21st International Conference on Maharashtra: Culture & Society Deha: Invoking the Body.

Deha or body can be understood in many ways. Conceptually, it may denote a self-reflexive mode of articulation that invokes and recreates history, heritage, region, culture, and politics. Alternately, deha can also be a descriptive and representative category denoting participation in transcultural frames that link with different regions and categories. Deha, that is about the self and the other, can be considered central to the discursive formation of modern Maharashtra. With deha as the theme for this 21st International Conference on Maharashtra, we present thought-provoking and original scholarship on topics that include but are not limited to caste, gender, sexuality, labour, health, migration, technology, representation, ritual, performance, and the anthropocene. The International Conference on Maharashtra is one of the key activities of the Maharashtra Studies Group (https://www.maharashtrastudiesgroup.org/index.html), which has had a long tradition of organizing conferences and publications on Maharashtra since the late 1960s. The last conference on Maharashtra held in Heidelberg was in June 1988 on the folk component in Maharashtrian culture and 19th-century social reform, organized by G.D. Sontheimer and N.K. Wagle. 

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

(Day 1) 19th June 2025

08:30-09:15: Registration

09:15-10:00: Welcome by the organizers and the Director of the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg

10:00-10:15: Tea Break

 

10:15-12:00: Panel 1: Orienting Deha

Kartik Maini (University of Chicago): Corpora and Comportment: Orientations of the Body in the Dāsbodh

Rahul Sarwate (Ahmedabad University): Two Histories of the Body: Literature and Life in Early-Twentieth-Century Maharashtra

Surajkumar Thube (University of Oxford): From Entertainment to Assertion: Reimagining Deha in Satyashodak Jalsas

 

12:00-13:00: Lunch Break

 

13:00-14:45: Panel 2: Representations of Deha

Irina P. Glushkova (Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow): Corporeal Discomfort, Divine Touch, and Janabai's Pictorial Physique in the 19th Century Prints

Dušan Deák (Comenius University Bratislava): Two Bodies, One Soul: Panduranga and  Vitthal in Shripura Mahatmya

Vaishnavi Bagade (University of Edinburgh): Challenging Traditional Brahminical Notions of Beauty: Exploring the Representation of the Body in the Poetry of Namdev Dhasal and Shantanu Kamble

 

14:45-15:15: Tea Break

 

15:15-17:00: Panel 3: Deha as Metaphor

Chinmay Dharurkar (IIT Kanpur): Metaphoric Extensions of Body Parts in Marathi

Shrikant Botre (King's College London): Metaphor, Caste, and the Body: Science-ing Sex in Late Colonial Western India

Pramod Mandade (IIT Mumbai): From Ulcers to Wounds: The Metaphoric and Material Body of the 'Police Action' in Marathwada

 

18:00-20:00: Evening Program: Film and Presentation by Dr. Mohan Agashe

(Day 2) 20th June 2025

08:50-10:00: Panel 4: Women’s Deha

Prashant (University of Exeter):The Maratha State, Brahmanical Patriarchy, and the Regulation of Women’s Bodies in 18th-Century Western India

Jaswandi Wamburkar (SNDT Women's University Mumbai): Changing Consciousness about Women’s Body and Health

 

10:00-10:15: Tea Break

 

10:15-12:00: Panel 5: Disciplining Deha

Nabhojeet Sen (University of Bonn): The Body in Punishment and a Body for Labour: Gender, Enslavement and Disciplining in Early Modern Western Deccan, 1670s-1818

Rashmi Banerjee (University of Virginia Charlottesville): Murderous Mothers: Illegitimacy and Child-murder in Colonial Bombay

Kalpana Dixit (TISS Tuljapur): Closed-Circuit Television Surveillance and Regulation of Bodies

 

12:00-13:00: Lunch Break

 

13:00-14:45: Panel 6: Disciplining Deha

Rosalind O’Hanlon  (University of Oxford): Embodied Families: The Kulavrttanta and Brahman Cultural Politics in the Twentieth Century

Sunila S. Kalé (University of Washington), Christian L. Novetzke (University of Washington): Sovereign Bodies: Surya Namaskar and Self-Rule in the Princely State of Aundh

Alok Oak (Heidelberg University): Inhabiting Secular Bodies: Dharmashastras and Hindu Reform in Maharashtra (1930-1956)

 

14:45-15.30: Tea Break

 

15:30-17:30: Evening Program: Film and Presentation by Henning Stegmüller

(Day 3) 21st June 2025

08:50-10:00: Panel 7: Public Deha

Aishwarya Walvekar (University of Warwick): A Look Within, a Look Away; a Look Back, a Look Forward: Politics of Bodies, Technologies and Times in Ganeshotsav’s halte dekhawe

Firdaus Soni (University of Hyderabad): Bodies in and of the Jatra: Engaging the Jatra of Malegaon in Marathwada

 

10:00-10:15: Tea Break

 

10:15-12:00: Panel 8: Deity and Deha, Deity's Deha

Anne Feldhaus (Arizona State University): The Divine Self in the Līḷācaritra 

Borayin Larios (University of Vienna): Embodying the Divine in the Streets of Pune

Anuja Patwardhan (IISER Pune): Maligned Maladies and Benign Divinities: A Case Study of Disease Deities in Coastal Maharashtra

 

12:00-13:00: Lunch Break

 

13:00-14:10: Panel 9: Relating Deha to the World

Sonali Kale (Heidelberg University): Reclaiming Spirituality by Deconstructing Body: Phule’s Approach to Bodily Impurity in Religion 

Digvijay Nikam (JNU Delhi): The Deha of the World and the Deha of the Poet in Arun Kolatkar’s Poetry

 

14:10-14:15: Short Break

 

14:15-16:00: Panel 10: Decaying Deha

Madhuri Deshmukh (Oakton College Des Plaines): Death and the Body in the Grind-Mill Song Tradition

Michihiro Ogawa  (University of Tokyo): The Damage to Human Health in the Indian Great Famine of 1876-1878 with Special Focus on the Epidemic of Cholera in the Bombay Deccan

Lisa Klopfer (Independent Scholar, Ann Arbor): Turnings

 

16:00-16:30: Tea Break

 

16:30-17:30: Business Meeting of the Maharashtra Studies Group