In this episode I, Kamayani Sharma, am in conversation with art historian Aparna Kumar, recipient of the inaugural UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize in 2021 for her dissertation on the Lahore Museum — Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia (UCLA, 2018).
We discuss the South Asian museum as a locus of studying Partition through art history, how the work of artist Zarina influenced this dissertation and the violent logistics and rhetorics of dividing civilisational heritage.
We touch upon the challenges of cross-border scholarship and how the subcontinent’s contemporary religious nationalisms continue to be reflected in the visual and material archives of its fissures.
Click here to access the Image+ Guide & view the material being discussed in the podcast: https://sites.google.com/view/artalaap-podcast-resources/episode-13
A full list of textual references is also available in the Image+ Guide.
Meet Our Guest
Aparna Kumar is a Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South in the Department of History of Art at University College London. She received her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary South Asian art, twentieth-century partition history, museum studies, and postcolonial theory. Before joining UCL in 2020, Aparna was a Lecturer in Art History at UCLA, and a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
Kumar’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Fulbright-Nehru Research Program, the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS), the Critical Language Scholarship Program, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation project, Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia, was awarded the inaugural UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize in 2021.
Credits:
Producer: Abhishek S
Intern: Priya Thakur
Images: Aparna Kumar
Design & artwork: Mohini Mukherjee
Marketing: Dipalie Mehta
Additional support: Raghav Sagar, Kanishka Sharma, Amy Goldstone-Sharma, Shalmoli Halder, Arunima Nair, Jayant Parashar.
Audio courtesy: Vernouillet by Blue Dot Sessions [CC BY-NC 4.0]
Contents: 1.34 - 8.35 – Aparna’s academic journey.
8.36 - 15.56 – Writing on South Asian visual culture through the Partition and the Lahore Museum.
15.57 - 17.17 – How Zarina’s works inspired by the Partition influenced this dissertation.
17.18 - 22.39 – The museum and material archive as a site of conflict and contestation.
22.40 - 27.08 – The “travel itinerary” of Mohenjo Daro’s Priest King and Dancing Girl*.
27.09 - 35.04 – The language used to discuss Partitioned objects.
35.05 - 43.19 – The machinery of the Partition enters the Lahore Museum.
43.20 - 45.32 – The problem of the border and the “regional” as an analytic.
46.34 - 50.02 – The problem of cross-border access for South Asian scholars.
50.03 - 55.07 – Scholars whose work made possible and informed this dissertation (listed in References).
55.08-1.01.18 – Contemporary hypernationalism and its effects on culture: the case of India’s National Museum and the Central Vista Project.
1.01.19-1.07.43 – The return of the Priest-King to Pakistan: what does repatriation mean in the subcontinental context?
