Date/Time
Date(s) - 21/08/2025 - 22/08/2025
9:30 am - 6:00 pm
Location
Seminar Hall
Categories
Two day National Seminar
on
“Revisiting the intersectionality of Religion and Literature in Indian Intellectual Traditions”
At IIAS, Shimla
Dates: August, 21st and 22nd 2025
Concept-Note:
Aims and objectives of seminar : This seminar aims at reopening the ontic and epistemic question pertaining to the foundational debate on the intersectionality of religion and literature in the Indian intellectual tradition.
• To explore and highlight the interrelatedness and intertextualities that exist between religion and literature in India
• To critically evaluate the idiosyncratic understanding of religion and literature as independent domains while ignoring their internal dynamism of both being entangled in the Indian way of being. The aim is to re-instruct and re-create the readings and relationships between religion and literature in India.
• To provide a novel and holistic understanding of society, religion and cultures in a more nuanced manner.
Significance of the seminar: This seminar, by revisiting the linkages of religion and literature, aims to bring a new perspective to the Indian Intellectual tradition. This is done in the backdrop of the argument that rather than mourning the death of Sanskrit, the death of Indian knowledge, the crisis of tradition, the epistemic break, the historical rupture and the epistemological crisis that was portrayed as part of the Indian intellectual response to modernity and colonialism. The narrative on Hindu nationalism has brought back the question of India’s corporate agency that was completely lost due to our narrow, suboptimal reactions to Orientalism and colonial anthropology. Rather than a mere tragic articulation of the end of the Indian knowledge system due to modernity and the exigencies of hybridisation (Bhabha, 1994), mimicry(ibid), sligh-civility (ibid), and catachresis (Spivak, 1985), the Hindu nationalist response is one of reclamation of India’s corporate agency.
Through a project of decoloniality and deglobalisation, the Hindu nationalist project has recovered the idea of India in the form of a nation as a corporate agent. This seminar attempts to demonstrate how, rather than giving in to the juggernaut of the imperatives to identify and mimic ourselves to the globalised forms of cosmopolitan identity that merely have traces of ethnocentrism, eurocentrism (Said 1978) and racism.
The Hindu nationalist project has foregrounded the significance of locating the cosmopolitan in the local, which this seminar tries to decode through the modes of historical sociology and 2 structuration. The primary epistemic departure that this seminar tries to mediate is to recover the project of Hindu nationalism from the scourge of majoritarian homogenising tendency and explain how it has been constructive in engineering a project of universalism. This seminar aims at reopening the ontic and epistemic question pertaining to the foundational debate on the intersectionality of religion and literature in the Indian intellectual tradition.
Notwithstanding the acknowledgement of the gamut of work undertaken on the intertextualities between literature and religion, it is required for us to revisit and reopen the said intertextualities. Here, one must ponder upon the ontological questions that must be raised in the epistemological quest to make sense of the Indian intellectual tradition which have manifested themselves time and again in the form of historical ruptures and épistèmé shifts, which Foucault has understood as shifts in ‘the body of knowledge and ways of knowing which are in circulation at a particular moment’ (Mills, p.28). Taking cognisance of such shifts and breaks, reopening the intertextualities has become a task of urgency, especially in the contemporary spatio-temporal context when our corporate identity has been compromised and encroached upon by globalisation.
Simultaneously one is faced with a politico-cultural experience in the domestic milieu of the subcontinent with the resurgence of cultural nationalism and the emerging political scenario. Owing to the rise of this phenomenon, India has been targeted incessantly for propagating and embracing a ‘homogenising’ idea of the nation by raising the Hindu religion to a divine pedestal at the expense of other religions. Thus, this political entity and its cultural and dharmic elements embodied in the ideology of Hindu nationalism has been defamed by deliberately misconstruing its outlook by both the global and local ‘secular-liberal’ forces. Such a criticism however is misplaced and rests on a neo-imperialist motive to resurrect and re-impose the stereotypes that were engineered by the European colonisers as part of their ‘civilising mission’, which also provided a rather fallacious rationale to justify their colonial endeavours. It is precisely such an attempt that must be challenged by taking recourse to reverse orientalism, which requires that indigenous tradition – the neovedantic in this case – ceases to see itself as the ‘other’ as it is normally projected in the European civilising dualism. Instead, reclaim and take pride in the idiosyncrasies characterising their mundane and transcendental outlook. This will also enable us to highlight the institutionalised overarching power hegemonised by the evangelical Church in the West and the West’s attempts to create anxieties in the subcontinent regarding the emergence of a similar possibility of religion usurping power in the subcontinent. This totally negates and fails to recognise the understanding of religion as a way of life, encapsulated by dharma, rather than an institutionalized ritualistic entity, a way of life that is based on the divine trinity of the self, the material and the cosmic, on which the Indian intellectual tradition rests. This said trinity stands in stark opposition to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on strict adherence to the Cartesian dualism of the subject and the object, which also extends to seeing the material and the metaphysical as each other’s antipodes, with the obvious consequence that the West has come to develop an unwavering belief in a modernist sense of separating the sacred and the secular. Such a Cartesian separation has led to the birth of what we conventionally understand as the notion of secularism, which was then imposed, with all of its Eurocentricity, to the Indian subcontinent and has evolved into the prime weapon with which the narrative of Hindu nationalism has been ideologically slaughtered due to the latter’s attempt to revive the neovedantic glory of our past by shedding the country’s epistemological dependence on the West.
This must be argued from the perspective of historical sociology. This is because history and change did not cease to manifest themselves with the end of coloniality and the beginning of 3 post-coloniality. In this regard, history should not be conceived as ‘a conglomerate of occurrences determined by a ‘set of universal laws’ but it should be recognised as characterised by volatility (Susen, p.149). It becomes pertinent that we do not limit our focus to merely unearthing the link between literature and religion, but precisely as to how this interrelatedness will accentuate the process of decoloniality.
The dynamics between globalising structures and our corporate agency of Indianness, which manifests itself as the collective will of the Indians, must be placed and understood in terms of the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens, where he has questioned the Manichean divide of the structure-agent debate. Focussing on the junction at which an actor meets a structure, Giddens argues that ‘actors are capable of resisting the determining power of the structure through their “knowledgeability” and their capacity of evaluating their actions in relation to structural constraints’ (240, Ndlovu). Understanding globalisation and corporate agency through Gidden’s structuration framework will then enable us to place them not in strict opposition to one another. We see globalising structures solely as an imposing force on the action of the people or the corporate agency as an expression of free will not deterred by structures. The reclaiming of the corporate identity and agency akin to Indianness must take into account the fact that such an effort is not a utopian project. A project that seeks to overthrow globalisation because such far-fetched project will only be doomed to be futile. Rather, the focus must be on making sense of the point of interaction between structures and agency, which will enable us to jumpstart a process of decoloniality through the reclamation of corporate identity and agency.
Having said this, it needs to be noted that the blueprint for such a project of reclamation must be envisaged by taking into account elements from the Hindu political thought and its scholars, whose writings and ideas, even though often come under scrutinizations and accusations of being communally intolerant, their nuanced understanding will enable us to offset the impact of the encroaching globalising structures onto our corporate agency. Thus, the seminar additionally shall illuminate the non-homogenising ideas of indigenous corporate agency, based on the trinity of the material, self and the cosmic. In this regard, there is a huge corpus of literature that richly contains epistemic tools to offset the colonised structures of thinking and consciousness, which have far outlived the judicial-administrative colonialism. This is what has been understood by decoloniality, which goes beyond the postcolonial school by identifying the existence of European coloniality even after decolonisation…and seeks to unshackle indigeneity from the universal fictions of coloniality (Sai Deepak, 2021, p. 121).
Recognising the exigency of engaging in such a task of decoloniality and deglobalisation, this seminar intends to reopen the debate on the intersectionality of religion and literature in the Indian intellectual tradition. This will be done by understanding the need for an ontic and epistemic embeddedness in historical sociology and the structuration approach.
Taking the above considerations into account, the seminar shall focus on the following subthemes
1) Reading Religious Literature in India: Theories and Methods
- Nature of Religious and Literary Experience: Pre-modern, Modern and Indian ideas
- Aspects of Religious texts and Literature: Individual, Social and Cultural
- Indological approach, Historical, explanatory, Philosophical, Sociological
2) Nature of the individual life and the Dharma
- Harmony of the trinity of the self, empirical and the metaphysical
- The trialectics Vs dialectics: The Idea of Indian Modernity
- Individual Agency Vs Corporate Agency
- Methodological Individualism Vs Corporate Identity
3) Understanding the secular and social life
- Vedic and Upanishadic Vision
- Bhakti Tradition
4) Decolonising the Indian Mind: Eurocentrism to Indo-centrism
- Decolonising and Deglobalizing Indian Intellectual tradition
- Need for historical sociology
- Significance of structurationist Approach