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Visual Philology for a Child’s Cosmos in Fifteenth-Century Hindustan
17 October 2024, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm
For this Research Seminar, we welcome Vivek Gupta (UCL) for a talk on 'Visual Philology for a Child’s Cosmos in Fifteenth-Century Hindustan'.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Queenie Lee – History of Art
Location
-
IAS Forum (G17)South WingLondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
How did bookmakers take apart old manuscript genres to create entirely new ones in Islamicate South Asia? A multilingual illustrated dictionary, The Key of the Learned, made in Central India, ca. 1490, sheds light on this question. This lecture reveals how the artists of the Key harnessed a visual philology to craft a book that could refine the aesthetic sensibilities of children or learners just at the beginning of their education. By inhabiting the world of fifteenth-century book culture, I offer two speculative lessons offered by the Key: the visual narratives of the Kalila wa Dimna and the transmedial concept of color-changing polychromy.
Image: Kazhmazh (mixed language of a child), Miftāḥ al-Fużalā’ of Shadiyabadi, Mandu, ca. 1490, 33 x 25.4 cm, British Library Or 3299, f. 228b.
About the Speaker
Vivek Gupta
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London
Vivek Gupta is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London. He is currently finishing his first book, Worldshaping Wonders: Books and Visual Knowledge in Hindustan under contract with Oxford University Press in the British Academy Monographs Series. His second project, Manuscript as Monument, focuses on the relationship between bodies, calligraphy, and ornament across media in the Bahmani Deccan. He is also co-curating Hindustani Airs: Songs Between Empires at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, with Senior Curator, Suzanne Reynolds.
More about Vivek Gupta