Announcements
Friday, Agust 18, 2022, 4:15 p.m., Hörsaal 010.01.05
We cordially invite you to a book reading and discussion with author Shaheen Akhtar on Friday, August 18th 2022. The event will take place in lecture hall 010.01.05 at 4.15.
Shaheen Akhtar is a notable Bangladeshi writer who won the “Prothom Alo Best Book Award“ in 2004 for her novel Talaash, which was translated by Ella Dutta into English as The Search and published by Zubaan in 2011. For her literary contributions, Shaheen has received the prestigious “Bangla Academy Award” (2015). In 2020 she has won the 3rd Asian Literature Award. She writes both novels and short stories. Shaheen’s works have been translated into English, German, and Korean.
Shaheen Akhtar will be present for a reading from her works and a discussion that will include aspects of translation of novels and short story from Bangla into English and German.
CATS, Vosstr. 2, enter through South Asia Institute (SAI)
More information here.
All are welcome!
Wednesday, July 27, 2022, 3 p.m. - 6 p.m. (sharp), room 010.00.06
Public lecture:
Epsita Halder, Jadavpur University, Kolkata - In Search of Imam Husayn: Muharram in Kolkata from an Interdisciplinary Perspective
Roundtable discussion:
Torsten Tschacher, SAI, Heidelberg - Muharram beyond the Shia Script
Frank Korom, Boston University - Muharram Controversies in the Indo-Caribeean Diaspora
Pushkar Sohoni, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune - Ta'ziahs and Temples in the Western Deccan
Deepra Dandekar, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin - An Ethnographic Exploration of Muharram(s) in Pune
More information here.
All are invited!
Monday, July 25, 2022, 4:00 pm, room 010.00.01
At a time when communal antagonism was at its peak (1920s) in colonial India, Premchand was perceptive enough to understand that the cause for religious intolerance was rooted in mutual ignorance of communities about each other’s faith. To alleviate this, he decided to write a play about Karbala, a 7th Century event in Islamic history, in which the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, Imam Hussain withstood the brute forces of the debauch ruler Yazid and sacrificed his life along with that of his companions and family members in the battlefield of Karbala, in modern day Iraq. In an unprecedented leap of faith, Premchand’s play draws the Dutt brothers, descendants of Ashwatthama, spending their exile years in Arabia, to the battlefield of Karbala. Inspired by the uprightness of the Imam and bound by their moral duty to justice, the seven brothers join forces with the Imam and sacrifice their lives for him, singing praises of their motherland Bharatvarsha. Premchand, thus, transformed this central event of Islamic history into a nationalist narrative. My talk reflects on Premchand’s play Karbala as an expression of his unique transoceanic imagining of nation, which transcended territorial boundaries and fell in line with Gandhian principles of communal harmony and co-existence of religions.
Nishat Zaidi is Professor and former Head, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, India
More information here.
All are welcome!
Thursday, 21 July 2022, 2 p.m. (sharp), room 130.00.03
At the core of this presentation lies a problem that I have encountered in my professional live as a scholar: what is it that we can say about the patterns of conceptual labour visible in the discipline of anthropology operating within neoliberal academia? We experience an exceptional acceleration of concept making processes by anthropologists that has a distinctive comment on reflexivity as a practice and a unique experience of time within academia. I will speak, with some examples, about the current state of affairs in neoliberal academia whose demand for accelerated production of concepts and proliferation of conceptual labour has had effects on the ethics of knowledge production and circulation.
More information here.
Dr. Max Kramer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Volkswagen Freigeist project "The Populism of the Precarious: Marginalization, Mobilization, and Mediatization of South Asia's Religious Minorities", and research associate at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin.
The talk is a public talk in the course of Hans Harder's seminar on "Speed: Dromology between South Asia and Europe".
All are welcome!
Monday, 18.7.2022, 6 p.m. (sharp), room 010.01.05 (lecture hall)
The presentation will focus on oral narratives talked about Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a charismatic Sufi saint who came to the United States from the Tamil-speaking part of northern Sri Lanka known as Jaffna. Bawa spent the years between 1971 and 1986 ministering to a transnational community of disciples, his so-called "funny family." His primary headquarters in the United States was Philadelphia, where the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship took shape and grew. After his death in 1986, he was buried in a rural area outside of Philadelphia, where his mazār has become a place of pilgrimage for South Asian and North American Muslims alike. By focusing on stories as performative vehicles for the remembering of Bawa, the community he founded keeps his charismatic presence alive in the "office" of his charisma, since no successor was ever appointed to continue his role as the qutb (pillar) of his small but dedicated group of followers. The ongoing circulation of narratives about his wondrous career therefore contains the power to keep his absent presence alive and vibrant as his funny family continues to mature and expand more than 35 years after his death.
More information here.
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