Can a close examination of the way scholars have studied the Indian past open new pathways for future scholarship?
| A series of interdisciplinary workshops focused on key themes and pivotal moments that shaped the course of Indian historiography will help chart a future course for the study of the Indian past. |
The Entanglements of the Indian Past project aims to make the study of the Indian past more self-conscious of the forces that have shaped it. A three-year series of interdisciplinary workshops will focus on three issues where serious engagement is critical: caste, materiality, and historicality. The project pairs each of these issues with a crossroad moment in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century that determined the course that the study of the Indian past would take: Rahul Sankrityayan’s quest for a past that mirrored his commitments to justice and equality in the present, Muni Jinavijaya’s efforts to free Indian thought from the limitations of manuscript textuality, and Georg Bühler’s vision of recovering the history of a country that, according to a commonplace, “has no history.” Each of these moments reveals the intensity of political commitment, and the depth of vision, involved in studying the Indian past. This project will attempt to answer where such scholarship might go in the future.
Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College
University of Chicago
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s research interests are in modern South Asian history and historiography, in postcolonial theory and its impact on history-writing, and in comparative studies of questions and politics of modernity.
He is a founding member of the editorial collective of...
Professor Emeritus of Religion
Denison University
John E. Cort is the author of Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (2001), Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in India (2010), and, with Lawrence A. Babb and Michael W. Meister, Desert Temples: Sacred Centers of Rajasthan in Historical,...
Associate Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Chicago
Whitney Cox’s main interests are in the literary and intellectual history of southern India in the early second millennium CE. Within that broad range, his research has concentrated on Sanskrit kāvya and poetic theory, the history of the Śaiva religion, and medieval Tamil literature and...
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
University of California, Davis
Lynna Dhanani's research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debate, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated twelfth-century Svetambara Jain Hemacandra, court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat. Having dedicated herself to...
Professor of History
University of Delhi
Charu Gupta is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi. The focus of her work is gender, sexuality, masculinity, caste, religious identities, and vernacular literatures in early twentieth-century north India. Her publications include Sexuality, Obscenity,...
Sessional Lecturer, Department of History and Research Associate, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs
University of British Columbia
Doug Ober is a historian of South Asia, religion, and colonialism with more than a decade of archival and ethnographic research experience in northern India, the Himalayas (India, Nepal, Bhutan) and Tibetan areas of China. His research explores how colonialism shaped and continues to shape...
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Chicago
Andrew Ollett studies the literary and intellectual traditions of South Asia, including works composed in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, and Kannada, mostly falling within the first millennium of the common era. Ollett's research has focused on the “question of language”: the availability and...
Assistant Professor of Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture
University of Chicago
Sarah Pierce Taylor’s research focuses on gender and emotion in premodern religion in South India. Her current book project, Embodying Souls: Emotion, Gender, and Animality in Premodern South Asian Religion, considers the soteriological tension in Jainism between experiencing and...
Assistant Professor, Divinity School and the College
University of Chicago
Anand Venkatkrishnan is an intellectual historian of religion in South Asia. His book in progress, Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa in Indian Intellectual History, examines the relationship of bhakti, religion as lived affect, with philosophy as...
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Scholars came together to discuss the emergence of Jainism as a crucial aspect of understanding the Indian past, particularly in the 19th century
This talk followed the trail of one Jain textual tradition, that of the thirteenth-century Prakrit Ṣaṣṭi Śataka.
Charu Gupta (University of Delhi) and Laura Brueck (Northwestern University) reflected on their experiences with teaching caste.
In this workshop, Charu Gupta discussed the writings of Santram BA, a radical anti-caste social reformer from Punjab.
This conference brought together prominent researchers on caste to consider new directions for the field of caste studies.
Charu Gupta reflected on the meanings of caste, Dalit and Bahujan identities, and the criticality of “critical caste studies.”
Discussion with invited guests to consider the legacy of Rahul Sankrityayan.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Scholars came together to discuss the emergence of Jainism as a crucial aspect of understanding the Indian past, particularly in the 19th century
This conference brought together prominent researchers on caste to consider new directions for the field of caste studies.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This talk followed the trail of one Jain textual tradition, that of the thirteenth-century Prakrit Ṣaṣṭi Śataka.
Charu Gupta reflected on the meanings of caste, Dalit and Bahujan identities, and the criticality of “critical caste studies.”
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Charu Gupta (University of Delhi) and Laura Brueck (Northwestern University) reflected on their experiences with teaching caste.
Discussion with invited guests to consider the legacy of Rahul Sankrityayan.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
In this workshop, Charu Gupta discussed the writings of Santram BA, a radical anti-caste social reformer from Punjab.
