Abstract: Long illustrated letters, sent by Jain merchants invited eminent monks to walk vast tracts of land on foot and spend the next monsoon season in their city. Through such invitations, vijnaptipatras, scribes and painters sought to entice recipients with images of flourishing places and striking visualizations of the invited monk’s future assemblies. Their pioneering pictures mingled imaginary and completed journeys and thereby hoped to stir emotions such as curiosity, awe, and wonder. Composed in and transmitted from bazaars, these letters critically expand the kinds of sources we access to globalize and decolonize histories of art and mobility. The excess inherent to panegyrical representations of place and the emphasis on emotions of plentitude and pleasure in painted letters often reveal unexamined moods and memories of India’s long eighteenth century, alongside the lesser-charted politics, patrons, and publics that shaped early modern and colonial India.
Dr. Dipti Khera teaches in the Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She holds the American Institute of Indian Studies-National Endowment for Humanities Senior Fellowship and is affiliated with the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her book, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur's Painted Lands and India's Eighteenth Century, was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in Indian Humanities by the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her recent co-edited volumes include the catalogue for the exhibition A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, and two special issues, "The 'Long' Eighteenth-Century?" Journal18 and Readings on Painting: From 75 Years of Marg.
