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There are few students who’ve been devoted to finding out museological phenomena in India with the rigour and dedication of the artwork historian, creator and institutional builder Kavita Singh. Writing on “the museum in an age of spiritual revivalism,” Singh and her collaborator, the artwork historian Saloni Mathur be aware:m“In India, it might appear that one can’t separate the area of the secular and the spiritual in the way in which that one would possibly in Europe, nevertheless tentatively. It’s not merely that, for some guests, museum objects housed in secular museums proceed to be worthy of worship. Neither is it solely that politicised faith finds the institutional type of the museum enticing—its alternation of resonance and marvel, sensuousness and training—and that politicised faith incorporates its applied sciences inside the temple itself. It’s, basically, that the complete epistemological authority established by the museum by means of its secular avatars, the place it declares itself because the teller of truths, is now proving helpful for the reconstruction of society alongside spiritual traces.”
Within the days following Kavita Singh’s loss of life, the humanities group throughout India celebrated her scholarship and collectively mourned her loss. As a founding determine of The College of Arts and Aesthetics within the historic Jawaharlal Nehru College (JNU), the place she had taught since 2001, Singh developed a number one curriculum specializing in medieval miniatures and later intervals of Mughal, Rajput and Deccan portray traditions, in addition to museum research shifting its axis from a colonial vantage towards finding out the pluralism of India’s visible tradition by way of concepts of custodianship, ritual, legacies of patronage, and post-partition reminiscence cultures. Earlier than her lasting engagement with JNU she was a visiting lecturer on the Faculty of Artwork, New Delhi, and taught on the Nationwide Institute of Style Expertise from 1991 to 1997.
Singh curated exhibitions on the San Diego Museum of Artwork, in California, and the Nationwide Museum of India, in New Delhi. Throughout the inaugural course on curating and museum heritage that she conceived, I used to be a part of a bunch of postgraduate college students who labored underneath her steering on the large-scale exhibition The place within the World: Indian artwork within the period of globalisation at Devi Artwork Basis in 2009. She by no means separated the idea from observe, encouraging us to dedicate consideration to putting in artwork works, go to museum storages, and spend time in artists’ studios. A number of younger students mentored by Singh usually contribute to worldwide colloquia and publications on the civilisational expanse of Persian and Mughal miniature portray in addition to transcultural visuality.
Singh was a compelling public speaker and delivered a spread of main lectures together with The Way forward for the Museum is Ethnographic at a convention held by the Pitt Rivers Museum and Keble Faculty, Oxford, in 2013; and, by video streaming, the Slade Lectures in Fantastic Artwork for Cambridge College in April 2023. She joined the Getty Board of Trustees in 2020.
Singh’s essays corresponding to “Remembering and Forgetting within the Nationwide Museum”, featured in an edited anthology printed by Leuphana College in 2022, discover the multifaceted function of museums within the South Asian public sphere. The sides examined embrace how museums change into websites to handle historic traumas with an emphasis on Sikh and Tibetan communities. Moreover, Singh critically addressed rising nationalism and religiosity in state-led cultural establishments and heritage monuments. Her e-book chapters and up to date articles on the impartial information web site Scroll laid additional emphasis on how artists of the Mughal and Rajput courtroom ateliers utilized methods of subversion and appropriation, whereas foregrounding scholarly views across the politics of illustration. Amongst Singh’s quite a few publications, her most up-to-date volumes embrace Scent Upon a Southern Breeze: The Synaesthetic Arts of the Deccan (2018, Marg Publications), and Actual Birds in Imagined Gardens: Mughal Portray Between Persia and Europe (2017, with Getty Analysis Institute, Los Angeles).
The artwork historian and artist Gulam Mohammed Sheikh met Singh when she was finishing her postgraduate research at Maharaja Sayajirao College of Baroda in 1987. He notes, “She would attend the MA Portray class of Historical past of Portray I used to conduct round mid or late Nineteen Eighties regardless of her being a pupil within the artwork historical past division. We stayed in contact after she left Baroda as a result of I used to be keenly keen on her analysis on Phad [scroll] portray of Rajasthan she had initiated whereas she was in Baroda. She had recognized all of the characters of the folks deities Pabuji and Dev Narayan Phad made for performers to enact them. In 1987, I visited her in Jodhpur and he or she took me to see a uncommon efficiency on a hillock outdoors the village of Borunda in entrance of a giant phad on an open floor. It was the time of nightfall and solar and moon shared the sky, the Bhopi danced with just a little lamp because the Bhopa sang the story”.
The artist Jitish Kallat recollects, “I met Kavita within the early 2000s. Many people will keep in mind her not just for the sensible scholarship and her lasting legacy as an educator, however for her humour, generosity, radiant laughter and lightness of spirit. After I was forming my curatorial workforce in 2014 for the Kochi Biennale she was the primary particular person I contacted for recommendation. She not solely really useful a few of her finest college students, however over the months continued to be in contact and providing any assist I may have.”
In July 2017, Kavita Singh grew to become the dean of the College of Arts & Aesthetics at JNU at a very turbulent time of political interference and communalisation on the rise. She challenged administrative measures corresponding to a brand new attendance coverage that curtailed tutorial freedom and the upcoming closure of analysis libraries, each in courtroom and through her acceptance speech for the 2018 Infosys prize in Humanities, saying: “At this time, issues are unhealthy; issues are comically unhealthy in my institutional house.”
Singh was faraway from her place because the dean together with six different school members, which led to pupil protests and a lockdown of the campus, later adopted by a excessive courtroom order to reinstate them. After a two-year lengthy well being battle with most cancers, Singh delivered her ultimate public lecture on 15 July on the invitation of Karwaan, a student-led Heritage Exploration Initiative. She shall be remembered not solely as a exceptional educator but in addition as a daring public mental astutely reflecting on the transformations of institutional institutions from the college to the museum.
Kavita Singh, born Kolkata 5 November 1964; Infosys Prize for Humanities 2018; married Arunava Sen (one son); died New Delhi 30 July 2023.
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