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)

 

Perspectives on Work, Home and Identity from artisans in Telangana: Conversations around Craft

Discussion based on the new book by Chandan Bose (New York: Palgrave, 2019)

 

Reading of an excerpt from the book: Prof. Chandan Bose, cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor, Dept. of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad

 

Panelists: Dr. Aditya Malik, Vice Chancellor, K.R. Mangalam University; Shri Rajeev Sethi, Founder, Asian Heritage Foundation; and Prof. Savyasaachi, Professor, Department of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia

 

Chair: Shri Rajiv Sethi

 

Conversations around Craft dwells upon narratives of artisans who share their experiences of making and of being craftspersons in contemporary India. The book is the result of ethnographic study of a household of artisans in Telangana who specialize in the region’s style of murals, narrative cloth scrolls, and ritual masks and figurines. In situating voices of artisans as the central focus of study, Conversations around Craft allows readers to explore the simultaneous and juxtaposing locations where practitioners situate the experience of making and of being craftpersons

 

INDIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

 

The Uren Story: Ascent of Human Society

Illustrated lecture by Dr. Goutami Bhattacharya, Deputy Superintending Archaeologist (Excavation Branch IV), Archaeological Survey of India, Bhubaneswar

Chair: Shri B.M. Pande

 

Two seasons of excavations (2016-18) at Uren, district Lakhisarai, Bihar by the Archaeological Survey of India, Excavation Branch III, Patna has revealed a complete unbroken sequence of cultures starting with the proto-historic village culture and ending with a flourishing Buddhist establishment during the Pala period. The site has brought to light, evidence of an ancient habitation that traversed the entire journey of human settlement from an incipient village that quickly learnt to gainfully exploit its immediate surroundings and developed first as an urban mercantile settlement and finally transformed as a famed religious centre