The Erotics of Empire: Mughal Albums and Visible Bodies, c. 1720–1800 with Yael Rice

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Yael Rice (Amherst College / Short-Term Beinecke Fellow) focuses on South Asian albums (muraqqa‘s), the patronage of which originated among just a handful of sixteenth and early seventeenth century Mughal and Deccani royals. By the eighteenth century, however, the pool of album patrons exploded across the Mughal Empire, as had the numbers of albums. No longer the purview of princes, emperors, and sultans alone, albums were now made for, collected by, and gifted to provincial governors, Europeans, and minor nobles. The same period also saw the focus of albums shift as depictions of women—very often undressed or clothed in diaphanous muslin—came to assume a much higher proportion of the codices’ pictorial repertoire. Focusing on the decades between 1720 and 1800, this talk asks how and why so many muraqqa‘s bearing such images were produced at this time, and it seeks to situate these materials within broader histories of empire, gender, and media in South Asia.

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Page from an album assembled in northern India, late 18th–early 19th century. British Museum, London, 1920,0917,0.12.6.