UC Berkeley

The city of Jaipur (today, an UNESCO World Heritage Site, located in the western Indian state of Rajasthan) was founded in 1727 to serve as the new royal capital of the Kacchvahas, a dynastic family that had established itself in Rajasthan in the eleventh century. From its very establishment, Jaipur was an important commercial center, a global intellectual hub for scholars, and the locus of intense artistic experimentations. Jaipur’s founder Jai Singh II had invited merchants, artists, and craftsmen from different regions in India, Jesuit missionaries, and scholars of varied socio-cultural backgrounds to make Jaipur their home, shaping a cosmopolitan, intellectually stimulating, and commercially productive environment. As early as the 1720s, the Kacchvahas started collecting European books and maps and patronized European cartographers at their court. By the 1880s, Jaipur’s rulers had transformed their capital into a modern metropolis with a Public Works Department, an art school, and a museum in collaboration with British administrators employed by the court. A broad archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art from Jaipur not only testify to the depth and range of artistic experimentations but also foreground the new materialities, media, and genres that had developed in Jaipur, a city described in nineteenth-century European travel accounts as the “Paris of India.”Despite the cosmopolitan ethos of this dynamic urban center, regional Indian painting has been inscribed within multiple discourses—colonial and nationalist—that demarcate the local as a site of authenticity. The British Orientalist James Tod had exalted the kingdoms of Rajasthan for their custodianship of medieval feudal cultural values, even in the nineteenth century. Following Tod, the nationalist art ideologue Ananda Coomaraswamy had specifically valorized Rajasthani court painting as a provincial artistic practice that upheld “traditional” Hindu values and aesthetic ideals derived from fifth-century art. Setting aside the dexterous experimentations of artists in the regional courts of western India, Coomaraswamy—a scholar who has been seminal for the study of Indian painting— had chosen to present regional Indian painting as not only a conservative, traditional, and slow-changing art form but also an “authentic” Hindu genre of painting. Following early twentieth-century art history, more recent survey texts, exhibition catalogues, and other publications on regional Indian painting have overwhelmingly framed the seemingly hybridized paintings developed during the period of British colonial rule as illustrative of the end of regional Indian painting. Indeed, scholars have argued that the establishment of British colonial art institutions and the introduction of modern technologies of representation such as photography propelled the fragmentation of a seemingly homogenous local painting tradition by the mid-nineteenth century. This has impoverished our understanding of both the material practices of colonial India and the history of Indian painting in a longue durée. This dissertation proposes a renewed, critical engagement with the historical imbrications of regional Indian painting and global eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art worlds. Far from a conservative, slow-changing art form, I suggest that paintings from Jaipur exemplify a worldly, flexible, and highly perceptive artistic imagination, signaling the transcultural ethos of regional Indian cultures. Studying a range of materials—eighteenth-century paintings that integrate the conventions of contemporaneous European prints; nineteenth-century paintings that draw from European landscape painting and photography; architectural drawings; and more—I examine how artists engaged with, appropriated, and even disrupted the pictorial conventions of different art forms to shape new identities, visualities, and representations in and of Jaipur. By recognizing visual practices as acts of world-making, I seek to highlight the production of artistic knowledge about the world from the margins of empire. Far from reproducing empirical, if not imperial, visions of the world, I demonstrate that paintings from Jaipur engender and reflect distinct ways of seeing and knowing the world that are shaped by local cultural practices, political ideologies, and cosmographies. This dissertation thus foregrounds painting as an instrument and a mode for visualizing and reconceptualizing the terrain of modernity vis-à-vis the shifting socio-economic and political contexts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each chapter examines the reworking of multiple artistic traditions into a new style of painting. Chapter one examines how Jaipur painters translated eighteenth-century European perspective prints into new perspectival paintings that reproduced local ideals of urbanism and modernity. Chapter two analyzes the role of transregional networks of trade, pilgrimage, and mobility in shaping a new style of popular bazaar paintings that convey local epistemologies of the colonial world. Chapter three studies depictions of Jaipur in nineteenth-century painting and photography to trace not only how depictions of Jaipur changed over time but also to identify the technologies, motives, and aesthetics that shaped a new, modern visuality of the city. The conclusion of the dissertation traces three subsequent moments in which Jaipur’s visual identity is redefined: the development of a new aesthetics of ornamentation in Jaipur’s visual cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the re-inscription of vernacular traditions and epistemologies within Jaipur’s modern architecture; and Jaipur’s insertion into the global world heritage arena as an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019. Each chapter thus identifies and analyzes the constitutive processes of articulating modern subjectivities and worldviews though pictorial representations of the city and its spaces. The founding of Jaipur took place against the backdrop of a shift in political power, from the stronghold of the imperial Mughal Empire into the hands of new regional Indian rulers and European trading companies. During this crucial transitional period, Jaipur’s position as a vital commercial node of India formed an important part of the city’s residents’ vision of themselves and their kingdoms—a vision that took material form in the painting cultures of the city. This dissertation investigates the discursive construction of Jaipur and the colonial world through their various spatial, visual, and material productions. The material archive of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings from Jaipur reveals a series of pluralistic images of the colonial world that developed from within transregional networks of mobility, zones of social interaction, and multiple loci of artistic acculturation. Indeed, the global flows of commerce, trade, technologies, and pilgrimage served as catalysts for an imagination of the world in Jaipur. The world, however, that is imagined is not a replication of Western modernity; rather, it is a deliberate reworking of global modernity through local epistemologies, cosmologies, and ways of seeing.