Kalyani Madhura Ramachandran
Kalyani studies the art of premodern South Asia. Her dissertation The Art of Phanigiri: Innovation and Ideology in the Riverine Deccan, ca. 1st – 4th centuries CE focuses on an ancient Buddhist complex in Andhradesa and highlights the earliest sculptural history of Deccan (south) India. She holds a minor in British Art.
Prior to joining Columbia, Kalyani was a Research Assistant in the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she conducted research for five exhibitions including Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE – 400 CE. She has a B.A. from the University of Delhi where she received the Department of History Prize and an MPhil from the University of Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship.
Kalyani is the 2023 – 2024 Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 2024 – 2025 Asher Family Fellow awarded by the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Publications:
“Gangaram Tambat’s Sculptural Pictures of Karla.” In Holly Shaffer and Laurel Peterson edited Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company in India and China, 1760 – 1830. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Spring 2026.
“Ellora’s Living Rock: Tambat and Daniell.” In Holly Shaffer and Laurel Peterson edited Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company in India and China, 1760 – 1830. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Spring 2026.
“The Matter of Sculpture: Isamu Noguchi and Early India,” Ars Orientalis, Vol. 55, Fall 2025.
“Buddhist Art and Architecture in Southern India.” Oxford Bibliographies, Fall 2025 [Co-authored with Akira Shimada].
“The Representation of a Universal Monarch in Early Buddhist Andhra.” In Annapurna Garimella edited The Long Arc of South Asian Art – A Reader in Honor of Vidya Dehejia, 139 – 149. New Delhi: Women Unlimited Press in association with The Marg Foundation, 2022. Link.