The Institute for South Asia Studies invites you to a talk by Assistant Professor of Asian Religions and Islamic Studies at Yale University and historian of Mughal India, Prof. Supriya Gandhi.
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DATE: Wednesday, September 30, 2020
TIME: 9am Berkeley | 5pm London | 9pm Lahore | 9:30pm New Delhi | Calculate Your Local Time
This event will also be live streamed on the Institute's FB page: ISASatUCBerkeley
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Abstract: Did Persianate writers in the evolving political formation of the Mughal Empire have a concept (or concepts) akin to that of race? In the early modern period, with the rise of European colonialism, the terms raça/raza and casta acquired new connotations. During that era, several encyclopedic works and universal histories were produced in Persian, replete with genealogies and taxonomic classifications of peoples, creeds, and sects. In this talk I draw on a small corpus of such Persian writings from the late-sixteenth as well as the seventeenth centuries, to investigate what ideas about race they might present.
Speaker Bio: Supriya Gandhis research examines the interface of Islam and Indic religions in South Asia. Her interests include the religious and cultural history of the Mughal empire, Islamic mysticism, the early modern and modern translation of Indic texts into Persian, and modern Hindu thought. She grew up in India and studied there as well as in Iran and Syria before earning her doctorate. Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright and ACLS/Mellon foundations, among others. At present she is completing a book examining the writings and political context of the Mughal prince and Qadiri Sufi, Dara Shikoh (1615-59), whose works include a translation of roughly fifty Upaniṣads into Persian. Her next project explores the role of the Persianate cultural and intellectual ecumene in the making of modern Hinduism. More about Prof. Gandhi on her faculty page HERE.
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The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
