Kajri Jain

Biography

Kajri Jain is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on images at the intersections between art, religion, politics, and vernacular business cultures in modern and contemporary India; she also writes on contemporary art. Jain’s latest book Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke University Press, 2021) traces the emergence of monumental iconic sculptures in post-liberalization India; Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007) is about printed icons. Her current book project, tentatively titled Nature in the Time of the Gods, investigates vernacular ideas of nature in India’s public parks. This will complete a trilogy on public images in modern India. Jain’s work is interdisciplinary, appearing most recently in Art History, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Third Text, Current Anthropology, The Immanent Frame, and numerous edited volumes including The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (forthcoming), How Secular is Art? On The Art of Art History in South Asia (Cambridge 2023), Concepts: A Travelogue (Bloomsbury, 2023), The People of India: New Indian Politics in the 21st Century(Penguin 2022), and Capitalism and the Camera (Verso 2021).