children exiled to Batavia in 1639 for their connections to European men. In dressing her gift, Koshoro constructed a patchwork wrapper out of accumulated and repurposed textile fragments from China, India, and Japan, which she then backed with a vividly painted Indian cotton. Further inscribed atop the inner wrappings is a letter addressed to Koshoro’s “aunt,” in which Koshoro expresses her deep longing for Japan, lamenting the fact that she will never be able to return home.
Where earlier attention has centered on Koshoro’s written words, this paper turns instead to the material object itself. Each fragment, thoughtfully collected and repurposed according to its origin and design, carried its own history of production, circulation, and use. In their new context as a vessel for Koshoro’s longing, they come together to form a tangible archive of her past and present. Through the interwoven practices of letter writing, patchwork assemblage, and ritual wrapping, Koshoro’s creation participated in a series of Japanese cultural traditions. Set within the wider network of textile exchange among women in Batavia, her wrapper points to how exiled women mobilized familiar material practices to navigate their new conditions of displacement.

4. Alexandra Dalferro, University of California, Berkeley

Alexandra Dalferro is the outgoing program director at the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD in anthropology from Cornell University, and she is currently revising her monograph that draws from her dissertation, which received the 2022 Lauriston Sharp Prize from the Cornell Southeast Asia Program for excellence in scholarship on Southeast Asia. It examines the history and contemporary configurations of silk production in Thailand among communities of Khmer silk producers. Her academic and curatorial interests encompass textiles and material culture of Southeast Asia; vernacular aesthetics; craft and embodied knowledge; gender and sexuality; and art, ecology, and human/nonhuman relations.

From the Royal Court to the Bangkok Street: Following Chintz Textiles Made in India for the Thai Market Across Time and Space
In 2018, the image of chut thai, or Thai dress, transformed from that of frumpy, formal garb to hip, versatile wardrobe staple across Thailand. Scholars, media figures, and members of online and offline communities traced the trend’s origin to the hit historical-romantic drama series called Bupaysanniwat, or “Love Destiny,” which premiered early that year, as well as a new royal festival designed to commemorate Thailand’s monarchs. Many of the chut thai that were donned as festival wear and as daily dress were assembled using pha lai chintz fabrics. Starting in the early sixteenth century, pha lai were produced in India for the Siamese/Thai market according to local preferences and specifications. While available in Siam/Thailand since then, production locations and methods, as well as chintz patterns and aesthetics, have changed over time.

In this paper, I take seriously both the historical and contemporary trends of wearing pha lai, exploring the multivalent significances of chintz over time and the ideas and relationships that their production and use materialize. Thinking about pha lai as it appears in museum collections, at royal spectacles and festivals, on diverse bodies, and more, I consider the heterogeneous connections and intimate impressions that people develop with and through these textiles amidst and despite their concurrent conservative, royalist framings.

5. William H. Ma, Louisiana State University

William H. Ma is an assistant professor of art history at Louisiana State University, specializing in the artistic exchanges between China and the world in the late-imperial and modern periods. His research interests include material culture, theories of ornament, colonial representations, Jesuit missionary art, Cantonese export art, and the arts from the Qing court. Recently, he has expanded his area of research to Vietnam, examining works of art from the Nguyen court in the context of Sinitic influence and French colonial imposition.

Moving Shards, Moving People: “Chinese” Ceramic Decorations on the Exterior of Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Buildings
From buildings in the imperial citadel at Huế to historical Buddhist temples and shrines, some of the most popular ways of ornamenting the exterior of these structures were through colorful ceramic decorations, either as intricate designs made by repurposing broken ceramic into mosaics (khảm sành sứ) or as programs of glazed Cây Mai ceramics depicting auspicious flora and fauna. These two modes of ceramic production and display were the results of various waves of migrants from southern China settling in different areas of Vietnam from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

This presentation will briefly examine how these two modes became indigenized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Vietnam. On one level, I examine the process of translation by paying close attention to how local artisans manipulated and appropriated the appearance and function of these two traditions by using local materials and techniques. Viewing from a wider perspective, this investigation is the beginning of a larger project on how vernacular arts can reimagine and reframe a cultural regionalism distinguishable from the dominant narrative of a singular Sinitic or Sinophone sphere, which spanned from the three most southern provinces of China to Vietnam and to immigrant Chinese communities scattered throughout Southeast Asia.

6. Holly Shaffer, Brown University

Holly Shaffer is an associate professor in the history of art and architecture at Brown University. Her work includes Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 (2022); an exhibition catalogue Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850, with Laurel Peterson (2026); essays on the term “Company painting,” with Yuthika Sharma (Archives of Asian Art), eclecticism (Art Bulletin), picture-rhythms (Art History), exhibiting taste (Huntington Library Quarterly), ephemeral architecture (Journal 18), artistic translation (Modern Philology), and art and evidence (Third Text); and editing Ars Orientalis 51 on the graphic arts.

Routes and Fruits: Artists, Plants, and Paintings Traveling Across Asia
This paper discusses the intersections of British, Indian, and Chinese artists, works of art, and artistic materials in relation to the Dutch and British East India Companies, alongside the goods in which they trafficked. I focus on the letters and drawings that the British East India Company official James Forbes created and compiled in India from 1765 to 1784. In these albums, Forbes was particularly attuned to the Dutch management of agricultural plantations and to the goods that they transferred, many of which he purchased, including taxidermized birds from Java and still life paintings of birds, flowering plants, and fruits from China. The genre of still life has long been equated with trade and the import of exotic goods, rare birds and fruits, porcelain, and spices through East India Companies. Here, I address the colonial sources of the fruits depicted in those still life paintings, and the artists, arts, papers, pigments, and other goods that moved among colonial entrepots. This talk will be grounded in the exhibition Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850, which is on view at the Yale Center for British Art in 2026.

7. Hawon Ku, Seoul National University

Hawon Ku is an art historian with a special interest in the visual cultures of early modern and contemporary South Asia. She is presently a visiting scholar at the South Asian Studies Council, Yale University. Hawon’s current project, funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea, examines the patronage of art and architecture by Indian and English women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Asia. This has led to studies in women’s history in India as well as research on Jain women’s patronage of temples and civic institutions in Gujarat or the late eighteenth-century portraits of Mary Impey.

Traveling Through the Asias: Marianne North and Her Paintings in Material Culture
Marianne North (1830–1890) is well known for her botanical paintings preserved at Kew Gardens, London. However, while traveling through Asia, she also left a number of landscape and architectural paintings, mostly from India but also with a few examples from Japan and Indonesia. These paintings expose nineteenth-century Western perceptions of various regions in Asia, within which intra-Asian connections were obscured to emphasize the dichotomy of civilized/uncivilized. In this presentation, I examine her paintings of plants and buildings and suggest how they may have enforced/challenged the ideas of femininity and botanical paintings as well as the practice of collecting.

Panel 7: Making, Meaning, and Method in South Asian Art

1. Mika Natif (chair), George Washington University

Mika Natif is an associate professor of art history at The George Washington University, specializing in Islamic art and cultural exchanges between Muslim societies and Europe. Her research focuses on Islamic painting and illustrated manuscripts from Mughal India, Central Asia, and Iran. She authored Mughal Occidentalism (2018) and co-edited Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art (2013). Her current work explores women’s portraiture, patronage, and artists in Mughal India, including a forthcoming monograph on Hamida Banu Begum, Emperor Akbar’s mother. Natif has held fellowships from MIT, Harvard, the Mellon Foundation, Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and Dumbarton Oaks.

2. Sonya Rhie Mace, The Cleveland Museum of Art

Sonya Rhie Mace has been the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art since 2012. Since her arrival in Cleveland, she reinstalled the permanent collection galleries of Indian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan art and organized such special exhibitions as Tantra in Buddhist Art (2013), Art and Stories from Mughal India (2016), Beyond Angkor: Cambodian Sculpture from Banteay Chhmar (2017), and Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain (2021). Her areas of research center on the imagery of monks and nuns in sculptures and manuscripts of premodern India.

Getting the Job Done
When a coherent series of sculptures or paintings includes works made in different styles, art historians propose one of several explanations for the visual variations. Often, they posit that stylistic changes imply chronological evolution and the addition of later work. Alternatively, differences in style can be attributed to the participation of artists from other regional workshops with different training and levels of experience who contributed to the work of completing a large-scale project within a limited period of time.

This paper presents evidence to suggest that the last explanation may obtain in two vexed cases of large serial works from premodern India, one made in stone for a Buddhist site during the first century BCE in southern India and the other made with gum tempera on paper for a Hindu patron around 1700 in the Pahari kingdoms of northern India. An examination of the variations found within the fifty-nine double-panel relief slabs at Kanaganahalli and the pictorial “Shangri” Ramayana of more than 640 folios reveals similar strategies for accomplishing an ambitious project before a presumed deadline. This study foregrounds the importance of considering artists’ processes in the evaluation of visual and epigraphic imagery.

3. Ariana Pemberton, University of California, Berkeley

Ariana Pemberton is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley studying the material cultures of South Asia and the medieval Indian Ocean World. Her work explores transregional connectivities, materials and materiality, and histories of the nonhuman, using these approaches to reconsider what objects can reveal about power, identity, and belonging across the premodern world. Ariana is currently writing her dissertation on ivory carved objects from South Asia dating between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, tracing ivory across three sites—the shrine, the court, and the bedroom—and her talk draws directly from that final chapter.

The Elephants in the (Bed)room: Ivory Bed Plaques from Twelfth- to Fifteenth-Century Odisha
The elephant was always in the room. Elephant ivory was equally significant in the bedroom. My paper focuses on a corpus of nine ivory-carved bed plaques (one of which is in the collection of the National Museum of Asian Art) produced in Odisha between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The bed plaques depict mithuna, or amorous couples, engaged in arousing scenes of generative union. Rather than focusing on their iconography, however, I propose that the material of ivory enlivened these love-making scenes; that the scenes, in other words, illustrate the efficacy of the material. To demonstrate this, I trace the formal, talismanic, and medicinal qualities of ivory. While its luminous whiteness and fine scent aligned it with the poetic emblems of romantic culture, its phallic form carried talismanic associations of fertility and cornucopian abundance. The material essence of ivory was understood to carry the elephant’s varcasam—its vigor and luster—into contact with the human body. Despite the corporeal and formal ruptures that occurred in its transformation from tusk to sculpture, ivory retained a symbolic and physical potency that had been associated with elephants for millennia. By taking their erotic subject matter, their utilitarian function as bed ornaments, and their material into primary consideration, I propose that these plaques functioned as visually evocative and materially auspicious aphrodisiacs, and that the elephant—transformed but never absent—remained an animated presence in the most intimate spaces of courtly life.

4. John E. Cort, Denison University

John E. Cort is professor emeritus of religion and international studies at Denison University. His research deals with ritual, history, visual culture, and literature of western India, with a focus on the Jains. Among his publications is Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has been a regular attendee and presenter at ACSAA since 1996 and twice served on the board of directors.

What Is Jain About Jain Art?
On the occasion of the publication of Janice Leoshko’s Making a Canon (2024), Marcus Bank’s Jainism as Social and Visual Practice (2025), the special 2025 issue of Marg on Jain art in the seventeenth–twenty-first centuries edited by Phyllis Granoff and Nandita Punj, and the catalogue of the exhibition Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings (2025) by the Fowler Museum at UCLA, I ask in this paper some questions about the term “Jain art.” In several essays, Marcus Bank’s asked whether there even is such a thing as Jain art, and if there is, what relationships might it bear (or not) to “art” as understood in Western culture and academia. More recently, Janice Leoshko, in part echoing Carolyn Dean, a scholar of ancient Americas, has asked a similar question: “What is Buddhist Art?” In this presentation, I argue that despite all the conceptual problems raised by the term “art,” we can still identify a distinctively Jain visual aesthetic (to use another problematic term) that binds together a Jain approach to the visual and material. This aesthetic involves a dynamic interplay between practices and expressions of stability, equanimity, and dispassion on the one hand and celebration and wonder on the other.

5. Elena Pakhoutova, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art

Elena Pakhoutova is senior curator at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art with a PhD in Asian art history from the University of Virginia. Her background in Tibetan Buddhist studies informs her interdisciplinary interests in Buddhist art and ritual, art production and patronage, material culture, narrative in Tibetan visual culture, and contemporary Himalayan art. She curated several thematic exhibitions that introduce and contextualize Tibetan and Himalayan art, including Death Is Not the End (2023) and The Power of Intention: Reinventing the (Prayer) Wheel (2019). The current traveling exhibition Gateway to Himalayan Art is an integral component of Project Himalayan Art. The project, which she co-leads with Dr. Karl Debreczeny, aims to introduce Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian Art into high education curricula for teaching on Asia across disciplines.

Creating an Aware Culture: New Generation of Art Collectives in Ladakh, Exile Tibetan Communities, Bhutan, and Nepal
This presentation focuses on art collectives in Bhutan, Nepal, Ladakh, and exile Tibetan settlements in India formed in recent years, including Shesrig, sā Ladakh, Khadok (Dharamsala), VAST Bhutan, ArTree Nepal, and others. However distinct the intentions of their founders, they highlight their wish to address universal concerns, such as ecology/environment, sustainability, and education within their specific cultural spheres.
The presentation considers how collectives’ educational engagement with art and interest in connecting with globally positioned networks, while actively working with local communities, reshapes cultural and artistic production and generates new social awareness across generations. Moreover, agency and activities of the collectives, artists, and the engaged communities underscore respect and renewed interest in cultural preservation. The presentation also considers how these movements may differ due to varied regional and societal contexts—whether aimed to amplify local Himalayan versus exile Tibetan voices, or to function within regulated national settings in India, Bhutan, Nepal—and what these differences may imply in specific circumstances and at large, including varied modes of funding and sponsorship.

6. Akshaya Tankha, University of Washington

Akshaya Tankha is an assistant professor of South Asian art at the University of Washington, Seattle. He tracks how religious, ritual, and secular understandings of the image, space, and time animate works of art, photography, museums, and monuments in India. His book project, “Nagaland and the Art of Indigenous Presence in Postcolonial South Asia,” explores what critical resources like ideas regarding the sentience of material and space in the work of artists, cultural practitioners, and curators in the Indian state of Nagaland tell us about the contemporaneity of art outside metropolitan contexts and the political significance of the aesthetic in the Indigenously inhabited and politically contested borderlands of South Asia.

“The Sound of a Metal Pipe Meeting Flesh”: Textile Painting and Women’s Labor in Nagaland
In the early 1990s, just a few years into her job as a historian in Tuensang, Nagaland, Iris Odyuo’s peaceful night was broken by the “sound of a metal pipe meeting flesh” coming from the neighborhood. It wasn’t the first time that she had an intimate experience of violence that was at the time commonplace in the Indigenously inhabited state in northeast India, which had been home to an armed movement for political autonomy from the Indian state from 1953 to 1997 when a ceasefire agreement between Naga nationalists and the Indian armed forces brought the conflict to a provisional end. But it was the first day she began to take her work as an artist seriously. Odyuo paints on canvases fashioned from textiles woven by Naga rural women with pigment sourced from locally tended Indigo plants, enacting an artistic practice and a sense of the environment where nature, culture, and labour cannot be thought apart. In this paper, I will explore Odyuo’s work, which creates networks across the domains of the domestic—including work associated with the kitchen, the hearth, the handloom, and the garden—and the public as an artistic responsiveness to the structural conditions of patriarchy that marginalize women’s work in the male-centric worlds of Naga art and politics. Resonating with the gradually unfolding acts of solidarity in the arena of Naga activism led by women, I will also demonstrate how it also underscores the political significance of the aesthetic in the Indigenously inhabited postcolonial South Asia.

Panel 8: Goddesses and Women

1. Hillary Langberg, Bard College

Hillary Langberg is a visiting assistant professor in religion, art history, and visual culture at Bard College. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications include The Tantric World, a co-edited volume (forthcoming, 2027), and an in-progress monograph, Goddesses of the Great Vehicle: The Centering of Female Deities in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism, which places visual and textual sources in conversation to unearth key historical developments. She was the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholar at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (2022–2024) where she co-curated the exhibition The Art of Knowing in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas, and curated the online exhibition Wisdom of the Goddess.

2. Robert DeCaroli, George Mason University

Robert DeCaroli, professor of South and Southeast Asian art history at George Mason University, is the author of Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism. His second book, Image Problems: The Origin and Development of the Buddha’s Image in Early South Asia, explores the artistic origins of the Buddha’s image. He has been awarded a Getty Research Institute Fellowship and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship. More recently, he co-curated Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and co-edited the volume Buddhism and the Senses: A Guide to the Good and Bad.

Women’s Workings: Early Terracottas, Magic Rites, and the Possible Origins of Warrior Goddess Imagery
Although warrior goddesses are a familiar aspect of Hinduism, their origins are far from clear. The Vedic sources describe fearsome goddesses of disease and misfortune. However, these transgressive goddesses are never (to my knowledge) described as hale or militant in their demeanor. Yet contemporary terracotta plaques and figurines provide widespread examples of female figures brandishing weapons or wearing them in their hair. The most notable examples are the “Proto-Durga” images that depict a female figure standing in triumph over a buffalo. The exact identity of these figures remains unclear, but they may be connected to a type of avenging figure that appears in an unusual context. Descriptions of embodied curses are found in the Arthavaveda and Kauśikasūtra. It appears that the discontent could use secret rites to create something called a kṛtyā. A kṛtyā is a physical object that serves as the embodiment of vengeance empowered by ritual actions. The small figure or object was buried in the path of an unwitting target who walked over it. Once triggered, the talisman allowed the creator’s will to become manifest as a sort of spirit (also called a kṛtyā) that pursued their creator’s destructive aims. The early texts invariably gender kṛtyās as female, and these priestly texts are exclusively focused on defusing and disposing of such curses after they are discovered. The precision and caution detailed in this process resembles a bomb squad defusing an explosive. This paper will examine possible connections between kṛytās and the development of warrior goddess imagery.

3. Dessie Vendova, College of the Holy Cross

Dessie Vendova is a visiting lecturer in Buddhism in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. Before this, she served for two years as the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholar in the Art of Asia Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received her PhD in religion from Columbia University, where she specialized in early Buddhism and Buddhist art. Dr. Vendova’s research focuses on the role of the Buddha’s life story in the early textual, visual, and material transmission of Buddhism from South Asia to East Asia.

Calling the Earth to Witness: Text and Image Reconsidered
One of the most recognizable episodes from the life of the Buddha is the defeat of Māra, closely tied to Śākyamuni’s Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. From as early as the second–first century BCE, this scene became central in Buddhist art, though its textual and visual representations vary considerably across regions and periods. A key moment is the bodhisattva’s gesture of touching the ground with his right hand—the bhūmisparśamudrā—often explained as calling the earth to witness his Enlightenment. Yet this interpretation oversimplifies the gesture. Rather than asking the earth to affirm his Awakening, the bodhisattva, challenged by Māra, summons the earth deity to testify to his worthiness to sit upon the seat of awakening. This claim rests on countless acts of generosity in his past lives, meaningfully connecting this moment with the Buddha’s extended life story.

This paper revisits the episode by drawing on early textual and visual sources from South and East Asia. Some texts describe only the bodhisattva’s touch of the ground, accompanied by an earthquake, while others feature the Earth Goddess herself. In certain depictions, she even emerges holding a water pot—a motif long treated as lacking textual attestation. I demonstrate that overlooked textual versions of the Buddha’s life preserved in Chinese (but of South Asian origin) provide striking parallels to this representation, thereby providing long-sought textual grounding for the image. Placing these sources in dialogue, this paper highlights the dynamic interplay of text and image in shaping early Buddhist narratives and ritual imagination.

4. Yagnaseni Datta, Worcester Art Museum

Yagnaseni Datta is an associate curator of Asian and Islamic art at the Worcester Art Museum, where she oversees collections, exhibitions, and strategic acquisitions. Her work foregrounds cross-cultural exchange, community collaboration, and the reinterpretation of global art histories through more inclusive narratives. She has curated major gallery renovations and exhibitions that connect premodern and contemporary practices across Asia. Datta previously held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Jewish Museum in New York, and the National Museum of Scotland. She earned her PhD in the history of art from Yale University, specializing in Mughal visual culture.

Containing the Demoness: Karkatī, Tantric Resonances, and the Mughal Imagination
This paper examines the representation of Karkatī, the man-eating rākṣasī of the Laghu-Yogavāsiṣṭha, as translated and visualized in the Persian codex of the Jūg Bāshishta produced at the Mughal court in 1602. In the Sanskrit text, Karkatī embodies cholera and is described as a monstrous figure who undergoes spiritual transformation through dialogue with a king. In the Mughal manuscript made for Emperor Akbar, her form and narrative are mediated through translation into Persian prose and painting, which cast her as both an allegory of physical affliction and a vehicle for philosophical instruction. This paper situates her imagery within contemporaneous Śākta-Tantric iconography, noting resonances with terrifying goddesses whose liminal bodies simultaneously repel and protect. By juxtaposing her depiction with visual idioms from both Indic and Persianate traditions, the analysis highlights how the codex negotiates tensions between fear and desire.

I argue that Karkatī’s monstrous femininity provided a powerful means for articulating Mughal authority, wherein the emperor appears as the ultimate arbiter capable of containing and redeeming dangerous marginal figures. Her transformation from devourer to seeker echoes imperial strategies for incorporating peripheral communities into the fold of Akbar’s cosmopolitan polity. At the same time, the manuscript’s visual choices—such as the stylization of her body and her placement in courtly landscapes—suggest an attempt to domesticate the unsettling potential of Tantric imagery for Persian-reading audiences. The paper thus demonstrates how Karkatī’s translation illuminates broader Mughal investments in rendering Indic philosophy and its threatening margins legible, governable, and ultimately productive for imperial ideology.

5. Vaishnavi Patil, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Vaishnavi Patil is a research associate for South and Southeast Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She earned her PhD in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University, where her dissertation analyzed sculpture across Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jain traditions to explore how the concept of “motherhood” shaped the religious landscape of early South Asia. She previously held positions at the Harvard Art Museums and the Mapping Color in History project, where she conducted research on Indian paintings.

The Goddess as Mother, Mothers as Devotees
The goddess Ambika or Kushmandini features prominently in Jain shrines of the first-millennium CE. This paper reinterprets one such image—a seventh-century stone stele of the goddess Ambika from the Meguti Temple at Aihole, Karnataka—to demonstrate how maternal identity functioned as a form of both ritual and political agency in early medieval South Asia. Reading the sculpture closely, I demonstrate the unique aspect of the Meguti Ambika image, where a female devotee presents a male child to the goddess, collapsing the conventional divide between donor and deity and positioning a mortal mother as an active participant within a sacred space. This representation is analyzed alongside sculptural and literary examples that similarly depict mothers as ritual actors to articulate how the feminine, particularly the mother, participated in sacred spaces. Furthermore, the presence of a possible portrait of a human mother also raises the question of how such an image may have operated within the political register during the reign of the Chalukyas of Badami. By comparing this image with other instances of royal portraiture, I argue that representations of motherhood also served as assertions of political authority, with this image potentially functioning as a portrait for a Chalukyan queen seeking to legitimize her lineage or status. This sculpture, therefore, exemplifies how an elite mother mobilized her maternal identity to assert both ritual and political agency through visual representation.

6. Khushmi Mehta, The Graduate Center

Khushmi Mehta is a PhD candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in modern South Asian art. Her dissertation examines the development of artistic and pedagogical practices at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda from the 1960s to the 1980s. Currently, she is the Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Intimacy as a Structural Principle: Nilima Sheikh’s Painted-Drawings
Through the 1980s, artist Nilima Sheikh created a number of painted-drawings (as she terms them) depicting routines of her domestic life, the birth of her children, and the loss of her mother—speaking to the shared but often unarticulated experiences, preoccupations, and struggles of women. Analyzing this period of her practice, my paper examines why she turns away from the medium of oil on canvas for intimate works on paper at a time when her contemporaries in Baroda were creating oil paintings that grew more narratively complex and ambitious in scale. Sheikh says of the shift in her imagery in the 1980s, “the birth of my children changed my life and worldview as nothing else had, precipitating a recognition of intimacy as the structural principle of my new life.” Picking up on this observation of hers, I analyze her artworks through the lens of “intimacy as a structural principle.” Through a study of her personal archive, which includes a host of documents detailing laborious processes of tempera painting, research papers on miniature painting traditions, and diagrams of specific tools, I argue that notions of care, attention, and intimacy are reflected in both her subject matter and the techniques used to develop her visual language.

Panel 9: Practices of Representation: Image, Matter, and Mediation

1. Karin J Zitzewitz (chair), University of Maryland

Karin J Zitzewitz is a professor and chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a specialist in the modern and contemporary art of South Asia and the author of Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991–2008 (2022), The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (2014), and The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art: Stories and Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (2003). She curated exhibitions by Pakistani artist Naiza Khan (2013) and Indian artist Mithu Sen (2014) for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. Her research has been supported by the European Research Council, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the Fulbright program. She is a former chair of the editorial board of Art Journal and Art Journal OPEN.

2. Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen, The University of Rochester

Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Rochester, where she teaches modern and contemporary art with a specialization in South Asia.

The Hushed History of Oblivion: Sosa Joseph’s Slave Stories
In 2023, the Indian artist Sosa Joseph (b. 1971, Parumala) exhibited a series of paintings in South Africa titled The Hushed History of Oblivion: My Homage to the Victims of the Slave Trade from My Neighborhood and Beyond. The paintings, in lush green, coral, and purple, develop early modern histories of forced African migration within Portuguese and Dutch empires to South India and develop biographies for the lost histories of the 500,000 slaves traded in the Indian Ocean on Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish ships from Kochi to Cape Town, Mexico City, and the Caribbean to “cultivate wheat, barley, rye, and grapes in the Cape Colony, work as porters . . . nurses and grave diggers . . . in Cape Town, [and] Manila, toil in sugar and cocoa haciendas and . . . peddle sugar and other produce through the streets of Acapulco and Mexico City.” In response, Sosa introduces spiritually resilient, culturally ambiguous figures: Anima, abducted from Joseph’s neighborhood two centuries before she was born; Lucia, from Malabar, “tried by the Inquisition in 1626 for assaulting a crucifix”; and Catarina de San Juan, also known as China Poblana, venerated by Catholics in Mexico, taken from Kochi. Describing Joseph’s paintings as a character history of materialism—in which figures enflesh absent histories and become specular protagonists—and drawing on close readings of Saidiya Hartman and Ranajit Guha, I ask what they tell us about histories of enslavement.

3. Shivani Sud, Reed College

Shivani Sud is an assistant professor of art history and the humanities at Reed College, Portland. She earned her PhD in the history of art from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2022. Her upcoming book Painting Worlds: Jaipur and the Global Eighteenth Century examines painting from eighteenth-century Jaipur as theorizations of urban modernity. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Nehru, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Shivani’s teaching places South Asia in a global context, with courses on environmental histories, colonial art, photography, and Indian cinema.

Mercantile Materialities in Eighteenth-Century Jaipur Painting
Founded in 1727 as the new capital of the Kachhwaha dynasty, the regional city of Jaipur emerged as a major center of urbanism, art, and trade in eighteenth-century India. From within this dynamic cultural matrix, Jaipur’s artists developed a transcultural pictorial language that combined images of global maritime trade with Jaipur’s own urban design. My talk examines this little-known genre of painting to offer new insights into art and regional urbanism in the eighteenth century. By collapsing multiple geographies and urban forms into a single image, these paintings produced a distinctive vision of urban modernity. I argue that they translated the circulation, liquidity, and flows of the global eighteenth century into new visual forms of urban space. As such, they materialized a changing consciousness of place shaped by expanding trade networks, new credit systems, growing mercantile influence, and the intensified movements of people and goods. By tracing the paintings’ material supports to reused ledger books and financial documents, this talk further demonstrates how new artistic forms were themselves metonyms of the shifting economic structures of the eighteenth century. I conclude that this genre compels a rethinking of the global beyond frameworks centered on imperial ports and coastal exchange. As such, the paintings reveal regional cities like Jaipur as active sites for theorizing eighteenth-century urban modernity, grounded not in a singular Western model of rationalized space but in “pluriversal urban complexities” shaped by multiple, coexisting spatial logics.

4. Anjali Duhan-Gulia, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, Haryana

Anjali Duhan-Gulia is an associate professor of art history in the Department of Visual Arts, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, Haryana. She is a former fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Her research contributes to understanding the intellectual and religious history of the Mughals by examining illustrated Persian manuscripts that were translated from Indian sources. Her publications include The Dvādas Bhāv: A Mughal Version of a Sanskrit Story (Brill and IIAS, 2025), “Reinterpreting Figural Representation” (Marg, 2024), “The Transition of the Khāksār to the Nāth Yogi via Gor Khatri” (Routledge, 2022), and “Overcoming Framing Devices: The Ramtā Nāth Vairāgī in Mughal Painting” (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021).

The Dvādas Bhāv: Analyzing the Intermediality
The Dvādas Bhāv is a recently published illustrated Mughal manuscript, created for an imperial Mughal in the last decade of the sixteenth century. The manuscript was sold by Sotheby’s London on July 11, 1972, as part of Lot 45 in the form of individual miniatures, which are currently preserved in several private and public collections. Due to the absence of the complete Persian text and associated miniatures in a single location, several important aspects remain unanswered. These include the significance of the text in relation to the patron, the translator, concerns about the reception/usage of this manuscript, and the art-historical symbolism and value of the miniatures and their painters. This research seeks to address these questions. After taking into account the entire Persian text and the paintings, it can be safely stated that this Persian text is a romance with roots in classical Sanskrit literature. This research aims to understand how intermediality—by intertwining the mediums of text and visuals—plays a significant role in forming meanings. How the Mughal intellectuals/professionals belonging to these disciplines, through their specific knowledge traditions, interpreted, adapted and made the Indian narrative more meaningful for the elite Mughals will be discussed. The conclusion examines the concerns about the reception/usage of this manuscript.

5. Anchit Jain, University of Delhi

Anchit Jain is a PhD candidate at the University of Delhi and has taught as a guest lecturer at Delhi College of Arts and Commerce (2023–2025). His doctoral research examines the Caityavāsin Jain monastic tradition alongside an independent project on monastic representation in Jain art. He has served as researcher for the Temples of India Digital Heritage Project (Jio Institute) and instructor for a course in Jain art and archaeology (Deccan College). He has presented at major international conferences and is a recipient of the Global Philosophy of Religion: Junior Scholar Stipend, UGC-JRF, ICHR grant, and V&A SSRG-IN award.

Monastic Representations in Early Medieval Jain Art: Visualising Monastic Developments, Didactics, and Discourses
This paper examines the diverse visual representations of Jain monks and, in rare cases, nuns in early medieval Jain art across regions such as Central India, Rajasthan, and the Deccan. While earlier examples are known from Mathura, the early medieval period witnesses a marked proliferation of monastic imagery across temple architecture, narrative panels, pedestals, and independent sculptures. Despite this wide presence, such representations have received limited scholarly attention, as studies have largely prioritized Jina images and other deities.

The paper argues that these images were not merely ornamental but formed part of a broader visual discourse that articulated monastic identity, authority, and conduct in dialogue with textual and epigraphical traditions. Monks are represented as spiritual exemplars, objects of devotion, and authoritative teachers, often commanding reverence from both lay followers and royal patrons. In several instances, visual motifs invert worldly hierarchies by depicting kings bowing before ascetics, reinforcing the ideological centrality of monastic authority.

The study further highlights depictions of monks as intellectual debaters and defenders of doctrine, as well as didactic representations contrasting ideal and corrupt monks. Regional variations reveal distinct visual strategies and sectarian differences, particularly in practices such as alms giving. The paper also draws attention to the relative absence of nuns, whose representations remain marginal and rarely independent. By situating these visual forms within their historical and doctrinal contexts, the paper demonstrates that monastic imagery played a crucial role in shaping and communicating evolving ideals of Jain monasticism in early medieval India.

6. Anna Lise Seastrand, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Anna Lise Seastrand is an associate professor of art history at the University of Minnesota and Early Modern History Professor & Union Pacific Trustee for Early Modern Studies. Her research explores the multisensory experience of painting within the sacred and ritual spaces of South Asia. She is the author of Body, History, Myth: Early Modern Murals in South India (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Theater of Kings: The Mimetic Arts of Sucindram’s Gopuram
Mural paintings that decorate the temples and palaces of South India act in concert with the actions that occur in their midst: they depict the gods, kings, saints, and donors associated with the place; they depict the festivals celebrated there; and they relate the histories of both historical and mythical individuals and traditions. They are a kind of mise-en-scène, providing the setting, mood, and figures appropriate to their setting and to what might happen there.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, South Indian murals began to reflect, and to reflect upon, their staged qualities. This paper will focus on the murals of Sucindram, located in the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore. These fascinating paintings, executed to resemble oil paintings, and set inside golden frames hung from trompe-l’oeil nails, insist on their own mediation. They call attention to mimetic effects and play with levels of mediation. The murals cite earlier paintings, studio photography, kathakali dance-drama, and Parsi theater. Throughout, the murals take great interest in the many ways of staging their subjects.

There will be two exhibitions relating to South and Southeast Asia on view at the National Museum of Asian Art.

• Of the Hills: Pahari Paintings from India’s Himalayan Kingdoms
• Vishnu’s Cosmic Ocean

Several exciting exhibitions will be taking place at proximate museums at the time of the symposium. Extend your trip or team up with other ACSAA members for field trips.

• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Great Mughals: Art, Power, and Opulence, May 9 to August 23, 2026
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Epic of the Northwest Himalayas: Pahari Paintings from the “Shangri” Ramayana, April 19 to August 16, 2026.
• Cincinnati Art Museum, Longing: Painting from the Pahari Kingdoms, 1680–1820, February 6 to June 7, 2026.
• Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts
• Walters Art Museum

The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) is an organization dedicated to advancing the study and awareness of the art of South Asia and Southeast Asia and the Himalayan regions. In addition to the biennial symposia, ACSAA pursues these goals through various projects, including its annual bulletin, bibliographies, a color slide project, a microfiche archive, and outreach materials. Since its incorporation in 1967, ACSAA has grown from its original fifteen members to an organization of some three hundred individuals and institutions. ACSAA is formally affiliated with the College Art Association (CAA) and the Association of Asian Studies (AAS).

Established a century ago, the National Museum of Asian Art was the Smithsonian’s first art museum. Committed to preserving, exhibiting, researching, and interpreting art in ways that deepen our collective understanding of Asia and the world, the museum stewards one of North America’s largest and most comprehensive collections of Asian art.

Its rich holdings bring the arts of Asia into direct dialogue with an important collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American works, providing an essential platform for creative collaboration and cultural exchange between the United States, Asia, and the Middle East.

Beginning with a 1906 gift that paved the way for the museum’s opening in 1923, the National Museum of Asian Art is a leading resource for visitors, students, and scholars in the United States and internationally. Its galleries, laboratories, archives, and library are located on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and are part of the world’s largest museum complex, which typically reports more than 27 million visits each year. The museum is free and open to the public 364 days a year, making its exhibitions, programs, learning opportunities, and digital initiatives accessible to global audiences.