Ankush Arora

Ankush Arora focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century art from the British colonial period in India, with an emphasis on the role of the natural world in shaping European knowledge production about the subcontinent. Ankush’s ongoing project is researching the entanglements between water, trade, agriculture, and empires (British, Mughal, and Awadh) in a panoramic scroll depicting a topographical view of Lucknow by the Gomti river in north India. Research into the early nineteenth-century scroll, which measures thirty-seven feet in length and belongs to the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art, is supported by the South Asia Studies Council’s summer fellowship award (2024).

Before joining Yale, Ankush received a master’s degree in art history from Syracuse University (2021-23), where his capstone project examined the themes of diaspora and belonging through the vegetal motifs of plants and roots in the Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander’s drawings and sculptures. Other projects comprised a conference paper investigating the intersection between the animal body and nationalist identity, with a focus on the cow’s sacralization in Indian calendar art posters of gods and goddesses at Syracuse University’s Special Collections Research Center. In addition, Ankush curated a selection of Mithila paintings from the collections of the Syracuse University Art Museum, bringing the centuries-old art from eastern India-Nepal border in dialogue with drawings by the contemporary artist Rina Banerjee in the exhibition Take Me to the Palace of Love (2023).

Ankush is a recipient of the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Digital India Learning Fellowship (2022), which culminated in a digital exhibition centering around reimagining the role of the nonhuman, and human-animal relations in the age of the Anthropocene. The exhibition’s focus was the institute’s collection of documented manuscript paintings of plants, animals, and birds from the seventeenth-century Mughal emperor Jahangir’s period. 

Prior to graduate school, Ankush worked as an arts journalist and as a manager of a modern and contemporary South Asian art gallery in Delhi, his home city. Ankush holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Hindu College, University of Delhi (2004-07); and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi (2007-08).