Dear Colleagues in Indology, 

Yesterday we lost a friend and fellow scholar, art historian Professor Kavita Singh, to cancer. She was 58, and in the process of moving from the Jawaharlal Nehru University to Ashoka University when she was diagnosed last year. 

She was renowned for her work on Mughal, Rajput, Pahari and Deccani painting, as well as on museum studies. 

She was an Infosys laureate (2018), an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Getty Institutions (2020-24), and had been appointed the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University this year (2022-2023), an assignment she was unable to take up on account of her illness. (She did deliver the Slade Lecture in Fine Art online in April 2023).  

 

Kavita had just completed her curation of a forthcoming show about a rare illuminated Ramcaritmanas from the royal court in 19th c Kashi. The exhibition, co-curated with Dr. Singh's former student Parul Singh, is scheduled to go up in September 2023 at the new Museum of Art and Photography in Bangalore. She delivered an extensive illustrated lecture in person as a curtain-raiser for this show at the India Habitat Center in New Delhi on July 15, 2023 (a fortnight before her passing). 

I know that many of you knew her personally and were interested in and inspired by her work. Here is an extensive tribute by her colleague Shukla Sawant from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU: 

Her untimely death is shattering for her family and friends, but also an irreparable loss for the field of art history and art historical pedagogy in India, and for academic life, especially at beleaguered Indian public institutions, at this time. 

Sincerely, 

Ananya Vajpeyi.