Description: The Place of Many Moods by Dipti Khera - A look at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century.
Dipti Khera
The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Oxford and Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2020) uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place. It looks at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century, and what they reveal about the political and artistic changes of the era.
In the long eighteenth century, artists from Udaipur, a city of lakes in northwestern India, specialized in depicting the vivid sensory ambience of its historic palaces, reservoirs, temples, bazaars, and durbars. As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. This book explores how Udaipur’s artworks—monumental court paintings, r