Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. / Title from title page screen (viewed on July 7, 2005). Thesis advisor: Mark A. Hector. Document formatted into pages (xii, 155 p. : ill.). Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 126-137).

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2006. / Thesis advisor: Joanne DiPlacido. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-61). Also available via the World Wide Web.

with Rev. Peter Phan, Georgetown University; and Prof. Roberto Goizueta / Devlin Hall 008

In this dissertation, I analyze interactions between Sanskrit and Persian literary cultures at the Mughal court during the years 1570-1650 C.E. During this period, the Mughals rose to prominence as one of the most powerful dynasties of the early modern world and patronized Persian as a language of both literature and empire. Simultaneously, the imperial court supported Sanskrit textual production, participated in Sanskrit cultural life, and produced Persian translations of Sanskrit literature. For their part, Sanskrit intellectuals became influential members of the Mughal court, developed a linguistic interest in Persian, and wrote extensively about their imperial experiences. Yet the role of Sanskrit at the Mughal court remains a largely untold story in modern scholarship, as do the resulting engagements across cultural lines. To the extent that scholars have thought about Sanskrit and Persian in tandem, they have generally been blinded by their own language barriers and mistakenly asserted that there was no serious interaction between the two. I challenge this uncritical view through a systematic reading of texts in both languages and provide the first detailed account of exchanges between these traditions at the Mughal court. I further argue that these cross-cultural events are central to understanding the construction of power in the Mughal Empire and the cultural and literary dynamics of early modern India.

Since the start of Doi Moi (Renovation) over twenty years ago, Vietnam has increasingly opened its society and economy to the global capitalist economy and culture. The country has witnessed numerous changes in all aspect of everyday life, affecting individual men and women, their relationships with each other, and their relationships with other social and political institutions. My dissertation explores the challenges that three groups of dislocated men - men who were migrant laborers from a rural setting; men who were among the first methadone patients in the country; and men who sold sex to other men in Hanoi - were facing as they were struggling to build their manhood and to establish (or reject) aspects of culturally prescribed masculinities in post-Doi Moi Vietnam. I focus on their experiences with three structures, namely the market-bound socialist state, the fledgling capitalist market, and the patriarchal family, that together shape these men's everyday life struggles, their ethics of the self (especially their imagining of themselves as tru cot gia dinh, the pillar of the family), and ultimately their lives and health. I argue that in the context of post-Doi Moi Vietnam, these three powerful structures constitute, and are constituted by, the political economy of the male body, and that this relationship between structure and the body are best represented in the experiences of the men in this study. The male bodies examined here include: the exploitable body of migrant labors whose paths to manhood are limited by their lack of resources and capital other than their own sweat, tears, and flesh; the deviant body of men whose adherence to the regime of state-sponsored methadone is their only hope to recover from social death caused by their past heroin use; and the rejected body of men selling sex to other men who face the "problem of recognition." My analysis shows that their embodied forms of labor, whether on a highway, in a drug treatment center, or in a sexual marketplace, play a critical role in the making of their manhood. Their bodies are at the same time useful and disposable under the logics of power operated by the three powerful structures that offer possibilities, limitations, and various forms of desire (economic, erotic and ethical). While the male body of dislocated men bears great potential for man-making, they are also highly vulnerable to the exploitative practices of the state, to the vagaries of the market, and to disappointment of their own families. My dissertation shows various strategies, however seemingly premature, fragile and sometimes detrimental to their health, which these men deployed to overcome barriers and to make the best use of their limited resources in order to make their road to become tru cot gia dinh. These strategies, I will show, are forms of "strategic" and yet structurally determined decisions and action of these men, and they reflect constrained agency in confrontation with the "structural violence" that shapes experiences of dislocation, marginalization and stigmatization, and aggravates their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. My dissertation contributes to social science theory of men and masculinities by bringing to the center of analysis the lived experiences of men in post-socialist settings that are often at the margin in studies on men and masculinities. My dissertation also contributes to the burgeoning literature on men and HIV/AIDS, and men's health in general, through deepened analysis of the political economy of the male body and the relationship of this political economy with vulnerabilities in relation to HIV/AIDS and other health issues.

A number of Momoyama (1573-1615) and Edo (1615-1868) period folding screens feature Western maps of the world as their subject. These map screens are among the earliest examples of Japanese visual culture to feature pictorial imagery shaped by European cartographic science, geographic knowledge, and overseas trade and exploration. In these works, anonymous Japanese artists adapted Western European maps and book illustrations, often making substantial changes of form and content. This dissertation confronts many current assumptions concerning the nature of the map screens. The study argues that Japanese artists who produced the screens grappled with a complex tension between European pictorial cartographic representations of a newly introduced world and the world views that prevailed in Japan. It proposes that European map imagery and pictorial forms, through the process of reinvention for the Japanese format of the folding screen and for Japanese tastes and sensibilities, became vulnerable to alternative, and often unintended, interpretations by the Japanese political and social elite. The present study considers various dimensions of the world map screens: the manner of their production; their meaning in relation to maps of Japan and other subjects; their implications in regard to an established world view and cosmological order; their circulation in a changing political and cultural sphere; and their position within the modern history of Japanese maps and art.

This study is concerned with the Indian "romance" (qissah) genre, as it was understood from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Particularly during the Mughal era, oral and written romances represented an enchanted world populated by sorcerers, jinns, and other marvellous beings, underpinned by worldviews in which divine power was illimitable, and "occult" sciences were not treated dismissively. The promulgation of a British-derived rationalist-empiricist worldview among Indian élites led to the rise of the novel, accompanied by élite scorn for the romance as an unpalatably fantastic and frivolous genre. This view was developed by the great twentieth-century romance critics into a teleological account of the romance as a primitive and inadequate precursor of the novel, a genre with no social purpose but to amuse the ignorant and credulous. Using recent genre theory, this study examines the romance genre in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Braj Bhasha. It locates the romance genre within a system of related and opposed genres, and considers the operation of multiple genres within texts marked as "romances," via communal memory and intertextuality. The worldviews that underpinned romances, and the purposes that romances were meant to fulfill, are thereby inspected. Chapters are devoted to the opposition and interpenetration of the "fantastic" romance and "factual" historiography (tarikh), to romances' function in client-patron relationships via panegyrics (madh), and to romances' restagings of moral arguments rehearsed in ethical manuals (akhlaq).

My dissertation offers a revisionary history of the early development of Chöd, a philosophy and practice that became integral to all Tibetan Buddhist schools. Recent scholars have interpreted Chöd ahistorically, considering it as a shamanic tradition consonant with indigenous Tibetan practices. In contrast, through a study of the inception, lineages, and praxis of Chöd, my dissertation argues that Chöd evolved through its responses to particular Buddhist ideas and developments during the "later spread" of Buddhism in Tibet. I examine the efforts of Machik Labdrön (1055-1153), the founder of Chöd and the first woman to develop a Buddhist tradition in Tibet, simultaneously to legitimate her teachings as authentically Buddhist and to differentiate them from those of male charismatic teachers. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly view which exoticizes central Chöd practices--such as the visualized offering of the body to demons--I examine them as a manifestation of key Buddhist tenets from the Prajñaparamita corpus and Vajrayana traditions on the virtue of generosity, the problem of ego-clinging, and the ontology of emptiness. Finally, my translation and discussion of the texts of the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorjé (1284-1339), including the earliest extant commentary on a text of Machik Labdrön's, focuses on new ways to appreciate the transmission and institutionalization of Chöd. I argue not only that Chöd praxis has been an ongoing project of innovation and renewal, but also that we can properly understand modern incarnations of Chöd only through a nuanced appreciation of its historical and philosophical developments.

This dissertation focuses on the artistic culture of late Mughal Delhi spanning the last century of Mughal rule and the administration of the English East India Company in North India, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. It brings a hitherto unrecognized period of artistic accomplishment to light and studies the transformations within painting culture in the multicultural Anglo-Mughal society of Delhi. Rather than being fixated on the continuum of Mughal painting over centuries, this dissertation suggests that the art of the late Mughal period should be studied on its own terms as a response to immense socio-political and cultural changes. At its core this study is concerned with dissolving the stylistic barriers between Mughal and Company painting in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I take up the question of what the term 'late Mughal painting' entails and discuss how the term privileges the notion of a court centric culture of painting in an era when the Mughal court was only one of many venues of artistic expression. On the other hand, I highlight the inadequacy of the term 'Company painting' to address the variegated nature of works produced under East India Company patronage in this period. Thus, this dissertation attempts to view seemingly disparate works within a common framework of visual analysis. Moreover, it seeks to highlight the agency of painters in creating this diffusion of artistic conventions at Delhi and charts transitions in their working methods. In a period where the story of the Mughal empire appears as an appendage to the dominant historiography of the East India Company's rise to power, this investigation of painting culture in Delhi (the spiritual and historical center of Mughal power) reveals how paintings were critical for either maintaining or upsetting the status quo between court and Company and how this critical balance of power between the two was negotiated in the visual sphere. The first chapter of this dissertation discusses the role of cartography as a means for projecting Mughal imperial identity in the face of a growing Company dominance. Using a body of previously unexplored maps and cartographic drawings I show how painters used topographic markers to illustrate Mughal presence using both European and local conventions of drawing. Such works, I argue, also initiated the creation of visual histories of later Mughal rule at Delhi, as they pictured events often discussed in private correspondence, such as the famous bazgasht or Return of Shah Alam II (r. 1759-1806) to Delhi that marked the re-establishment of the Mughal house Delhi in 1772. Paintings produced in the royal court of Shah Alam II reflected upon the historical legacy of Mughal ideas while referencing the emotive context of Indo-Persian and Braj bhasha poetics that constituted the wider expressive culture of this period. Composed by the Delhi painter Khairullah, court scenes played upon the metaphorical significance of the long lost Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan re-imagining it within the space of the later Mughal court - thus creating a formidable visual imperial identity for the veteran blinded emperor Shah Alam II. Furthermore, Khairullah's younger colleague Ghulam Murtaza Khan took this legacy forward using the shared knowledge of Western perspective and Mughal painterly hieratic to create court scenes for Akbar II (r.1806-1836). His works can also be read for their clever subversion of the Company's attempts to conduct diplomatic meetings on an equal footing. The painter's innovative format for Mughal court scenes was modeled on the picture plane of a one-point perspective, which he used to draw attention to the centrally placed and physically higher figure of the emperor. This, in turn, relegated the figure of the British Resident to a mere courtier rather than the new arbitrator of power in Anglo-Mughal Delhi. Ghulam Murtaza Khan's paintings easily constitute the most substantial visual record of the Mughal court in the nineteenth century. As this dissertation reveals, a large majority of paintings produced in courtly and non-courtly settings were, in fact, executed by the same group of painters belonging to the family atelier of the painter Ghulam Ali Khan (active 1790-1855). This dissertation offers a first look into the network of painters active in Delhi during this period and also offers a plausible genealogy of their family. Later chapters of this dissertation highlight how Ghulam Ali Khan worked in different conventions - of Mughal manuscript painting, architectural, and landscape drawing, and miniatures - showcasing his ability to skillfully modify his technique to suit a particular patron. His working method also indicates that artistic knowledge available to the painter reached him through discrete channels such as the court atelier or through his training in European architectural draftsmanship. However, the melding of artistic conventions in the nineteenth century was subject to the will of the artist and the marketplace. I provide an overview of Ghulam Ali Khan's career spanning the breadth of his early work on architectural views of Delhi's buildings to his work on portrait studies of Delhi's residents for the newly powerful group of Company officers, William Fraser (1784-1835) and Colonel James Skinner (1778-1841). The dissertation also suggests a connection between Ghulam Ali Khan and the British topographical painter Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) through a study of Daniell's scraps (illustrated notes) from his private papers. Moreover, my research situates Ghulam Ali Khan as the driving force for painting at the Rajput court of Alwar and the Jat court of Jhajjar enabling us, for the first time, to create a near-complete picture of his career. This dissertation presents first time look into the pictorial archives at Alwar and uses new evidence to substantiate the painter's pivotal role in shaping painting culture at Alwar in the nineteenth century. The penultimate section of this dissertation presents facets of European patronage that link closely with the cultural and political conditions at Delhi. In particular, I examine the circumstances surrounding the commission of portraits of Delhi's residents by the Company officer William Fraser that were part of the (now) world famous album compiled between the years 1810 and 1825. I draw attention to the pragmatic considerations surrounding land settlement that bore upon Fraser's interest in creating a visual record of the Delhi countryside. Focusing on his professional role as the surveyor, I show how he was able to create an enduring model for land settlement that incorporated his personal and familial links with village residents in the region. This analysis provides the all important context for thinking about rural portraits in the Fraser Album, and their personal as well as professional appeal for Fraser. This dissertation also lays out a near complete picture of Fraser's friend James Skinner's professional life and his interest in creating a pictorial biography through commissions of albums and monumental paintings. Situating the paintings within the socio-political context of Skinner's rise from an adjunct Company officer to a decorated Mughal and Company servant, I discuss how Skinner's search for permanent recognition shaped the content of Ghulam Ali Khan's compositions. Finally, this dissertation charts the later years of painting at Delhi and its dilution into souvenir copies painted on ivory that I call, "Mughalerie". William Fraser's own interest in commissioning copies of popular paintings on ivory is noteworthy here, indicative of rise in the popular taste for European-styled miniatures based on Mughal ideas that fed into the emotional economy of Anglo-Indian residents of Delhi. Overall, this study of painting culture in Delhi aims at enriching the mainstream historiography of the modern period of Indian painting and offers a compelling reassessment of this transition period in Indian art history.

Scholarship on the earliest known illustrated manuscripts produced in the sultanate of Golconda has tended to describe these objects as the products of the extension of a powerful influence from Iran over this small kingdom in the Deccan. While this assessment rightly acknowledges the importance of Persianate visual traditions in early Golconda manuscripts and paintings, it oversimplifies the nature of these remarkable objects and the context of their production. In addition, it misrepresents the role of the artists involved in the manuscripts' creation. This dissertation provides a more nuanced consideration of these objects and their making. It offers the first in-depth discussion of six manuscripts produced in Golconda between 1570 and 1610, demonstrating a previously unrecognized sophistication and creativity in the process of their creation. It also presents a newly discovered manuscript, one which significantly alters prevailing understandings of early manuscript painting in the Qutb Shahi sultanate. These studies identify several interrelated modes of engagement with Persianate forms, rather than a single stylistic progression towards local artistic "independence." In addition, they reveal how these various modes were calibrated towards different goals, sometimes using Persianate forms as a platform from which to explore various ways of constructing and illustrating narrative and poetic texts, while at other times using these forms to make claims of cultural sophistication or for the legitimating of new and local cultural phenomena.