I studied History and Art History in India and Italy before earning the Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. I am interested in researching issues of identity formation, gender, patronage and cross-cultural interaction in ancient art from northwestern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. My first publication, Displaying Many Faces: Art and Gandharan Identity (2004), catalogued a private U.S. collection of early Buddhist sculpture. My true passion is Mathura, a small town located approximately 90 miles southeast of Delhi, where I regularly conduct fieldwork. I am currently studying the beliefs and lifestyles of cattle and sheep herders and their impact on religious art in ancient Mathura.

In my thematically oriented courses on Buddhist art and gender issues, students examine their own positionality while comparing art cross-culturally. Students who take my surveys of South Asian art and European art as well as my course on Islamic architecture also talk and write about issues of race, gender, and social class. In 2003, I traveled to Thailand with students from my Buddhist Art and Ritual class with a grant from the St. Lawrence University Asian Studies Initiative. In March 2019, my SYE students Elsa Coughlin ’19 and Ella Neilsen ’19 and I conducted a field study of architectural preservation and sustainable architecture in Mumbai, India. During the pandemic, I developed and taught a new special topics seminar titled Animals in Buddhist Art. -Dr. Chandreyi Basu

In this spotlight talk, Dr. Basu will discuss the function of thangka paintings and the importance of Guru Rinpoche, also known as Padmasambhava, a central figure in the history of Buddhism in Tibet.

Detailed photographs of the thangka are available on JSTOR.

Maker unknown, Eight Manifestations of Guru Rinpoche, ca. late 20th century,
gouache on canvas mounted on silk brocade, SLU 2003.19