Arts of South Asia

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

All India Museum Summit 2019

Last December AIIS received a grant to hold a three-day Museum and Heritage Conservation Summit meant to "bring together museum professionals in India including curators, administrators and conservationists, as well as some alumni of the Art Conservationist Fellowships, [so they can] engage with each other and American counterparts on important aspects of running museums and other heritage institutions in the twenty-first century, and . . . share best practices and develop creative, innovative, and sustainable programs." At the end of the summit, a white paper on advancing India's museums will be drafted for the Ministry of Culture, Government of India,

I recently received an announcement indicating that the summit will take place on July 22, 23, and 24, 2019 at the India International Centre, New Delhi.

Visit https://allindiamuseumsummit.com for more information.

The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal

Now on exhibit (through Janaury 12, 2014) at the Royal Ontario Museum: Between Princely India and the British Raj: The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal. From the Deepali Dewan, the museum's Senior Curator, South Asian Visual Culture:

"During his lifetime, the path-breaking and prolific lensman Raja Deen Dayal (1884-1905) was one of the most widely recognised photographers from the Indian subcontinent. Today he remains among the most celebrated figures from this earlier era. This book brings together for the first time extensive archival research with close analyses of the significant body of Dayal's work preserved in the Alkazi Collection of Photography. Over the course of his remarkable career, Dayal opened studios in Indore, Secunderabad, and Bombay, employing over fifty staff photographers and assistants. Together, they produced more than 30,000 images of architecture, landscape, and people that have played a central role in how India's past has been visualized. This volume explores varied topics, from Dayal's public works, state visit, and hunting photographs to his images chronicling India's elite and growing middle classes. In this way, lays the groundwork to rethink the history and practice of photography in India: as a commercial business, as an engagement with new technology, and as an aesthetic enterprise. It also demonstrates photography's unique trajectory in India and its inseparability from a larger world history of photography. This publication includes several appendices, including a Key to Dating the photographs produced by the Dayal Studio."

Also available via Mapin Publishing:

Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-century India
Deepali Dewan and Deborah Hutton
2013, Mapin and The Alkazi Collection of Photography
240 x 275 mm (9.45 x 10.8 in)
Hardcover, 232 pages, 161 colour photographs
ISBN 978-81-89995-76-8 (Mapin)
Rs.3,950.00 | $75.00 | ?48.00 | ?59.00
http://www.mapinpub.in/bookinfo.php?id=219