
Padma Kaimal
Department/Office Information
Art and Art HistoryPadma Kaimal trained in the History of Indian Art under Joanna Williams at the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught at Colgate University since 1988. Her research questions common assumptions about art from the Tamil region. Did kings build the only architecture that matters? Did men? Are the boundaries of India’s modern states meaningful for understanding tenth-century architecture? How do narrative sculptures tell their stories? Are fierce goddesses demonic? Are museums the problem, the solution, or both to contentions over cultural property? Her new book, Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space, reconstructs the aspirations, profound wisdom, Tantric secrets, and radically distinctive world view of ancient kings and queens of South India by closely analyzing the material forms of the elegant temple complex they built at the start of the eight century, and that has miraculously retained its form over the intervening centuries. Her previous book, Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis (Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies, 2012) seeks to disrupt categories of East and West, victim and thief, as it traces the worship, ruination, dispersal, and re-enshrinement of nineteen sculptures from a tenth-century goddess temple. Her essays have appeared in Third Text, Source, The Art Bulletin, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Artibus Asiae, Archives of Asian Art, and Ars Orientalis. Fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the American Association of University Women, the Center for South Asian Studies at U. C. Berkeley, and Colgate University have generously supported her research.