Subversive Smiths

How did a brass bowl become a symbol of sovereignty? Art historian Nachiket Chanchani traces craft, power & nationalism in colonial Assam.

This talk will trace the production and circulation of hand-crafted brass and bell-metal food containers and reconstruct how these everyday objects became emblems of sovereignty, reshaped society, and furthered the rise of nationalism in Assam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century.

This event is organized in partnership with University of Toronto Scarborough's Culinaria Research Centre.

Speaker Bio: Nachiket Chanchani is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research thinks across geographical boundaries and categories — nature and culture, materials and meaning systems, word and image — to reconstruct moments in the history of South Asia. He is the author of three books, including Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains: Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas (2019) and The Amaruśhataka and the Lives of Indian Love Poems (2022). His current work focuses on vessels from the Brahmaputra Valley and on sculpture and touch in medieval South India. His exhibition "Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia" opened at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 2024. Dr. Chanchani sits on the editorial board of The Art Bulletin.