Unfurling the Practice of Curā: Tracing Historical Claims and the Ongoing Custodianship of Letter Scrolls from Local Bazaars

Scrolls of painted letters transmitted significant histories from the local bazaars of early modern and colonial India. Yet they are rarely seen and have been marginalized in art museums due to their vernacular visuality, large scale, and material fragility. A vijnaptipatra, an invitation letter that could be up to 75 feet long, was sent by merchants to eminent Jain monks who sought to entice recipients with images of flourishing places in order to mobilise them to walk vast tracts of land on foot. In these letters, painters and scribes encouraged monks to imagine their future assemblies during the forthcoming monsoon season against depictions of notable events and everyday life of the inviting town. Why have lesser-charted publics, politics, and perspectives bundled in such invitations remained hidden? As contemporary viewers of these scrolls, how do we understand the visual and textual encoding of power relations among actors across class, caste, gender, devotional affiliations, and colonial orders? How do we handle their heterogeneity and materiality? 

Fragmented letter scrolls trace out the shape of times and stories from the street level, alongside trans-regional connections and disconnections often unseen in archives of imperial and regional courts or European companies. At the same time, though studying these vijnaptipatra, the colonial and twentieth-century politics of cūra unfurl, asking us to look again at histories of custodianship and critical practice from the early years of establishing regional archives in postcolonial India. Wrapped up in the care and cataloguing of painted letters by communities of librarians and monk-scholars, often bound to the singular sphere of Jain religious studies, are threads that entangle local bazaars and global art markets, curation and conservation, and private collectors and national museums. 

Series convened by Olivier Krischer and Peyvand Firouzeh, and co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.