At this lecture, sponsored by the Interwoven project, Dipti Khera (NYU) considered the letters that Jain merchants sent between 1400 and 1900 to invite eminent monks to their towns. The letters presented an opportunity to explore how the projects of globalizing and decolonizing art history address these kinds of scrolls and scraps.

Northern and western India’s well-traveled Jain merchants commissioned numerous letters between 1400 and 1900 to invite eminent monks to their towns. They sought to entice recipients with pictures of urban places and completed journeys. In a letter sent from the port of Diu, ca. 1666, painters and scribes juxtaposed the vignette of Jain monks and nuns who would walk long tracts of land on foot with the image of Portuguese merchants who had crossed the vast expanse of sea on ships. How do the projects of globalizing and decolonizing art history address these kinds of scrolls and scraps, and their marked wear and tear? What types of objects do we privilege in writing the history of peregrination? How do the perspectives of local bazaars and transregional journeys on inland frontiers feature in the discussions of early modern oceanic travels?

Read Dipti Khera’s paper, "Arrivals at Distant Lands: Artful Letters and Entangled Mobilities in the Indian Ocean Littoral."