Main speaker: Professor Sasanka Perera, Vice-President, South Asian University

Chair: Professor Yogesh Tyagi, Vice-Chancellor, University of Delhi

 

Discussants: Prof. JayadevaUyangoda, Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies; Prof. Sanjeev Kumar HM, University of Delhi; Dr. Santosh Kumar Singh, Ambedkar University, Delhi;  Dr. Dev Pathak, South Asian University and Professor Upendra Baxi, former Vice Chancellor, Delhi University

 

Moderator:  Prof Navnita Chadha Behera  University of Delhi

 

Based on Sasanka Perera’s book 'Warzone Tourism: Tales from the Darker places of Paradise (Sage Publications, 2016).  Post-independence Sri Lanka has been wracked by decades of civil war and political violence. The consequence has been documented and undocumented magnitude of death and destruction. How is such extraordinary institutional violence determining various ways of seeing in Sri Lanka? Through the trope of warzone tourism, this discussion delves into the details of violence, and more importantly the associated monumentalizing

 

(Collaboration: Department of Political Science, Delhi University and Sage Publications)

 

 

 

Make in India

Introductory Remarks:  Rajeev Sachdeva, Former MD, Siemens Poer Engineering Ltd.
 

Keynote speakers: Shri Amitabh Kant, CEO, Niti Ayog; 

 

Chair: Shri Ramesh Abhishek, Secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP)

 

(Collaboration: IC Centre for Governance)

 

Transformations in Ancient Northwestern South Asia

Lectures on 

 

The Indus Civilization – Myths and reality

By Richard H. Meadow, Director, Zooarchaeology Laboratory of the Peabody Museum, and  Senior Lecturer, Archaeology Programme Department of Anthropology, Harvard University

 

South Asian Contributions to Animal Domestication in prehistory

By Ajita K. Patel,  Research Scientist,  Zooarchaeology Laboratory of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University

 

Chair: Dr. Himanshu Prabha Ray

 

CREEDS OF OUR TIMES 

Curated by Rajiv Mehrotra

 

Being Mortal (60 min; 2015; dvd; English)

Director: Thomas Jennings

 

The film follows renowned New Yorker writer and Boston surgeon Atul Gawande as he explores the relationships doctors have with patients who are nearing the end of life. In conjunction with Gawande’s new book, Being Mortal, the film investigates the practice of caring for the dying, and shows how doctors — himself included — are often remarkably untrained, ill-suited and uncomfortable talking about chronic illness and death with their patients

 

(Collaboration: Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama)

 

Some Things Change

An exhibition of works by Anni Kumari and Jasone Miranda-Bilbao

 

Preview on Tuesday, 10 January 2017 at 18:30

 

In 2013 Anni Kumari and Jasone Miranda-Bilbao began an exchange of ideas surrounding the question of what art can do and how to bring the potential of this into their work. This exhibition presents the result of those conversations explored from the artists’ own individual perspectives

 

 

A discussion on two books: The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam by A. Azfar Moin and Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia by Walter N. Hakala

 

Chief Guest: Professor Robert P. Goldman, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor in South and Southeast Asian Studies, The University of California at Berkeley

 

Discussants: Professor Farhat Hasan, Department of History, University of Delhi, and Professor Hilal Ahmed, Associate Professor, CSDS, (The Millennial Sovereign); and Professor Sunil Kumar, Professor in the History of Medieval India, Department of History, University of Delhi, and Professor Shahid Amin, Professor of History, University of Delhi (Negotiating Languages)

 

(Collaboration: Primus Books)

 

 

The ‘In-Betweeners’: Trade, Politics and Patronage on the Western Coast in 1st Century AD

By Dr. Shailendra Bhandare, Ashmolean Museum / St Cross College, University of Oxford

 

Chair: Dr. Peter Skilling

 

The lecture will focus on one particular site on the Western Coast, namely Kuda-Mandad (Dist. Raigad, Maharashtra) and the feudal elites known as the ‘Mahabhojas’ who ruled here in these tumultuous times. Their existence depended on machinations played at a ‘higher’ level by their overlords and as such they were the ‘in-betweeners’ of political world of their times. The patronage extended by the Mahabhojas to the rock-cut cave temple complex at Kuda is well-attested through inscriptional evidence available in situ.   By deploying new numismatic evidence in the narrative, the talk will outline various aspects of Mahabhoja rule at Kuda, such as their contribution to the political and economic/trade history of the region

 

The Saints of Sin (85 min; 2016; dvd; English & with subtitles)

Director: Aniruddha  Sen

Original concept: Swati Bhattacharya

 

Screening will be followed by a discussion

 

The Saints of Sin is a lyrical journey of emotion and experiences of seven and a half Bengali women spread all over the globe between Nairobi to New York to New Delhi and Bombay. Built on intimate conversations recorded over three years, the film explores the lives of Debbie, Runa, Srila, Gopi, Shreya, Swati, Paro and Pradipta, where each acknowledges her propensity towards one of the Sins and speaks of her negotiations with it

 

 

 

Keynote Speaker: Dr. E. A. S. Sarma, former Economic Affairs Secretary and Power Secretary, and now a civil society campaigner based in Visakhapatnam

 

Panellists: Shri P. K. Tripathi, former Chief Secretary of Delhi and Chairman, Public Grievances Commission of Delhi, 

Prof. Gurpreet Mahajan, Professor, Centre for Political Studies, JNU; Dr Reetika Khera, Associate Professor of Economics, IIT-Delhi 

 

(Collaboration: D. S. Borker Memorial Foundation)

 

 

 

 

Speaker: Professor Robert Yelle, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich; author of several books including: Explaining Mantras: Ritual, Rhetoric and the Dream of a Natural Language in Hindu Tantra

Chair: Dr. Ananya Vajpeyi

 

The lecture will address some of the parallels, as well as the differences, between Hindu mantras (especially those of the Tantric variety) and Christian prayers. Like prayers in many other cultures, each of these has been used historically for a range of purposes: to worship gods and goddesses, of course, but also to perform magic. The first part of the lecture will examine how, through the use of poetry in particular, such formulas are converted into powerful speech, supposed to be capable of achieving their objective. The second part of the lecture will trace the polemics against poetic and magical prayers that originated in the Puritan critique of “vain repetitions.” For several centuries, this polemic was directed against first Roman Catholic chants, then Hindu mantras

Chair: Dr. Ananya Vajpeyi, Fellow and Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies