Famed art historian, educator Kavita Singh dies at 59

Said Nayanjot Lahiri, author and professor of History at Ashoka University, who has known Singh since 2015: “She was a much-respected art historian who produced superb writings on medieval paintings. She also researched and wrote on the world of museums and how these reflected and shaped public discourse in all kinds of ways.”

This is the saddest news… RIP lovely, brilliant Kavita Singh who always dazzled @JaipurLitFest with her fabulous insights to Mughal painting and did so much to educate us all on obscure recesses of Indian art history. What an irreplaceable loss! pic.twitter.com/82wf7UxgAQ

— William Dalrymple (@DalrympleWill) July 30, 2023

Lahiri further said, “Apart from her vast knowledge of the world of art, what distinguished Kavita was her ability to make her audience understand and feel a sense of delight about little noticed details in the paintings she loved. Really sad that she passed away much before her time.”

Singh had published several essays on secularism and religiosity, “fraught national identities”, and the memorialisation of “difficult histories”.

Historian and author William Dalrymple tweeted: “This is the saddest news… RIP lovely, brilliant Kavita Singh who always dazzled @JaipurLitFest with her fabulous insights to Mughal painting and did so much to educate us all on obscure recesses of Indian art history. What an irreplaceable loss!”

Singh received her BA Honours in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College in 1985 and her Masters in Fine Arts in Art History from M S University Baroda in 1987. She received a PhD in Art History from Panjab University, Chandigarh, in 1996.

Singh also curated exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art, the Devi Art Foundation, apart from JNU and the National Museum of India. Volumes that she has edited and co-edited include New Insights into Sikh Art (Marg, 2003), Influx: Contemporary Art in Asia (Sage, 2013), No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia (Routledge, 2014) with fellow art historian Saloni Mathur, among others.

“Kavita was one of the brightest art historians and one of the most brilliant people I knew. We worked together for about 20 years. She was one of the founding members of JNU’s School of Arts and Aesthetics,” said Naman Ahuja, professor of Art History at JNU. “She specialised in miniature paintings of the Mughal and Rajput courts and then she touched on something that was very unique and important, which was how the revival of Mughal, and Lucknow and Jaipur styles was carried out in the 18th Century — a period that very few people worked on,” Ahuja added.