History HSMT Guest Lecture by Prof. Samira Sheikh

Prof. Samira Sheikh, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, is a historian of early modern South Asia at Vanderbilt University. She has just completed a book on the dying days of a little kingdom in western India and is now planning a large-scale study of precolonial and early colonial Indian maps. She will give a guest lecture, “Looking west from Cambay: How Sadanand Vyas complicates the history of Indian science.” As political chaos shook the storied port of Cambay in the late eighteenth century, Sadanand Vyas drew a detailed map of his province of Gujarat, in western India. The map is now in the British Library, among the papers of a visiting English botanist. Who was Sadanand and why did he make this map? Through close scrutiny of the map and Sadanand’s other drawings, I suggest that he drew from the knowledge systems of the Sanskritic, Western, and contemporary Gujarati worlds to create a new visual vocabulary for useful technology.

Sponsored by the History Department’s Track in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology