The Transcultural Eros of the Manchester Cāndāyana

Molly Emma Aitken is associate professor at the Graduate Center and the City College of New York (CUNY). Her book publications include The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (Yale University Press, 2010), which won CAA's Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012. Aitken is currently working on a monograph with the working title “We Are All Women,” about gender, eros, and play in Mughal painting.

Allison Busch (1969–2019) was associate professor of Hindi literature in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her expertise and interests lay in the classical Hindi literature of the early modern period (ca. 1550–1850) with a special interest in the cultural life of Mughal and Rajput courts. Her publications include Poetry of Kings (Oxford University Press, 2011) and numerous articles on classical Braj Bhasha literature. Works she left in progress include a translation of Keshavdas's 1591 Rasikapriya, a study of Rajput martial poetry, and a coauthored monograph with Molly Aitken on the ideal Hindu heroine among Mughal connoisseurs, which received the support of an ACLS collaborative grant 2015–17. https://allison-busch.github.io.