Across three panels on May 2 2025, speakers explored various dynamics of the “inter” on the intricately “inter-religious” landscapes of South Asia in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
This hybrid symposium was co-convened by Dr Soumen Mukherjee (Smuts Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre of South Asian Studies), Dr Ankur Barua and Dr Hina Khalid. Dr Barua reports:
One expression of the “inter” relates to the “inter-disciplinary” style of the discussions that spanned established disciplines such as Hindu Studies, Buddhist Studies, and Islamic Studies. The category of religion is often received through that of the nation-state, so that religious affiliation and nationalism are lined up in an isomorphic mapping: thus, “India under Hindu Studies”, “Bangladesh under Islamic Studies”, “Sri Lanka under Buddhist Studies”, and so on. In their different ways, speakers interrogated these projections by exploring aspects of Islamic theology in South Asia and Western receptions or recalibrations of Hindu and Buddhist worldviews.
A leitmotif running through these talks is the triadic formulation: tradition, transition, and translation. A key theme explored by some of the speakers is the rootedness in distinctive premodern traditions of religious visions that have migrated across national borderlines. Against the backdrop of various sociohistorical pressures, these traditional language games have been reworked by a spectrum of Indian and European thinkers. Such processes have involved different types of translatory transactions across the sociolinguistic horizons of Persian, Sanskrit, Bengali, Arabic, and German.
The keynote address was given by Professor Van der Veer, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen.
About this event
This event was co-sponsored by the Spalding Trust and the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum, with additional support from Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies.
For the detailed programme, visit the archived event page: Religious canopies in South Asia: Tradition, transition, translation.