Rethinking Religion in India

Announcement and Call for Papers
Rethinking Religion in India
24-27 January 2008
Delhi, India

Increasingly, it is felt that the current knowledge about the Indian culture and its traditions is unsatisfactory at best or erroneous at worst. In the domain of religious studies, in postcolonial studies and in the field of comparative science of cultures, scholars have begun to argue that the questions and conceptual framework for the study of India and its religions are firmly embedded within the Western cultural history. Therefore, Rethinking Religion in India, a five year international conference cluster, aims at developing an alternative theoretical framework to understand the Indian religions and traditions. The Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap (Ghent University), the Centre for the Study of Local Cultures (Kuvempu
University) and the Karnataka Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities (KASSH) invite you to participate in this joint endeavour.

In order to address these pressing questions, a novel conference format has been developed. The first conference year will have:

(1) A Platform, addressing the question “Are there native religions in India?” Timothy Fitzgerald, Russell T. McCutcheon, David N. Lorenzen and S. N. Balagangadhara have been invited as Platform speakers.

(2) A Roundtable in which we will take up the issue of “Colonialism and Hinduism”. A preliminary list of speakers consists of: Richard King (Religious Studies Dept., Vanderbilt University); Geoffrey Oddie (Dept. of History, The University of Sydney); Laurie L. Patton (Dept. of Religion, Emory University); Naomi Goldenberg (Dept. of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Ottawa); Akeel Bilgrami (Philosophy Dept., Columbia University); Tony K. Stewart (Dept. of Philosophy and Religion, Centre for South-Asian Studies, North Carolina); Parimal G. Patil (Dept. of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University). A group of respondents will challenge these different positions. Scholars interested in participating as respondent can send us a short paper in which they summarise their position in this debate (see the call for papers on the website).

(3) Three Parallel Paper sessions will prepare the ground for Platform and Roundtable sessions of the following years. In the first conference year, they will address the following issues: ‘Evolutionary explanations of religion’, ‘Indians are Aryans, so what?’ and ‘The caste system and Indian religion’. We invite submission of abstracts for these Parallel Paper sessions (see the call for papers on the website).

More info
Marianne Keppens & Esther Bloch
Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap
Ghent University