Painters, Albums, and Pandits: Agents of Image Reproduction in Early Modern South Asia

The main question that this essay attempts to answer is why and how multiple eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscript ateliers collected and copied (in some cases, repeatedly) painting designs intimately associated with album paintings produced at the seventeenth-century Mughal court. The study argues that the agents of image reproduction, in these instances, find material, corporeal realization in the recursive operations that South Asian painters employed in reproductive pictorial practices rooted in distilling, outlining, and tracing forms; in the apparatus of the album, a book technology that was at once porous and itinerant; and through such less considered intermediaries as pandits, or Hindu knowledge brokers, who facilitated the widespread copying, circulation, and incorporation of Mughal designs in paint over the course of three centuries.