Inlaks Research and Travel Grantees for 2020: Mrinalini Sil, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Himani Upadhyaya
The Inlaks Research and Travel Grantees for 2020 are Mrinalini Sil, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Himani Upadhyaya. All three PhD candidates have uniquely interesting areas of interest.
Mrinalini is a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her PhD thesis aims to better understand the transition of power, politics and culture from the Mughals to the East India company via the Murshidabad paintings from Bengal.
Siddhartha is also a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is conducting research about the history of electricity in colonial and post-colonial India circa 1900- 1984.
Himani is a student at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. Her research topic delves into knowledge-production under colonial rule and examines surveying and map-making in the central Himalayan region of British Kumaon in the nineteenth century CE.
Mrinalini Sil
Neither Mughal nor Company Paintings? What do we talk about when we talk about Murshidabad Paintings?
This is a question that has been addressed to me many a times whenever I have mentioned that my research is on Murshidabad paintings. Often I have had to resort to the more familiar Mughalesque painting traditions to explain that I work on a ‘Provincial-Mughal’ variant of painting that gradually led to Company paintings with a shift in patronage and was based out of the Nizamat capital of Murshidabad (in Bengal). This, however, has proved to be a rather inadequate and vague reply as I have progressed in my researching endeavours.
The eighteenth century in India was dramatic to say the least and that have occasioned major debates and deliberations for many generation of scholars. Moving beyond the reign of the Great Mughals and the subsequent decline narrative of the eighteenth century if one has to understand the art and patrons of art in the transitional period between waning of Mughal power and rising British Empire one must study the regional histories and so the last decade have seen academic attention being spent on studying painting traditions in enclaves like that of Mughal Delhi, Rajput States and the Deccan. A very significant regional power of the East, Bengal Nizamat, based out of Murshidabad, supplies us with a very important strand to add another layer in this understanding of the arts in the transformative period. The eighteenth century in Bengal bore witness to a plurality of developments in various spheres and cultural, social, political and religious boundaries were extremely permeable during this time. Murshidabad being the nerve center of the power, politics and authority of the Bengal Nawabs, it offers an excellent opportunity to study the waning of the imperial Mughal control, the flourishing of the Nawabi circles and the eventual emergence of the colonial presence. Locating my PhD thesis in this juncture, my attempt is to chart out a ‘heteroglot’ art history of this site and this time where art became a site for dialogical engagements with the known and the strange, the imperial Mughal and the emergent colonial, sketching a mimetic phase where flexible strategies of art production extended beyond imitation and appropriation of previous artistic styles to interact with the contingent political, social, religious and commercial concerns that were neither timeless nor entirely universal but deeply embedded in the transitional period of the long eighteenth century.
The paintings and illustrated manuscripts produced in the then Murshidabad are today dispersed around the world and have found a place in almost all major public and private collections of Europe and America. Rooted in the long history of colonial rule in South Asia the formation of these collections as well as the collectors like Robert Clive, Sir Elijah Impey or Jean Baptiste Gentil make for compelling accounts of a transregional exchange which highlights the complex cultural entanglements of this period. Painting activities in pre modern Bengal remaining pretty unexplored for most parts, my PhD project currently seems like a jigsaw puzzle of innumerable missing pieces. With this grant, the attempt in my thesis will be to bring to the fore some of these pieces (mainly from the UK) not only in the form of the paintings and manuscripts but also through archival records of art auctions, manorial estate records, private and Company correspondences to provide an understanding of painting activities in Murshidabad which will essentially involve sketching a picture of a site of art production that reflects the complex, variegated nature of society, in its layering of classes and through its historical changes over time.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
My interest in electricity is a result of an unusual combination of the ‘academic’ and the ‘autobiographical’. As a child, I was fascinated with what electrical switches could do. Back then it seemed that there was something magical about them which could make a room habitable in a second. Like a lot of other houses in the 90s’, ours had black toggle switches with circular base. It seemed to me that these circular objects played a crucial role in structuring my everyday life even though they were out of my reach because of their location. These switches would announce the beginning and end of the bedtime, control the hours of indoor games and were the obvious instruments for lessons in economy of power consumption. It is precisely because these were sites of multiple modes of discipline, that playing with the switches in the absence of family members became a favourite past time. Access to the switches gained with the help of wooden chairs led to a ‘brave new world’ where controlling technologies brought freedom and pleasure.
I thought that this fascination with technology was rationalized in physics classes until I came across a course on sociological analysis of the colonial period in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The course taught us how to study histories of seemingly mundane objects that helped people to get on with their daily lives in British India. One of the key takeaways of the course was an evaluation of the role of technology in making lives liveable. It was through this course that I could reconnect with my early fascination with electrical switches. I figured that physics lessons had been unable to rationalize my affective connections with electrical technology. It was a coming together of the ‘autobiographical’ and the ‘academic’ that was both unique and unexpected. Affected and influenced in such ways, I became interested in examining how electricity shaped colonial and postcolonial Indian society. As I began to explore electricity’s impact on Indian society, I became aware of various journals, reports and technical debates related to the subject that are not available in Indian archives.
The Inlaks Grant will help me to look at many such documents which can be accessed in the libraries and archives in the United Kingdom. By enabling me to procure the missing pieces, it will allow me to complete the jigsaw puzzle that I have been constructing for my doctoral thesis. In tracing the larger histories of electricity, the hope is to retain fragments of my past afternoons- a number of which were spent in trying to play with disciplinary regimes by operating the switchboard.
Himani Upadhyaya
My research explores mapping and surveying as sites of scientific knowledge-production about the Himalayas. My study is situated in the regional context of British Kumaon, a non-regulation province in the northern frontier of the British Indian empire in the nineteenth century CE. Focussing on practices of geography and botany, I aim to investigate the varied roles played by local and indigenous communities - as guides, porters, intermediaries and native surveyors - in knowledge-production about the mountains.
The IRTG grant shall help me travel to London in order to access crucial archival material at three institutions primarily – Royal Geographical Society, Royal Botanic Gardens and the British Library. There I will study historical maps, private papers and correspondences of military and civil officials of the East India Company who surveyed and mapped the physical geography of Kumaon Himalayas. I will also observe and study botanical specimens in herbaria collected by British officials and surgeon-naturalists who travelled in Kumaon and its high-Himalayan Tibetan frontier.
Currently, I am a PhD candidate in History at Ashoka University, Sonepat. I completed my postgraduate studies (M.A. and M.Phil.) in modern Indian history from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. I have also worked in two interdisciplinary projects on transboundary conservation and development in the Himalayas - the Sacred Himalaya Initiative of the India China Institute, The New School; and the Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Nepal.
