Kashmiri Painting: Little Known, Much Misunderstood

Speaker: Karuna Goswamy

March 11, 1994 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Dr. Karuna Goswamy teaches History at Panjab University, Chandigarh and has lectured extensively in India and abroad. Her doctoral dissertation on Vaishnavism in the Punjab Hills and Pahari painting is an authoritative work on the subject. Subsequently she has authored two more books and numerous research papers which have been published in national and international journals. Her work on Kashmiri painting completed while she was a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, is the first ever study of the subject.

The talk will focus on the work of the Kashmiri painters and draw attention to the extraordinary range of their oeuvre and its bold, visually exciting stylisation, illustrating it through carefully chosen slides. Kashmiri painting traces its roots to the great tradition of Buddhist monasteries on the one hand and Persian painting on the other. Illustrated manuscripts in what is roughly called the `Kashmiri Style’ are to be found all over Northern India, and the talk will seek to explain this uncommon phenomenon of absorption and diffusion.