Announcements

CANCELLED

The Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literature in cooperation with the Indo-German-Society in Jaipur offers its annual intensive Hindi course. It is aimed at all students and interested persons who already have a good basic knowledge of Hindi. The intensive lessons with native-speakers enable the participants to deepen their language skills, to automate grammar structures and to acquire new vocabulary. In addition, they are motivated to actively use Hindi in class and everyday life.

From 29 to 30 October 2021 the 6th Bangladesh Studies Network Conference will be taking place in Heidelberg.

The European Bangladesh Studies Network brings together people in Europe studying Bangladesh. While there are a lot of research activities on Bangladesh in various disciplines, these are often only interconnected by chance or personal networks. They are hardly visible to the outside, with Bangladesh remaining, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, an appendix to South Asian Studies which focus on India, and, to a lesser degree, Pakistan. By creating a forum for perceiving interconnections and providing visibility, this conference contributes to strengthening Bangladesh Studies as a field and to eliminating blind spots within Bangladesh studies.

Venue: Heidelberg University, South Asia Institute, Vossstraße 2, Building 4130, 69115 Heidelberg

Kindly send your abstracts, registration and queries to Dunya Wasella sc236@uni-heidelberg.de.

More details here.

CrossAsia-eBooks has published Translating Islam, Translating Religion: Conceptions of Religion and Islam in the Aligarh Movement by Arian Hopf.
Religion is commonly perceived as an unequivocally defined concept. However, a historic perspective raises questions about this understanding and reveals religion as a concept that developed only in a process of negotiation with other religions. In particular, the 19^th century is of special interest in this regard, as the colonial encounter intensifies tremendously in South Asia. The religions of South Asia are scrutinised, categorised and compared to Christianity by Europeans, which leads to the development of religion as abstractum. Missionary and orientalist critique as well as modern science pose to be an entirely new confrontation for the Muslims of South Asia. This book aims to analyse Muslim responses to this confrontation, which imply a translation of Islam as a religion as well as an adaption of the concept of religion itself. The Aligarh Movement is of particular interest in this regard, as it intensively engages in these debates, trying to integrate a re-interpretation of Islam in these discourses.