A workshop on the history of religion, conflict, and accommodation in India.  The two-day discussion will focus on two broad themes:  Buddhists’ encounter of conventional Vedic religion in ancient India; and exchanges among Saivas, Vaisnavas, and Jains in ancient and medieval South India.

Workshop Topics:

What are the causes  and  reasons behind the eruption of religious conflict? Is it primarily due to basic philosophical differences on central issues – like the nature of God, the derivation of ethical principles from an idea of a divine being, structure of society (the varna system) / Or is it rooted in sociological causes like the role of a priestly class and their dominance over society – which can be threatened by the appearance of a contending religion? Or, thirdly, is it linked to the patronage religious groups receive from royal power, so that conflict between rulers are translated into a conflict between two religions?

What are the ways in which, once conflict arises in a society, it seeks to produce exchanges and accommodation? How does it produce everyday peace after religious conflict, a sort of “wordless accommodation”(Al Stepan’s phrase)? Do they create institutions which mediate between religious groups, and institutionalize accommodation? Do they move towards articulated theories of religious tolerance? And if they do, how do they ground their arguments? Finally, at times such accommodation is achieved not explicitly through theoretical reasoning, but through art and literature. How do we read these texts, without reading our anachronistic concerns into them?

In earlier discussions some persistent and interesting methodological questions have arisen: how do we read their texts without the intrusion of our language into theirs? How do we inflect the broad general ideas of accommodation/tolerance, and conflict/violence into a set of more nuanced concepts of continuous, but distinct states of affairs?

Discussion Schedule:

4 November 2011

 9.30 – 11.30

Chair: Partha Chatterjee

Lawrence McCrea

Desecularization in Indian Intellectual Life

Dan Arnold

Othrodoxy, heterodoxy and the argumentative India: Jayanta Bha??a, the M?m?mskas, and the Question of a Case for Religious Pluralism in India”

11-11.30 COFFEE

11.30 -12.30

Rajeev Bhargava

Civility and Principled Coexistence: Asoka’s Dhamma

LUNCH 12.30 – 2.00

2.00 – 3.00

Chair : John Stratton Hawley

Charles Hallisey

Religious pluralism, accommodation and justice in Sri Lanka’s Mahavamsa

3.00- 3.30 COFFEE

3.30-4.30

Sudipta Kaviraj

On the Agamadambara

 4.30 – 5.30

Discussion of some methodological questions

5 November 2011

 9.30 – 11.30

Chair: Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Valerie Stoker

Hindu Sectarian Identity in Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara: Vy?sat?rtha and the ?r? Vai??avas at Tirupati

Ajay Rao

Fear and Eschatology in the Memory of Violence: Representing the conquest and re-conquest of Madurai

 1130 -12.00 COFFEE

 12.00 – 1.00

V.  Narayana Rao

 LUNCH 1.00 – 2.00

 2.00- 3.00

Chair: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi

 COFFEE  3 – 3.30

 3.30 – 4.30

Arindam Chakrabarti

Translation and Toleration: Remarks on Al Beruni’s Arabic translation of Yogasutras and Ballantyne’s Sanskrit translation and commentary on the Bible

 4.30 – 5.00

Concluding session – methodological questions and publication schedule