Professor Jinah Kim, “Telling Forest Stories in Color: An Early Sixteenth-Century Illustrated Hindu Manuscript from the Delhi Sultanate and the Indic Art of the Book”
Art History Colloquium
December 6, 2024
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM America/Chicago
The earliest surviving illustrated manuscript of the Hindu epic, Mahābhārata known to us is a manuscript now in the Asiatic Society, Mumbai(966-B.D.245). Completed in July 1516 CE during the reign of Sikander Lodi of the Delhi Sultanate, this exceptional manuscript presents the third book of the Mahābhārata, the Book of the Forest (Āraṇyaka Parva) with dynamic and colorful illustrations. Although known to art historians working on Indian painting following the publication of a short monograph on the manuscript in 1974, the manuscript remained unseen in the library’s reserve collection for safekeeping and conservation concerns. In a historic collaboration under the aegis of the Mapping Color in History [MCH]-India, this manuscript along with five other art historically important manuscripts were examined by the MCH-India mobile heritage lab in 2022-2023, which provided thorough documentation of each manuscript’s physical conditions and non-invasive analysis of pigments. Based on the findings from the MCH-India on-site analytical campaign, this talk will situate the manuscript’s importance in the history of the Indic art of the book: its inventive layout and synergistic text-image relationship depart from the template for designing Indic religious manuscripts while the narrative setting of the book, i.e. Paṇḍavas adventures in forests, seems to have inspired the manuscript makers to cultivate fresh pictorial language and colors to channel changing ecological awareness.
Jinah Kim is the George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University. She teaches courses on the art and architecture of South and Southeast Asia. She received her B.A. in Archaeology and Art History from Seoul National University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Kim’s research and teaching interests cover a broad range of topics with special interests in intertextuality of text-image relationships, art and politics, female representations and patronage, issues regarding re-appropriation of sacred objects, and post-colonial discourse in the field of South and Southeast Asian Art.
Date posted
Dec 2, 2024
Date updated
Dec 2, 2024