Paper short abstract:

This paper explores urban imaginings of Rajasthan's towns and cities, particularly Udaipur, visualized by artists and poets in Jain painted invitation letters and poems for mercantile and religious communities in the context of changing territoriality in early modern and early colonial India.

Paper long abstract:

In 1830, the merchants of Udaipur sent a 72-feet long vijnaptipatra or painted scroll to a Jain pontiff, inviting him to spend the next monsoon season in their city. While the artist visualized Udaipur with painted vignettes of street-life, bazaars, temples, and palaces, referencing established conventions, he sought radically to alter the format and modes of seeing the scroll. This paper, first, charts the transformation of vijnaptipatras into a vernacular visual genre (1750-1830) that mediated between sectarian and court traditions, thereby highlighting the circulation of images and audiences. Second, it explores how such scrolls created a cartographic vision of the place that entered even into popular poems of the period. Focusing on vignettes of alluring places within eighteenth and nineteenth century Rajasthani gajals on Udaipur, I suggest that Jain monk-poets departed from exclusively constructing a religious geography related to pilgrimage.

This paper considers Jain painted invitation letters and topographical poems within the historiography of cultural practices engaging with travel, place-making, mercantile networks, and changing territoriality in early modern and early colonial India. I argue that these artifacts—operating on the margins of regional courts and metropolitan polities—offer a view into how artists and poets employed the trope of praise to re-imagine places within other geographies, subtly subvert political and economic realities, and craft urban memories for broader elite and non-elite audiences. Monks and artists inscribed their subjective experiences as urbanites, thereby enabling us to trace the dynamic interactions of nineteenth century religiosity and commerce with various power brokers.