Saumya Agarwal

Saumya Agarwal has completed her PhD from Heidelberg University. During this time, she also held a yearlong research position at the Quai Branly Museum. Before commencing her PhD, she worked as an assistant professor at Delhi University.

This grant will enable Saumya to explore the identities, biographies and artistic practices of the painters who created the wall paintings of the Shekhawati region in Rajasthan. These wall paintings are unique for their dense proliferation and eclectic iconography. For her PhD research, Saumya studied the paintings as visual historical sources to investigate the manifestations of colonial modernity in the localised context, and the historical factors that led to the proliferation of this decorative art form. During the course of her research, she realised that there was a severe dearth of archival and textual records about the artistic practices of the caste subaltern painters. In her opinion, this lack is the primary reason such artist groups continue to remain on the margins of historical research. To address this gap, she will research the wall paintings through the case studies of two painters – Binja Chejara and Balu Ram Chejara. They were two of the most prolific painters in the region, with very distinctive painting styles that make it easy to recognise their work.

The signatures on the paintings suggest that Binja Chejara was active between 1890 and 1905 and Balu Ram Chejara between 1935 and 1945. While Binja Chejara has given an emotive quality to the faces he depicted, Balu Ram’s work shows the influence of popular prints and photographs. Yet, the aesthetic choices he makes mark his work as distinctive. The various ways in which Balu Ram Chejara has inscribed his name on the paintings are reflective of his decision to create an evolving arc of changing identity. Saumya will study this arc of changing caste affixes in conjunction with his use of modern aesthetic. She will analyse this aspect by comparing the emotive quality that Binja Chejara incorporated in his paintings a few decades earlier. She will also gather biographical information through interviews with the descendants of the painters. The formal analysis of the paintings will be supplemented by archival research.  

 Since the painted buildings of Shekhawati are predominantly associated with the merchant patron, Saumya aims to draw attention to the artist behind the paintings so that they can be understood through the aesthetic choices and biographies of their creators.

The outcome of this project will be a monograph and a short booklet in Hindi. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the monograph and the short booklet in Hindi.