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The Voice of the Indian Mona Lisa: Gender and Culture In Eighteenth-Century Rajasthan

Author :  Heidi Rika Maria Pauwels

Product Details

Country
India
Publisher
Cambridge University Press, New Delhi
ISBN 9781009201650
Format HardBound
Language English
Year of Publication 2023
Bib. Info xvi, 278p.; ills. 23 cm. Includes Index.
Categories History
Product Weight 600 gms.
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Product Description

The 'Indian Mona Lisa' is an eighteenth-century portrait of the goddess Radha from the Kishangarh school of Rajput Painting. It was purportedly modelled after a young enslaved woman and court-performer, Bani-thani, who became a concubine of the patron of the painting, crown-prince Savant Singh. Tracing her career, Heidi Pauwels recovers her role as a composer of devotional songs in multiple registers of Classical Hindi and shows how she was a conduit for trend-setting styles from Delhi, including the new vogue of Urdu. Through a combination of literary, historical, and art-historical analysis, she brings to life the vibrant cultural production center of Kishangarh in the eighteenth century by reconstructing how Bani-thani came to be acclaimed as the devotional poetess Rasikbihari and as 'India's Mona Lisa'. This major new study conveys important new insights in the history of Hindi literature and devotion, the family, palace women and the social mobility of the enslaved.

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