Sonal Khullar Research Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre

The Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) funding covered staff replacement costs for Sonal Khullar’s post, allowing her to dedicate a term to research on her forthcoming book. Reflecting on investigations conducted across the United States and Sri Lanka, Sonal gives a sense of the global scope of her inquiry and describes the rich ancient and contemporary sources which inform it. Below, Sonal describes her grant-funded programme in the context of her wider work.

A fellowship from the PMC proved invaluable in advancing my research on Unpeace in the Land, a single-authored book on art and war in Sri Lanka which examines critical responses to complex and enduring effects of European colonialism on imaginations and institutions. This project builds on multiple research trips to Sri Lanka and my intellectual commitment to writing histories of the relationships between artistic movements, circles and individuals in South Asia and Britain. During the fellowship term I focused on Muhanned Cader’s (b. 1966) collages, paintings, and drawings, which address European practices of cartography, painting, photography, printmaking, ethnography, archaeology, and natural history in Sri Lanka, and engage representations of the island by British figures such as the sailor and solider Robert Knox (1640–1720), painter Samuel Daniell (1775–1811), big-game hunter and naturalist Samuel Baker (1821–93), photographer-turned-planter Charles Thomas Scowen (1852–1948), photographer William Louis Henry Skeen (1847–1903), writer and administrator Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), planter-turned-archaeologist John Still (1880–1941) and civil servant and commissioner of archaeology Harry Charles Purvis Bell (1851–1937) among others.

I conducted research in various archives in the United States and Sri Lanka, including the De Soysa House; Sapumal Foundation; National Museum, Natural History Museum and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Colombo; the Jaffna Public Library, Jaffna Fort and the art gallery and history museum at Fox Jaffna in Jaffna; the Yale Center for British Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts of the University of Pennsylvania; and Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Harvard Museum of Natural History and Joanna G. Williams Archive in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. In Sri Lanka, I interviewed artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, curators, scholars, critics, activists, archivists and lawyers who specialise in human rights, refugee programmes, intellectual property, cultural repatriation and academic freedom; visited archaeological sites such as Anuradhapura, the capital of an ancient Sinhalese kingdom and site of contemporary Buddhist worship; studied materials in private and public collections; and documented relatively new memorials, monuments, museums and art spaces across Sri Lanka, especially in the Northern Province, a former war zone.

Cader’s exhibition ISLAND (Talwar Gallery, New Delhi, 2016) was the subject of my article “Trouble in Paradise”, which appeared in a special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asia on Archipelagic Asias, edited by Leo Ching and Nicolai Volland, in 2024. Several chapters in my book consider intimate links between nature and culture and their place in a history of art and empire in South Asia. These links acquired new significance during and after the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) as military tools and symbols became “a permanent, organic part of life” and a “state of nature”, according to the Colombo-based artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara (b. 1960). Cader’s and Thenuwara’s art are featured in my forthcoming book The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia, which will be published by the University of California Press in 2027.