Dr Yashaswini Chandra
Job title:
Lecturer in South Asian Art History
Office:
Room 0.63, Higgitt Gallery, Hunter Building
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Yashaswini Chandra is Lecturer in South Asian Art History. She has diverse interests that encompass the arts and cultures of the Himalayas, Rajasthan, Mughal India and colonial India, combining them with a focus on animal history and women's studies. Her first book, The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback, was published in South Asia by Pan Macmillan India under the Picador India imprint in 2021, paperback 2022, and in the UK by Holland House Books in 2022. It explores the relationship between horses and humans in the Indian subcontinent, together with its global connections, in the early modern period in particular, charting the decline of the horse culture of India under colonial rule. The Mughal empire is at the heart of the work and it includes a case-study of Rajasthan. It shows that paintings capture the story of the horse in India and its profound impact on the history of the region. The original edition was listed among the ‘highlights of 2021’ in the category of Non-fiction: History by the Asian Review of Books.
Her next book is due to be published jointly by Picador and Picador India in 2026. It is intended to be a women’s history of colonial India related as intimate experiences intertwined with colonial spaces. Yashaswini previously worked for Sahapedia, an open online resource on the arts, cultures and histories of India, and managed the multi-volume documentation of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (President’s House) in New Delhi, tracing its transformation from the Viceroy’s House designed by Edwin Lutyens. She has a PhD from SOAS University of London.
Research interests
- Arts and cultures of South Asia
- Mughal India
- Colonial India
- Animal history
- Women's studies
Yashaswini Chandra presently teaches specialist courses covering Mughal art and material culture, Indian and Himalayan paintings, and art and empire in nineteenth-century South Asia.
Research
Research
Yashaswini Chandra aims to establish a link between the past that survives in archives, museums and historiography, that which is reformulated in popular imagination, and the past that exists as lived history in contemporary India.
Her research is driven by extensive fieldwork and travels in India and the Himalayas. It is oriented to approach political and cultural centres from the peripheries and takes special interest in the role of animals and women in shaping history and their visual representations.
Her first book is The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback. She has co-edited two volumes concerned with the Rashtrapati Bhavan (President's House) in New Delhi, Right of the Line: The President's Bodyguard, and Life at Rashtrapati Bhavan. In addition, she has published chapters in edited volumes, peer-reviewed articles and articles in specialist art magazines. She is contracted to write her next book as a spatial history of women in colonial India.
PhD Supervision Topics
- The arts and cultures of South Asia, including the Himalayas, in relation to the premodern, early modern and colonial periods
- Animal history, interspecies relations and ecology
- Women's studies and gender
- Space and place
- Empire and Scotland
