Time and Place:
Friday and Saturday, October 9-10, 2026
101 Hahn Hall
420 N. Harvard Avenue
Claremont, California 91711
Description and Schedule
In recent years, scholarship on eighteenth-century India has opened new lines of inquiry, decisively moving past earlier debates about the period. As a part of this work, scholars have interrogated what constitutes the archive of the eighteenth century, and they have developed novel ways to approach it. This workshop explores the theme of archival materialities in eighteenth-century India expansively, considering topics such as scribal and artistic practices; the tactility of archives, manuscripts, and texts; the role of objects in commercial, bureaucratic, socioreligious, and ceremonial spaces; cartographies of cities, landscapes, and climate; the centrality of visual culture and the built environment; and materialist histories of the sciences and their diverse phenomena.
Presented by the Department of History, the Department of Art History, and the Academic Dean’s Office of Pomona College
Description and Schedule
Friday, October 9
9:30–10 a.m.: Welcome and Introduction
Chanchal Dadlani, Art History, Pomona College
10–11:30 a.m.: Cosmographic Arts and Sciences
Murad Khan Mumtaz, Art and Art History, Williams College
“The Mi‘raj in Eighteenth-Century Hindustani Painting”
Arash Khazeni, History, Pomona College
“Archive of the Seven Spheres: The Astral and Earth Sciences in the Eighteenth-Century Deccan”
Moderator: Nile Green, History, University of California, Los Angeles
1–2:30 p.m.: Tactile Archives
Sylvia Houghteling, Art History, Bryn Mawr College
“The Worm in the Archive: Tracing Silk and Sericulture in Eighteenth-Century South Asia”
Yael Rice, Art History, Amherst College
“The Erotics of Empire: Touch, Textiles, and Muraqqa‘s in Mughal South Asia, c. 1720–1800”
Moderator: Zirwat Chowdhury, Art History, University of California, Los Angeles
2:45–4:15 p.m.: The Materiality of Encounter
Rishad Choudhury, History, Oberlin College
“A Portrait of the Mercenary as a Nobleman: Mughal Portraiture and Prosopography in the ‘Company School’ of Art”
Mrinalini Rajagopalan, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
“Matters of Imagination: Reading an Image and Text Archive in the Long Eighteenth Century”
Moderator: Durba Ghosh, History, Cornell University
4:30–5:30 p.m.: Keynote Lecture
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, History, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Mughal World and the Danske Ostindiske Kompagni”
6–6:30 p.m.: Salar Nader, Artist in Residence, Pomona College
“Naqqarakhana: Drums of the Afghan Durrani Court”
Saturday, October 10
9:30–11:30 a.m.: ‘Immaterial Archives’
Abhishek Kaicker, History, University of California, Berkeley
“In Praise of Immaterial Things: Books in the Life of the Mind of an Eighteenth-Century Intellectual”
Sunil Sharma, World Languages and Literatures, Boston University
“Persianate Palimpsests: The Tale of the Four Dervishes”
Robert Travers, History, Cornell University
“Immaterial Facts: An Indo-Persian Counter-History of the British Empire in Eighteenth-Century India”
Moderator: Oliver Cussen, Geography, University of California, Berkeley
1–2:30 p.m.: Urban Materialities
Dipti Khera, Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
“Unfurling: Scrolls, Streets, and Histories Relayed from Eighteenth-Century Bazaars in Western India”
Naveen Kanalu, History, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris
“The Infrastructure of Imperial Urbanity: Administering the Material Landscape of Mughal Cities in the Early Eighteenth Century”
Moderator: Chanchal Dadlani, Art History, Pomona College
2:45–4:15 p.m.: Reimagining the Documentary Archive
Subah Dayal, History, New York University – Gallatin
“Routes of Regulation: Transit Permits, Everyday Life, and the Afterlives of Mughal Archives”
Samira Sheikh, History, Vanderbilt University
“Tracing Knowledge: Maps, Documents, and Archival Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Western India”
Moderator: Penny Sinanoglou, History, Pomona College