Events
Upcoming Events
All COSAS events are free and open to the public.
Event Archive
‘Their Lordships are again at great disadvantage in not knowing Sanskrit’: the Privy Council, Mīmāṃsā, and Anantakrishna Shastri
The colonial desire to continue while reforming the pre-existing practices of civil law in British India, so as to govern according to “native” legal customs, was the original driver of the creation of modern Indology. As the British legal and scholarly...
Narratives of Siege: Understanding Buddhist/Muslim Conflicts in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand
Public lecture by John Holt, Visiting Professor of Buddhism. Why have Buddhist and Muslim communities in these three countries, after sharing centuries of largely amicable relations, found themselves recently enmeshed in conditions of inter-communal tension,...
TAPSA: Bilvamaṅgala in Bengal: Biographical Thought, Inexpressibility, and Other Mysteries
Ishan Chakrabarti, PhD Candidate in SALC, University of Chicago In 1510 Caitanya made a pilgrimage to South India, where he was captivated by the Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta (Ambrosia for Kṛṣṇa’s Ears), an anthology of Sanskrit verses about Kṛṣṇa written by the...
How Patrons Select Brokers: Efficacy and Loyalty in Indian Cities
Tariq Thachil, Associate Professor, Vanderbilt University. This lecture is hosted by the Department of Political Science and COSAS. Scholars of urban politics in India have yet to systematically understand how party leaders select the rank-and-file ‘brokers’,...
Regimes of Knowledge in the Early Indic World, Part of the 2019-2020 Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Śāstram: Form, Power, and Translation in Indic Scholasticism
Venue: Franke Institute for the Humanities, Room S-102, Regenstein Library, open to all members of the University community The domain of śāstra – disciplined, textualized systematic thought, composed in Sanskrit and other languages – forms premodern southern...
South Asia Seminar: Plotting Malaiyaham: Life and Work among Northern Hill Country Tamils in Postwar Sri Lanka
Mythri Jegathesan, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Santa Clara University This talk is based on exploratory research conducted in two districts in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province since July 2018 and is in conversation with ethnographic fieldwork...
TAPSA: Mai Misra, Multivalence and Materiality in the Sidi (African-Indian) Sufi Tradition
Jazmin Graves, doctoral candidate in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago This presentation explores multivalent conceptions of the African Sufi saints honored in Gujarat and Maharashtra in order to analyze the veneration of Mai Misra in...
TAPSA: Mai Misra, Multivalence and Materiality in the Sidi (African-Indian) Sufi Tradition
Jazmin Graves, doctoral candidate in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago This presentation explores multivalent conceptions of the African Sufi saints honored in Gujarat and Maharashtra in order to analyze the veneration of Mai Misra in...
South Asia Seminar: “After the “Unthinkable”: Cheran’s Poetry”
South Asia Seminar: Anushiya Ramaswamy, Professor of English, Department of English Language and Literature, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville “After the "Unthinkable": Cheran's Poetry” This is part of the introduction to the forthcoming translation of...
South Asia Seminar: Making a World with a Word: Language, Intimacy, and Ethicality among Thirunangai Transgender Women in Chennai, India
Aniruddhan Vasudevan, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin The Tamil word ‘Thirunangai’ is currently the most preferred and widely used identity label among transgender women in Chennai. Free of pejorative meanings, indexing...