Doctoral Candidate in Asian Languages and Cultures
About
A Richard and Lillian Ives Graduate Fellow at the Institute of the Humanities, I am currently working on a dissertation titled, “Animals Like Us: Interspecies Relationships in the Sanskritic Literary Tradition of Early India.” Centered on four Sanskrit texts, I aim to engage in a close study of animals and human-animal relationships represented in early Sanskrit courtly poems, dramas, epics, and fables. Relatedly, I investigate how concerns of genre, aesthetics, and ideologies of gender and religion shape the representations of animals and human-animal relations.
My other major area of research interest consists of the world of premodern South Asian manuscript cultures. The issues with regard to manuscript cultures that interest me are materiality, networks of patronage, scribal communities, stages of production, and text-image relations. In this broad area, my publications include Balagopalastuti: Celebrating the Child Krishna, a book co-authored with Harsha V. Dehejia and Narmada Prasad Upadhyaya and published by D.K. Printworld (New Delhi) in 2019. A related work is my article, "Text, Image and Kṛṣṇa Devotion in a 15th century Illustrated Sanskrit Manuscript from Gujarat" that was published in 2018 in Aziatische Kunst, a journal brought out by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and published by Brill. Another article, "Cultural Mediators: Artists, Writers, and the Making of the Gītagovinda Tradition in Early Modern Mewar" was published in the Spring 2021 issue of the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts published by The University of Chicago Press. A third article, "History from the Margins: Literary Culture and Manuscript Production in Western India in the Vernacular Millennium" appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Manuscript Studies published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. A fourth article, “Preaching and Preening: A Ṭūṭī’s Book in Persianate India” appeared in a 2023 issue of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient published by Brill University.
For a more complete presentation of my academic work, please refer to my profile on Academia.edu (https://umich.academia.edu/JahnabiBarooahChanchani).
