Why this book excites me:
Arts of South Asia offers "a collective approach to previously unrecorded histories about how the arts of South Asia were sourced for external appreciation and about a variety of economic, political, and social forces that enabled 'collecting.'" [p1] While I'm mostly interested in the sections exploring artworks that have been "kidnapped" (authors' word), the book also deals with art that has been produced for "translocal consumers," with local and possibly global circulation in mind.
I'm also intrigued by the chapter on Coomaraswamy, for obvious reasons, but also because he played such a large role in shaping the Indian painting collection at the Boston MFA.
Arts of South Asia: Cultures of Collecting
Allysa B. Peyton and Katherine Anne Paul, Editors
University Press of Florida, 2019
ISBN 9781683400479
Hardcover, 296 pages, $65.00
Table of Contents:
Introduction (Allysa B. Peyton & Katherine Anne Paul)
Chapter One: “Relating to a Country So Distant”: Collecting South Asian Arms and Armor at the Tower of London during the Nineteenth Century (Natasha Bennett)
Chapter Two: Objects across Empire The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (Deepali Dewan)
Chapter Three: Colonial Collecting in Ceylon: Dispersing the Hugh Nevill Collections across the British Isles (Sushma Jansari)
Chapter Four: “We Want Quality and Condition”: The Formation of Chester Beatty’s South Asian Manuscripts and Miniatures Collection (Hyder Abbas)
Chapter Five: Collecting with Éclat: Coomaraswamy and the Framing of Indian Art in American Museums (Brinda Kumar)
Chapter Six: Nasli Heeramaneck: The Consummate Collector and Connoisseur (Pratapaditya Pal)
Chapter Seven: Masterworks of South Asian Art at the Newark Museum: From Missionaries, Merchants, Medical Women and Men (Katherine Anne Paul)
Chapter Eight: Collecting and Curating Indian Art in Southeast Asia The Asian Civilisations Museum and the Indian Heritage Centre, Singapore (Gauri Parimoo Krishnan)
Chapter Nine: Returning “Home”: The Journey and Afterlife of Repatriated Objects (Melody Rod-ari)
Appendix A. Publicly Accessible Collections of South Asian Art outside South Asia
Appendix B. Higher Education Programs for South Asian Studies
Appendix C. Selected Histories of Global Collecting
