Asian Art and History

Lecture

Asian Art and History Giraffes and Horses and Turkeys, Oh My! Trade and Gifting of Animals in Early Modern India

Qamar Adamjee, Ph.D., Provenance Researcher, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Beautiful and unusual animals have a long history of being collected at imperial courts. Prized, admired, displayed and eliciting wonder, they were traded and gifted, and often re-gifted. Some traveled long distances across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with additional overland journeys.

In this talk, Qamar Adamjee, Ph.D. and art historian of the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent, will use three case studies to explore the social and material “asset” values of unusual animals in early modern global trade and diplomacy networks of the 14th–17th centuries. With India as her center point, she will look at the trade and exchange of military and equestrian horses from Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, a turkey bird from the Americas and giraffes from East Africa.

This presentation is part of the Asian Art and History series.

Image: Shah Jahan on Horseback, Folio from the Shah Jahan Album, ca. 1630. By Payag (Indian, active ca. 1591–1658). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Qamar Adamjee

Qamar Adamjee

Qamar Adamjee, Ph.D., is an art historian of the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent. Formerly an associate curator of South Asian and Islamic art at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, Adamjee began her career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’s Islamic Art department; she has recently returned to the Met as provenance researcher in the Asian art department.

Adamjee has organized numerous museum exhibitions; published on varied topics on Islamic, Hindu and Sikh art; and served as visiting lecturer at New York University, Rutgers University and UC Berkeley. Her research areas explore material culture produced in the porous spaces between distinct cultural or religious traditions. She is particularly interested in the social, intellectual and artistic worlds of the people who made or used such objects.