About the Talk

Despite rich evidence of over a hundred contemporaneous sites in ancient Āndhradeśa (modern-day Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka states), most scholarship on premodern Buddhism in general and Buddhist art in particular, has concentrated heavily on northern and central regions of the Indian subcontinent. This talk will focus on the early Buddhist monastery at Phaṇigiri, located on a granite hill bounded by the Kriṣna and Godāvarī river systems, which has yielded an extraordinary though limitedly understood architectural and sculptural corpus that dates from at least the first through the fourth centuries CE.
The early evolution of the monastic complex coincides with the proliferation of stone construction in Deccan (southern) India and predates its Hindu monuments and Islamic structures by several centuries. The site’s later development corresponds with the enigmatic decline of active construction of ancient Buddhist complexes and the rise of Brahmanism in the region—the scholarship on which is limited by the “Deccan gap” or relative absence of authoritative textual sources. Through an engagement with the site despite—and in fact through—its fragmentation, this talk highlights the relationship between the early Buddhist site and stonework, and establishes that Phaṇigiri was a dynamic local idiom of the Deccan school of early Buddhist art at the moment of its historic transmission across and beyond Southeast Asia.

About the Speaker

Kalyani Madhura Ramachandran is an art historian of South Asia. Her work focuses on ancient Buddhist sculpture—particularly from the Deccan—and its transmissions across Southeast Asia. She has further interests in colonial and contemporary approaches to premodern South Asian art. Kalyani completed a PhD at Columbia University under the supervision of Vidya Dehejia; an MPhil at the University of Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship; and a B.A. at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, where she won the Department of History Prize. She previously worked as a Research Assistant to John Guy in the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and assisted with five exhibitions. Kalyani is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai.

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