Social Order and Social Justice: Negotiating Power and Marginality in the Classical Sources
King's Building, Strand Campus, London
This seminar is jointly organised by the King's Theology & Religious Studies and King's India Institute.
Abstract
This lecture looks at characters from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads and other literary texts in the Sanskritic canon who occupy socially marginalized positions, such as Shudras, outcastes, women, and forest-dwellers, but nevertheless play an important role in bending the arc of the epic’s moral universe towards justice. Through significant encounters with human and divine protagonists, figures like Shambuka, Shabari, Ekalavya, Kak Bhushundi and Satyakama, among others, open up possibilities of critique and resistance to a patriarchal socio-political order dominated by brahmins and kshatriyas. They breach the hegemonic discourse of dharma from within the text, where the strategic use of narrative structure as well as poetic language enables the reader to make moral judgments contrary to the dictates of caste and gender. Some of these critical openings are actively debated in the commentarial traditions. Episodes involving such characters also throw light on the contingent and dynamic nature of identity, which emerges from specific interactional contexts and turns out not to follow the rigid normative classifications of varnashrama-dharma. I will draw on Sanskrit sources, but also the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, which is composed in Awadhi and Brajbhasha.
About the speaker
Dr Ananya Vajpeyi
Ananya Vajpeyi is a scholar and writer, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology, and currently a Fellow and Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. She is completing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit for W.W. Norton. An anthology of her essays about cities is forthcoming from Women Unlimited.
She is currently a Research Consultant with the Nilgiri Archeological Project at the University of Ghent, BE; and a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, where she teaches a Foundation Course on Great Books. She writes widely for newspapers and magazines in India and internationally, on arts, culture, politics and ideas.
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