Archishman Sarker

Archishman is an art historian awaiting his PhD viva-voce at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, specialising in medieval Asian Buddhist art, with a primary focus on the Pāla period. His dissertation critiqued allochronic aphasias and asynchronous postcolonial temporalities in Buddhist manuscript studies, and developed a poly-centric semiosis framework to transcend traditional taxonomic classifications of Pāla period manuscripts and images, highlighting localised agencies in the Magadha-Varendra and Samataṭa regions. It also reimagined Prajñāpāramitā’s pan-Asian doctrinal and iconographic evolution as an evental continuum through cyclical and linear temporalities, and framed manuscripts within non-dual temporalities in ritual morphogenesis; and as hyperobjects: integrating Mādhyamika non-duality, ecological phenomenology, and relational quantum mechanics to explore śūnyatā and pratītyasamutpāda in soteriological and ritual contexts. Archishman’s broader interests include South Asian art historiography (early historic period to 1200 CE), art institutions, comparative religion, visual culture, gender, aesthetics and transculturalism. His work has appeared in The Burlington Magazine and Religions of South Asia.