Friday 29 August 2025 11:00am to 3:15pm
Online
About
Attempts to address questions of this type often operate under the long shadow of a trichotomy of the “ancient” (“Hindu”) age, the “medieval” (“Muslim”) age, and the “modern” (“British”) age. This Orientalist distinction can stultify attempts to make sense of the writings of nineteenth-century South Asian figures who straddle these historiographical boundary-markers.
For instance, the presentation of Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) as the “father of modern India” can obscure his dense negotiations with a range of Persian, Bengali, and Hindustani sociolinguistic milieus. By reworking ideas from the Upaniṣads (c.600 BCE), Roy critiqued contemporary Baptist missionaries in Bengal, and claimed that Hinduism resonates with the Unitarian Christianity of some prominent intellectuals in Bristol and Boston.
Several other figures recalibrated materials they had received from local Hindu and Indo-Islamic sources in engagements with European Christianity, without presenting these engagements in terms of a “modernity” versus “medieval” binary. The recent appearance of temporal markers such as “late medieval” and “early modern” indicates some measure of scholarly unease with this binary.
In this online symposium, convenors Dr Ankur Barua & Dr Anindya Purakayastha invite doctoral students and established academics working on different aspects of the religious history of South Asia to explore the writings of thinkers who operated “in between” Indic and European idioms between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.
View a complete set of speaker’s abstracts for this event & the detailed schedule.
About the convenors
Dr Ankur Barua is University Lecturer in Hindu Studies, based in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Adopting a phenomenological approach, he probes the interaction of Hindu and Muslim practices, culture and identities with a particular focus on West Bengal. He accompanies his academic scholarship with literary and musical endeavours, including his debut novel The Harvest of Time (2023).
Dr Anindya Purakayastha is based at the School of Translation and Cultural Studies, Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR) in Calcutta, having previously served as a professor in the Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, India. During 2025, he is one of three Global South Visiting Fellows connecting the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum.
His current research project explores divergent indigenous thought geographies from the Global South as instances of immanent modernity or pre-modern vernacular modernity. It looks into histories of inter-faith constellations and epistemic infusions in pre-colonial Bengal of the 16 century that actualised cross-cultural heterodoxy and conviviality, building grounds for subsequent modern religious reform movements like the Brahmo Samaj mobilisations in early nineteenth-century Bengal.
Practicalities
This event will start at 11:00 BST (local time in Cambridge). This corresponds to 15:30 IST, 06:00 EST.
There will be a break from 12:35 to 13:30 BST. Download a PDF flyer with the complete schedule.