Race in South Asian Art

This panel emerges from a desire to understand race in South Asian art. Race often involves circumscribing a group of people based on some physical difference, whether real or imagined, and giving that difference an ethical and hierarchical significance. Drawing on the scholarship on the artistic legacies of various racial groups, including African, Greek, Middle Eastern, and European communities in South Asia (e.g., McLeoad and Robbins, “The Image of the Black in India,” 2017), we are interested in asking whether and how such difference finds its way into representation.

How might Mauryan sculptures be reinterpreted if we knew that Greco-Roman physical features were deemed desirable at the time? Could we rewrite a history of portraiture from the perspective of African generals in the Deccan or F. N. Souza’s “Black Paintings?” How does colonialism structure and produce racial categories, and how do anticolonial and postcolonial aesthetic theories reproduce or challenge them? Does race extend our discipline to the tombs of enslaved Turks, Dravidian film and video cultures, and contemporary indigenous resistance?

We are aware that race is a fluid, difficult to describe, socially constructed, category. And yet, it is urgent to consider its workings in our scholarship and in our classrooms. We welcome proposals that discuss any aspect of South Asian art and architecture, including its diasporas, from artists, curators, critics, conservators, and scholars across the humanities and the social sciences, and especially invite conceptually innovative approaches, including those that critique our premise.