Dr. Sonal Khullar will explore the educational legacies of two titans of Indian and world art during the next event in the Dr. Mulk R. Arora Endowed Lecture series at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). “Learning and Unlearning Art in Modern India” will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, in the UAH Student Services Building, 301 Sparkman Drive.
The program is presented by the UAH College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and sponsored by the UAH Humanities Center. The lecture is open to the public free of charge, but guests are asked to RSVP. UAH is a part of The University of Alabama System.
“In Dr. Khullar’s innovative research, we discover the dynamic interconnectedness of the visual arts in 20th-century India,” said Dr. Laura Lake Smith, assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history, UAH Department of Art, Art History and Design. “Her ability to seamlessly integrate the arts with political and cultural histories creates an enriching learning experience for all.”
Khullar will focus on art education at two institutions established in India in the 20th century as a corrective to British colonial art schools of the 19th century:
- Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore – poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter of the Bengal Renaissance – founded the first in 1919 at Santiniketan. His 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature was the first Nobel in any category won by a non-European.
- Dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar founded the second school at Almora in 1939. A pioneer of modern dance in India, he created a fusion of Indian classical dance and European theatrical techniques, which he popularized internationally in the 1920s and 1930s.
Both schools engaged the natural world and drew on folk and rural traditions, leading to a rich exchange of ideas between many different art forms. The interdisciplinary dialogue they created became influential in postcolonial India.
Khullar specializes in the art of South Asia from the eighteenth century onward. Her first book, “Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930-1990,” received the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2017 and the Millard Meiss Publication Award and Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association in 2014.
Khullar is the W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the history of art department at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of California at Berkeley and has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She is currently a 2024-2025 Harvard Radcliffe Fellow.
“We are thrilled to have Dr. Khullar deliver our third annual Arora lecture,” said Dr. Sean Lane, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. “This series has created a wonderful opportunity to share insights into South Asian history and culture with the UAH and Huntsville communities. We are profoundly grateful for the Arora family’s support and appreciate the efforts of the Arora Endowed Lecture Series committee – Dr. Laura Lake Smith, Dr. Dylan Baun, Dr. Lillian Joyce, Dr. Dan Morrison, Dr. Amy Guerin and Dr. Shuang Zhao – who worked hard to bring Dr. Khullar to campus.”
The Dr. Mulk R. Arora Endowed Lecture in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences was funded by a gift from Arora’s sons – Dr. Amit Arora, Vivek Arora and Rahul Arora – in 2022 in honor of their father. The endowment supports an annual program aimed at building community engagement, promoting meaningful scholarship and inspiring global connections beyond the United States.
For more information on the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and its programs, visit uah.edu/ahs.