Name: KOMMAREDDI LECTURE SERIES |Romancing the Stone: Gendering Jewels in Colonial and Post-Colonial India
Start: 2024-10-19T17:30:00-04:00
Location: 1120 E Kearsley St, Flint, MI, United States, Michigan 48503

KOMMAREDDI LECTURE SERIES
Romancing the Stone: Gendering Jewels in Colonial and Post-Colonial India
Saturday, October 19 | 5:30p | FIA Theater | FREE Admission
Dr. Siddhartha V. Shah, Guest Lecturer
Jewels have long played an essential role in fashioning the auspicious Indian body, as evidenced even in the earliest art excavated on the subcontinent. In the Indian context, the ideal body—full of vigor and beauty—is always the body adorned and it is, in particular, the royal male body that is most heavily ornamented in jewels. The importance of jewels in styling monarchical power in India was a point of severe criticism and judgment from the British during their extended rule over the Subcontinent while they also appropriated the practice for their own imperial aims, especially in the final decades of the British Raj. This talk examines the importance of fashion and jewelry in styling imperial power, with an emphasis on the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond that is now a part of the British Crown Jewels. The presentation examines the display and treatment of the legendary jewel since it was 'given' to Queen Victoria, the role of jewelry in shaping colonial fantasies about a weak and subordinate Indian masculinity, and ongoing considerations about what jewelry says about power, value, and identity.
Siddhartha V. Shah is the John Wieland 1958 Director of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. He was previously the Director of Education and Civic Engagement and Curator of South Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, which is home to one of the leading collections of modern Indian art outside the subcontinent. Dr. Shah earned his BA in art history from Johns Hopkins University, an MA in Hindu philosophy and Jungian psychoanalysis from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a PhD in art history from Columbia University. His academic and curatorial projects have been featured in publications ranging from The Times of India and India Today, to The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today.