Aditi Gupta

Aditi Gupta is a PhD candidate in French Studies at the University of Oxford. Her forthcoming thesis will shine a light on the life and work of Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-1799), a French East India Company officer who spent twenty-five years in different parts of India, where he constituted his collection of manuscripts, art albums, maps, and material culture from the subcontinent. This project supervised by Professor Catriona Seth FBA MAE. It is fully funded by the AHRC Oxford-Open-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership and the Clarendon Fund. Prior to beginning doctoral study at Oxford, Aditi obtained a BA in French Language and Civilisation and an MA in French Literature

The project

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Gentil (1726-1799), a French resident in pre-independent India, is accredited with the largest and most diverse collection on India. The collection consists of illustrated treatises on Indian political history, currency and religion, an illustrated atlas of provinces of India, an album of illustrations for Gentil’s memoirs, and albums of paintings on Indian history and culture. To compile them, Gentil engaged with local scholars, artists and depended wholly on first-hand knowledge, a rare
practice for European collectors in India. This corpus will allow me to shine a light on overlooked intercultural material that is specifically the result of interactions between the practices of indigenous artists and scholars on the one hand, and European patrons and collectors on the other. By illuminating networks (actors, objects and practices) that underlie the production of this collection and their modes of interaction at the local and regional level, this study will illuminate multifaceted interactions between local networks at the level of the individual and their strategies, thereby transcending political boundaries in the eighteenth century.

Title: Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-1799), A Traveller, Patron, Collector, and Historian: A Page in Indo-French Cultural Relations

Hosting institution: Archival Research in the BnF, Paris

Selective Bibliography

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