The Pulse of Art History Lecture Series

This talk presents a close analysis of a Persian text (1760-61CE) in praise of the Maklī necropolis in Sindh, now in modern-day Pakistan. I discuss the intertwining of Ṣufī beliefs with emotions and movement and sociability. The act of walking serves as a critical method for experiencing the sacrality of Maklī, not simply as a mode of reaching holy sites and following pilgrimage itineraries, but rather as an embodied experience that could enact significant emotional transformation upon the feeling subject. This research highlights the rich possibilities that poetic texts hold for excavating the affective dimensions of urban and funerary spaces in premodern South Asia.

Fatima Quraishi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. Her current book project Necropolis as Palimpsest: The Makli Cemetery in Sindh, 1380-1660 is a longue-duree analysis of a vast funerary site in the south of Pakistan.

The event is only open to the Cornell community.