Ecocritical Art History: Perspectives from South Asia

Undergraduate / Graduate

How can art history contribute to the ongoing discourse about environmentalism? What can the study of art tell us about the interrelatedness of human creativity and the environment? In this seminar, we will wrestle with these questions through an ecocritical study of South Asian art. Ecocriticism has its origins in literary studies, although it is now an interdisciplinary field of study that explores how the natural world is portrayed in the arts, broadly conceived. Art history has long been interested in analyzing how artists depicted the natural world. However, such explorations have usually been framed by a narrow set of discreet concerns that have their origins in Enlightenment-era discourse; for example, landscape studies, animal studies (zoology), plant studies (botany), etc. Ecocriticism does not have any such limiting framework. An ecocritical study attempts to move beyond the irreducibly anthropocentric approach in the humanities to understand the natural environments in which humans made art. South Asian art is fundamentally marked by an interest in nature. The towers of Indian temples were conceived of as physical manifestations of the Himalayas. The door guardians that stand on either side of temple entrances are anthropomorphic depictions of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna.