Pandukeshwar, Architectural Knowledge, and an Idea of India

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences</strong> a Lecture on <strong>Pandukeshwar, Architectural Knowledge, and an Idea of India</strong> <strong>Nachiket Chanchani</strong> University of Michigan, United States <strong>4th November 2015</strong> This sumptuously illustrated talk probes a temple complex at Pandukeshar––a sacred center near a glacial source of the Ganga River in the Himalayas––where lithic shrines in local, regional, and trans-regional architectural typologies stand side by side. I first descriptively analyze the forms and layouts of these edifices, then connect the archaeological evidence to the epigraphic record to date these shrines to the ninth and tenth-centuries. Thereafter, I show how their design, construction, and use appears to be connected to the emergence, refinement, and dispersion of an India as a geo-cultural landscape extending from the Indian Ocean up to high Himalayas. This conception, I conclude, was transmitted along knowledge corridors, routes that connected institutions of learning. Nachiket Chanchani (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2012) is a tenure-track assistant professor jointly appointed in the departments of the History of Art and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. His writings are appearing in leading journals including Artibus Asiae, Archives of Asian Art, History of Photography, Ars Orientalis, and Arts Asiatiques and on the editorial and opinion pages of The Hindu newspaper. Nachiket has been involved with curatorial projects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC. He has won fellowships from many bodies including Asian Cultural Council, New York, Nehru Trust at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and the Gonda Foundation at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nachiket has been invited to speak at numerous venues including Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.