Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760-1910

Conceptualizes “graft”— the violent and creative processes of suturing arts as a method of empire building in western eighteenth-century India

Grafted Arts focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with (or fought against) each other to control western India in the eighteenth century. This book conceptualizes the artistic combinations that resulted as ones of “graft”—a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials.