In "Mimesis Across Empires," Natasha Eaton examines the interactions, attachments, and crossings between the visual cultures of the Mughal and British Empires during the formative period of British imperial rule in India. Eaton explores how the aesthetics of Mughal "vernacular" art and British "realist" art mutually informed one another to create a hybrid visual economy. By tracing the exchange of objects and ideas between Mughal artists and British collectors, British artists and Indian subjects, and Indian elites and British artists she shows how Mughal artists influenced British...

In "Mimesis Across Empires," Natasha Eaton examines the interactions, attachments, and crossings between the visual cultures of the Mughal and British Empires during the formative period of British imperial rule in India. Eaton explores how the aesthetics of Mughal "vernacular" art and British "realist" art mutually informed one another to create a hybrid visual economy. By tracing the exchange of objects and ideas between Mughal artists and British collectors, British artists and Indian subjects, and Indian elites and British artists she shows how Mughal artists influenced British...

Filling in gaps in a largely neglected cultural period, this study proposes that Mughal and Hindu visuality interrupted and undermined British cultural and administrative hegemony in India. Close examination of the lives of various objects reveals that, as they moved between temples, palaces, the bazaar, museums, private collections, and traveling exhibitions, these objects demonstrated their slippery agency and their ability to slide out of colonial definitions. Even during this most authoritarian epoch of empire, Natasha Eaton shows, there were spaces, places, and objects that raise...