[Reader-list] Invitation to a Lecture by Elaine M. Fisher on 17 July 2017 at CSDS

[Praveen Rai]

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

invites you to a lecture





*Hindu Pluralism: *

*Religion and Public Space at the Dawn of Modernity*

by *Elaine M. Fisher*





*Shail Mayaram *will Chair

Monday, 17 July 2017, 5 pm
                                                      *RSVP *

CSDS Seminar Room,
                                                                  Tel: 011
23942199

29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054
                                                      Fax: 011 23943450

Please join us for tea at 4.30 pm

                                           email: jaya at csds.in





In a landscape thoroughly inflected by religious difference, what does it
mean to literally wear your religion on your forehead? Since the height of
Orientalist scholarship, Hindu difference has been read through the lens of
the term “sectarianism,” a concept that translates devotion as dissent, and
community as a potential precursor to communalism. And yet, sectarian
identities were embodied and performed in public space, with geographies
that often seamlessly overlaid with one another a pluralistic religious
landscape that mediated conflict through independent coexistence. This
lecture examines how religion came to inhabit public space in Hinduism’s
Sectarian Age, as coexistence came to be mediated by the shared performance
of plural religiosities.

*Elaine M. Fisher* is a scholar of South Asian religions and Indian
intellectual history and currently a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow
affiliated with the University of Mysore.

Her recent book *Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early
Modern South India* (University of California Press, 2017) aims to
excavate, for the first time, the historical emergence of Hindu
sectarianism in the centuries prior to British intervention, a crucial era
that set the tenor for the role of religion in public life in India through
the present day.



*Shail Mayaram *is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies.

-- 
Praveen Rai
Academic Secretary
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road
Delhi - 110054
Phone: 91-11-23942199
http://www.csds.in/praveen.rai