History of Indian Philosophy

Launch of the Special Indian Edition of the book edited by Purushottama Bilimoria and Amy Rayner (New Delhi: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2019)

 

Panelists: Prof. Purushottama Bilimoria, Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor, Ashoka University who has been teaching as Chancellor’s Scholar, University of California, Berkeley, and at the Center for Dharma Studies in Berkeley, USA; Prof. Hari Shankar Prasad, Chair, Philosophy Department, University of Delhi; Prof. Alex Watson, Professor of Indian Philosophy, Ashoka University; and Ms Samiksha Goyal, Monash University, Australia; and Prof. Bindu Puri, Centre for Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

Chair: Prof. Shashi Prabha Kumar, formerly at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Indo-Tibetan Sanchi University who will also speak 

 

‘the earth is still going around the sun’

Thirteen curated exhibitions as part of the Curatorial Intensive South Asia 2019 programme which brought together fellows from Iran, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka mentored by Leonhard Emmerling, Director, Programs South Asia, Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan; and Latika Gupta

 

On view are:

Alisha Sett (India) presents Rooee

Rooee addresses the remnants of the ‘empire of cotton’ in two prominent sites: the low country in South Carolina, USA and the textile mills of Mumbai

 

Ashima Tshering (India) presents Knock Knock

Knock Knock is an encounter with personal stories addressed through humour

 

Ayushma Regmi (Nepal) presents inhibitions.inhabitations

Inhibitions.inhabitations attempts to read bodies – human bodies, natural bodies, man-made bodies – to decrypt the fundamental question about what it means to be human

 

Diwas Raja (Nepal) presents Furnishing Papers

Using the original ID documents of the Manange people, the exhibition explores how a group of people interacted with the bureaucratic needs of the modern state of Nepal

 

Maryam Bagheri (Iran) presents Timequake

Studies show that a great earthquake will definitely occur in Teheran in the near future. This exhibition is an attempt to show how a natural phenomenon like an earthquake can turn into a human catastrophe

 

Mila Samdub (India) presents Real Time Tactics

Real Time Tactics combines spontaneous ways of using the platforms that form the basis of our social lives

 

Poulomi Paul (India) presents Pata

How do we represent places? How do we condense histories and lived realities of urban neighbourhoods into names and images? Pata tries to explore these questions

 

Pranamita Borgohain (India) presents Dis-place

Dis-place is structured around various areas of disagreements, discomforts and dislocation, each framing questions connected to the general line of inquiry while they also open specific discussion points

 

Rumi Samadhan (India) presents 1927:’Erasure’ as a form of assertion

The exhibition explores the concept of ‘erasure’ as a form of assertion, and centres on the Mahad Satyagraha as a pivotal moment of rupture within the practice of Untouchability in India 

 

Sadia Marium (Bangladesh) presents Ghar

A collection of video, photographs, photo-book, and paintings to dissect the meaning of ‘Ghar’ both as an idea and perception

 

Sarker Protick (Bangladesh) presents This too shall pass

How does are physical world and the socio/political states of affairs affect our mind?

 

Kirubalini Stephan (Sri Lanka) presents Memoryscapes

Is it ever possible to retrace memory? How do our memories define us? Memoryscapes interweaves with multiple narratives of past and present

 

Zohreh Deldadeh (Iran) presents Some-Bodies: Bodily Narratives in Iranian Contemporary Art

This exhibition focuses on different perspectives of seeing the body in Iranian contemporary art

 

As part of this exhibition, there will be a film screening on Monday, 16 December 2019 at 18:30 at C.D. Deshmukh Auditorium

 

(Collaboration: Khoj International Artists’ Association; and Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan)

 

BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP

 

Categories, Creations and Cognition in Vaisesika Philosophy

By Shashi Prabha Kumar (New Delhi: Springer, 2019)

 

Discussants: Prof. Uma C. Vaidya, former Vice Chancellor, KKSU, Ramtek, Nagpur; Prof. Ram NathJha, School of Sanskrit & Indic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Prof Purushottama Bilimoria, Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor, Ashoka University who has been teaching as Chancellor’s Scholar, University of California, Berkeley, and at the Center for Dharma Studies in Berkeley, USA; and Prof. Christopher Key Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

 

Chair: Prof. R.C. Sinha, Chairman, Indian Council of Philosophical Research

 

Mahatma Gandhi, Multilateralism and the United Nations
Speaker: Miloon Kothari, an independent expert on human rights and social policy, and former Special Rapporteur on adequate housing with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Council

 

The lecture will explore the contribution of Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders from India to the development of multilateralism as a defining, and lasting, characteristic of the global work of the United Nations. The lecture will reflect on the contemporary relevance of the ideas of global solidarity and commonality of purpose espoused by Mahatma Gandhi

 

Chair: Prof. Ashis Nandy, Trustee, IIC

 

(Collaboration: U.N. in India)

 

The Liberal Triangle of Rt. Hon. V.S. Shastri, G.K. Gokhale and M.K. Gandhi
 

Speaker: Prof. Purushottama Bilimoria, Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor, Ashoka University who has been teaching as Chancellor’s Scholar, University of California, Berkeley, and at the Center for Dharma Studies in Berkeley, USA. He is also Honorary Research Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australia and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sophia, international journal in Philosophy; and Journal of Dharma Studies (Springer)

Chair:Prof. Ashis Nandy, Trustee, IIC

 

Rt. Hon. V.S. Srinivasa Sastri – the ‘Silver-Tongued Orator’ of the Empire and perhaps the last of the Indian Liberals of his era – succeeded G.K. Gokhale as President of the Servants of India Society and was a founding member of the Indian Liberal Federation (a.k.a Liberal Party) in 1919. The talk explores how svar?j, Home-Rule, self-rule, India’s role within or without the Empire, reform and swadeshi, constitutional imperatives, democracy, and governance meant different things to each of the three leading spokes voice for India’s freedom and her liberal future; and yet they were bound up reverentially in a trialogue, agreeing to disagree and mutually criticize

 

A Sarod Duet Recital 

By Ustad Irfan Muhammad Khan and Arnab Chakrabarty  

 

Accompanied on the tabla by Zuheb Ahmed Khan 

 

This duet recital featuring Ustad Irfan Muhammad Khan and Arnab Chakrabarty will feature a mix of ragas rarely and commonly heard on the sarod, with a focus on gats or miniature compositions, around which raga performances are shaped. The repertoire for this concert will be sourced exclusively from the vast stock of the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur gharana 

 

 

Aaj Kavita

With Divik Ramesh (Delhi); Hari Mridul (Mumbai); Lakshman Prasad Gupta (Prayagraj); and Anu Shakti Singh (Delhi)

 

(Collaboration: The Raza Foundation)

 

Concert – Guitar Duet

By the Grigoryan Brothers from Australia – Slave & Leonard Grigoryan, regarded as Australia’s finest guitarists

 

With a repertoire spanning centuries, continents and genres, the Grigoryan Brothers have amazing telepathy and the ability to draw emotion from every note

 

(Collaboration: Australian High Commission)

 

FILMS OF THE SPIRIT

Curator: Rajiv Mehrotra

 

Trishagni (The Sand Storm/Hindi)

(102 min; 1988; dvd; English subtitles)

Director: Nabendu Ghosh

 

With Nana Patekar, Pallavi Joshi, Alok Nath, Nitish Bhardwaj

 

Recipient of the Best First Film of a Director, National Film Awards 1988

 

Based on a historical short story, Moru o Sangho written by Saradundu Bandopadhyay, and inspired by Buddha’s Fire Sermon. The film is set in the Buddhist town of Sariput in the deserts of Central Asia, around 200 B.C., when the town is struck by a devastating sandstorm that leaves behind only four survivors: two monks, and two children taking refuge in the monastery. Twenty years later, the monks have aged, while the boy and the girl have grown and fall in love. The jealous monk deceitfully persuades the boy to become a monk, but the girl wins him back. As a result both are expelled from the monastery, and that is when the sandstorm strikes once again

 

(Collaboration: Foundation for Universal Responsibility of H.H. the Dalai Lama; and National Film Archive of India, Pune)

 

The Poetry Society (India) Annual Lecture

 

Wordscapes: Poetry and Possibility

Speaker: Prof. Radha Chakravarty, Professor of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies, and Dean, School of Letters, Ambedkar University, Delhi. A writer, critic and translator, she has co-edited The Essential Tagore (Harvard and VisvaBharati),  edited Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Social Science Press, 2015); author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers (Routledge, 2008) and Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts (Routledge, 2013); and her translations of Tagore include Gora, Chokher Bali, Boyhood days, Farewell Song: Shesher Kabita and The Land of Cards: Stories, Poems and Plays for Children, among other publications

 

Chair: Dr. H.K. Kaul, President, The Poetry Society (India) 

 

(Collaboration: The Poetry Society, India)