Seminar Series February 2026: The elixir-like glance and the blessed hand : the affective world of the imperial Mughal library with Dr Bronwen Gulkis
The elixir-like glance and the blessed hand : the affective world of the imperial Mughal library
The arts of India's Mughal empire (1526-1857) have formed some of the most enduring images of South Asia in the popular imagination. The globally-connected Mughal court hosted visitors from around the world, creating a syncretic visual language which drew upon Islamic, South Asian, and European precedents. The empire’s reputation for complex visual programs and sumptuous workmanship have led art historians to characterize the period as one of state-sponsored grandeur. Yet despite the empire’s reputation for visual magnificence, the Mughal world was necessarily composed of multiple small interactions, whether artistic, material, or social.
One noted example are Mughal arts of the book—small works of painting and calligraphy, often literary in nature—which were preserved in paper albums and meticulously catalogued. Small enough to hold in one hand, or to pore over on a book stand, these albums were a mutable format which could be added to over time. As albums became the dominant method for displaying painting and calligraphy, they entered into a conversation with objects and imagery from the imperial Mughal collections. My work takes as its premise the idea that these small format artistic works provide an insight into the lived experience of how this vast empire operated on a daily basis. By considering the material qualities of surviving Mughal album folios, I establish how practices like touching and inscribing were a part of art viewing for members of the imperial Mughal court. In doing so, I aim to reconstruct the wider cultures of reading and viewing in early modern South Asia.
About the speaker:
Bronwen Gulkis is a lecturer in art history at the University of St Andrews. Trained as a specialist in Mughal painting, her research considers Islamic and South Asian arts of the book in their cultural and material contexts. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2021 and has held research positions at the University College Dublin Humanities Institute and Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, where she also curated the digital exhibition Writing My Truth: The Mughal Emperor Babur in 2022. She is currently working on her book manuscript on memory and emotion in Mughal albums, and is developing a second project tracing the history of connoisseurship in the study of Indian art.