Salila Kulshreshtha

The Buddha seated in deep meditation having renounced all desires; Shiva performing his cosmic dance in a ring of fire or a Mughal emperor seated in his court in all his regal splendor are some of the most reverberating and paradoxical motifs of South Asian art. The course offers a survey and analysis of the aesthetic diversity of art from South Asia within a historical and socio-cultural perspective. Much of what we understand as art today are relics of the past, icons of devotion or objects of decorative and everyday use. Through the medium of sculpture, paintings, illustrated manuscripts, calligraphy and architecture the course will help to cultivate an art historical vocabulary, explain the visual symbolism, discover the language of sacred and ritual representations, and underscore the power of myths and narratives which give life to these motifs. Covering a broad time period- from the pre-historic to the 19th century the course will focus upon select themes of South Asian art. In the process, the course will address questions of representations of body, landscapes, image making, patronage, individual artists and their styles, materials, techniques and aesthetic turns.

The early architecture from South Asia is very diverse, belonging to various religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Islam. The course addresses the complex ways in which consciously or unconsciously people of varied religious communities engage with shrines and sacred spaces. Ritual and worship are just one of the many roles that shrines and temple spaces have. In the context of South Asia, shrines have also provided a space for social and political interaction and growth. At the same time certain sites and shrines in South Asia are also associated with people who arrived into the region from other parts of the world. Moving beyond merely their aesthetics and architecture, the course will examine temples, shrines and their associated iconography in sculptures and paintings, to explore the diverse ways in which devotees, patrons and visitors have engaged with temples, shrines and their larger cultural landscapes. The course will further explore how through patronage, rituals, pilgrimage and art, shrines came to be associated with a sense of place, historical memory and sacred cartography.

How did the familiar, powerful, and problematic narratives of civilizations emerge that pit the "East" against the "West"? What are their consequences? Where and how have they been resisted? The course will analyze texts, events, images, and places that were influential in shaping these representations of the Orient/East, as well as key efforts, including Edward Said's, to outline the political consequences of such narratives. How was the Orient first encountered, written about, and even "produced" by European adventurers, travelers, and artists who "discovered" and "described" the people and places of the "East" in the 18th and 19th centuries? How did the travel writings, paintings, photographs, monuments, and museums that resulted both narrate the Other and simultaneously construct the "West" as well? Carefully considering Said's important theorization of Orientalism and a range of responses to it, the course will extend the applicability of these concepts to regions beyond the Middle East, especially South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, and will also consider such topics as gender, ethnography, aesthetics, and the shaping of post-colonial identities.

Students cannot take CCEA-UH 1094X if they have completed CCEA-UH 1078X

What can different notions of the sacred teach us about human relations throughout the world, throughout time? How do sacred sites, artworks, and practices illuminate the deepest possibilities for human connection, healing, and reconciliation? And how do they represent what we stand to lose through environmental extraction and degradation? Historically and today, the sacred has been located within nature, within built environments and material culture, and within the dynamic actions of the human body. As ancient myths reveal, the sacred is a precious - and sometimes tragic - contact zone between gods, peoples, and animals, and it is also a contested place of ideologies and identities. Sacred art and culture also present ethical tensions for research and collecting practices of museums and ethnographers. This colloquium explores case studies from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and draws on religious studies, sociology, art and architectural history, film, literature, historic preservation, museum theory, and performance to help us understand the global implications of endangered, thriving, and ever-evolving worlds of the sacred today.

Prerequisite: Must be an NYU Abu Dhabi student and have not completed the Core: Colloquium requirement.

This course offers an opportunity for in-depth study of the history and culture of the South Asians who comprise the majority population of the United Arab Emirates. Situated at the center of the Indian Ocean world, the Indian subcontinent is currently home to over a billion people, and is the site of richly interconnected histories with regions around the wider Indian Ocean, including the Gulf. The course explores these histories, with a focus on understanding major cultural, political, economic, and environmental connections and changes as they affected ordinary people (including migrant laborers) and shaped the nature of collective identities (ethnic, national, religious, caste, class, gender, regional, and linguistic) over time. In developing an understanding of how collective identities were produced historically, students ultimately acquire valuable tools for appraising and navigating competing models of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism in the wider Indian Ocean world today.

The course will explore the beginning of colonial museums in Europe, in particular the early museums established in Britain, France, Belgium and Netherlands in the 19th and the 20th centuries. Set against the backdrop of empire building, the course will discuss how museum spaces, collections, display and labeling of objects was planned to fit the colonial ideology of racial supremacy and territorial conquest on the one hand, and establish the "otherness" of the colonial subjects on the other. The museums were also meant to display the "splendors" of the colonies such as crafts, flora, fauna and minerals, produce knowledge about the acquired territories as well as disseminate this knowledge among museum visitors. Finally, the course will shift the focus to colonial museums of South Asia and analyze how museum-making has shaped the way in which we understand the history and heritage of these former colonies and how these museums are being restructured in the present day, post-colonial world.

The Indian Ocean has provided an important avenue for the movement of people, traditions and ideas over centuries. The course explores the cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean world with the spread of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and later Christianity. How are the different regions of the Indian Ocean littorals tied together through networks of piety, pilgrimage and mythologies? Do the surviving material remains that dot the littorals - built structures, religious iconography, inscriptions, maps, travelogues, legends and poetry of traveling saints and mythologies about the Oceanic waters itself, attest this dynamic exchange and interconnectedness? How do the circulation of people, relics and mythologies connect the hinterland with people and places across the waters?