Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Ranjeeta Dutta
(Assoc. Prof., CHS, JNU)
Will be presenting a paper on
Imagined Geographies And Regional Conformities: Political Geography And Early Modern South India
Date & Time: February 7, 2019 (Thursday), 11am
Venue: CSSS Committee Room (No: 13), SSS-II
Abstract: The paper will attempt to understand the different ways in which space was visualized in southern India and became the basis of differential geographies conceived at various points of time in the historical past. Narratives in pilgrimage literature, and political texts that abound from fourteenth and fifteenth century onwards had their own geographical vision and associated with it their respective notions of history, region and identity. Identifying the intersections between geography, historical imagination of a space and political identities, it will be argued that though these narratives located in their specific contexts conceived the space according to their respective worldviews as sacred, political and regional, as the case may be, they were in conversation and competition with each other. Thus, these varied and complex geographical imaginations produced an interconnected frame within which the ideas of local and cosmopolitan circulated and generated contesting cultural and social identities.
Bio-note: Ranjeeta Dutta teaches at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Previously, she also taught at the Department of History and Culture in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research interests are religion and religious identities with special emphasis on the peninsular region. Her publications include a monograph titled, From Hagiographies to Biographies: Ramanuja in Tradition and History (2014) and an edited volume (co-edited with Rameshwar Prasad Bahuguna and Farhat Nasreen) titled, Negotiating Religion: Perspectives from Indian History (2012).