Monsoon Mood

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

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4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

We think of paintings as art, but can they also be a source of data? 300 years ago, a young prince inherited the throne in Udaipur, India, and brought with him some newfangled ideas about art. His court artists created massive paintings that flew in the face of convention, documenting real life events, times, places and even emotions —especially during the annual monsoon season. These paintings are so detailed that - centuries later - they can serve as archival records to help understand our own changing climate.

Guests:

Debra Diamond, Elizabeth Moynihan Curator for South Asian and Southeast Asian Art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art

Dipti Khera, associate professor, Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Mark Giordano, professor of geography and vice dean for undergraduate affairs at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service

This episode was produced in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art’s exhibition: A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the museum’s founding and the 75th anniversary of Indian independence.

The exhibition is on view through May 14, 2023.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX, I'm Lizzie Peabody.
0:24.1	Picture this, a string of horses wades through a grey river.
0:29.5	There are riders on their backs.
0:31.8	In the middle is a king draped in white robes.
0:37.1	His horse is belly deep in water.
0:39.8	His own legs lost beneath the current.
0:43.4	As you can see how the artist has painted the water as like splashing near the body of
0:49.5	the horse, right?
0:50.5	So you get that sense of movement.
0:54.2	This is Deep Dekarra, she's an associate professor of art history at New York University
0:59.2	and one of the curators of an exhibition tucked away in an underground gallery of the Smithsonian's
1:04.7	National Museum of Asian Art, which, by the way, is where we are, standing in front of
1:09.4	a massive watercolor, almost six feet across.
1:13.8	It shows a scene from the late 1800s in Udaipur, India.
1:20.7	Behind the riders, green hills rise up in the distance, but the sky above is foreboding.
1:27.8	A golden streak of lightning snakes across the painting, darting in and out of swirling charcoal clouds.
1:34.6	Vertical streaks of rain pour down.
1:37.3	In every texture here, the texture of the water that is like flowing in waves, the vertical
1:44.0	texture of the rain that is lashing, the streak of the lightning, the kind of thick,
1:51.4	cloudy texture of waterlogged clouds.
1:55.5	The whole painting feels wet.
1:59.9	Yeah, you're soaked.
	...

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