Hosted by Dr. Deepali Dewan, this digital program expands the scope of content within the current exhibition, Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery, by taking a closer look at the diverse cultural and religious practices around death in South Asia. 

Featuring new and cutting-edge research from her forthcoming book, Seeing Ghosts: How India Imagined Death and the Afterlife, researcher Subhashini Kaligotla joins Dewan, shedding light on her extensive and thoughtful research and writing process, and sharing her insights from studying diverse communities to understand the origins and complexities of religious and cultural practices for, and with, the dead across South Asia.

Speakers: 

Subhashini Kaligotla

Subhashini Kaligotla is a poet and art historian of early and medieval South Asia. She is interested in approaching artworks from the point of view of the creative resources of architects, sculptors, painters, and other visual artists. Her first book, Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Architects and Their Audiences in Medieval India (Yale University Press, 2022), places the ingenuity of medieval Deccan Indian makers at its heart. Her current book project, called Seeing Ghosts, charts the life story of the premodern dead from the moment of death to their journey into afterworlds through material objects and visual culture. It draws on religious perspectives – Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina – as well as courtly views and non-elite thought on death, dying, and the afterlife. Kaligotla is Barbara Stoler Miller Associate Professor of Indian and South Asian Art History at Columbia University.

Dr. Deepali Dewan

Deepali Dewan is the Dan Mishra Senior Curator of Global South Asia at ROM, where her work is key to supporting and enhancing ROM’s commitment to South Asian Visual Culture through exhibitions, public engagement, research, and learning activities. Dr. Dewan is also an associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto and affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies. Her research interests span the history and theory of photography, colonial and nationalist visuality, and contemporary art in South Asia and its diaspora.

Event captured on February 28, 2024.