Akshaya Tankha is the Forsyth Postdoctoral Fellow in Art at the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. He is an art historian of modern and contemporary South Asia. His work, which spans photography, museums, Indigenous art and visual culture in India, is focused on the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and postcolonialism. Akshaya’s current book project, drawn from his doctoral dissertation and titled “Nagaland and the Art of Indigenous Presence in Postcolonial South Asia,” explores the border-crossing that craft objects, memorial monuments, house museums, and their makers perform across ritual and secular domains of practice, the tensions that characterize this open-ended slippage, and what they reveal about the contemporaneity of art and the political significance of the aesthetic in the Indigenously-inhabited and contested borderlands of postcolonial South Asia.