Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis is a book about the lost home, the new homes, and the journeys in between of nineteen sculptures that now reside in at least twelve separate museums across North America, Western Europe, and South India. After piecing together what these goddesses and their former companions might have meant when they were together in tenth-century South India, Kaimal traces them into the hands of private collectors and public museums as these objects became more thoroughly separated from each other with each transaction. In the process of export and purchase, and in the hostile as well as loving receptions these sculptures received within South Asia, she fi nds that collecting and scattering were the same activity experienced from different points of view.

Since 1988, Padma Kaimal has taught courses on the history of Asian art at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, surrounded by family, friends, and good colleagues. Her research questions common assumptions about art from India, and the Tamil region in particular. Did kings build the only architecture that matters? Did sculptures tell only one story at a time? Did buildings? Did people in the tenth century have no concept of individual identity? Are the boundaries of India’s modern states meaningful for mapping the subregions delineated by tenth-century architecture? How did women of the tenth century get the power to patronize temple construction? Are museums the problem, the solution, or both to debates on cultural property? Is collecting art the opposite of scattering it? Professor Kaimal’s essays have appeared in Third Text, Source, The Art Bulletin, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Artibus Asiae, Archives of Asian Art, and Ars Orientalis.