In 1959, the University of Malaya Art Museum (predecessor institution of the NUS Museum) received a first-of-its-kind donation of fifty-five objects and one hundred photographs from the Government of India. Drawing on her recent publication, Priya Maholay-Jaradi will read this donation beyond its apparent geo-political and diplomatic connotations, i.e., the culturally hegemonic proposition of the Indianization of Southeast Asia, and India’s diplomatic gesture in a new regional order. Instead, she will situate the donation along the conjoined tracks of decolonization and Third World solidarities, and nation-building and modernization. Relatedly, she will uncover the overlapping political, institutional, and personal contexts of the mid-twentieth century which steered this donation.
Speaker: Priya Maholay-Jaradi, Convenor for Art History & Senior Lecturer at the Department of History of the National University of Singapore
Moderator: Jinah Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art and Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University
Priya Maholay-Jaradi is Convenor for Art History, a collaboration between National University of Singapore (NUS), the National Gallery Singapore, and the Singapore Art Museum. Jaradi served as assistant curator (South Asia) at the Asian Civilisations Museum (2005-2007). She is the author of Fashioning a National Art: Baroda’s Royal Collection and Institutions (1875-1924), Oxford University Press (2016), and volume editor of Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition, Mumbai: Marg Foundation (2015). Jaradi’s ongoing research uncovers the contributions of collections, curricula, and pedagogies to revisionist art histories and historiographies of South and Southeast Asia, particularly, India and Singapore.
RSVP: https://mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu/event/revisiting-the-1959-artifact-donation
