Edited by Debra Diamond and Dipti Khera
How and why did painters center sensory experience, enchanting emotions, and cultural landscapes in South Asia? A Splendid Land is the first book to address this question through dazzling paintings made over a period of two hundred years that extends from Mughal to colonial India. The works have never been published or exhibited in the United States.
Around 1700, artists in Udaipur began creating large, immersive paintings to convey the mood (bhava) of the city’s palaces, lakes, and mountains. "A Splendid Land" explores how painters depicted places, mapped terrains and triggered memories to foster political and personal attachments to land. By examining social networks, ecological relations, and pleasurable pursuits, and by drawing upon previously untranslated sources and engaging with the history of the senses, the catalogue opens early modern art history to new interpretative possibilities.
400 pages, with approximately 150 full-color illustrations
Published 2022