Event report: Searching for the Sacred in South Asia

Last month, CIP co-sponsored postgraduates "Searching for the Sacred in South Asia". Faculty of Divinity PhD student and lead organiser Hina Khalid reports back from the symposium:

“Over the two days of the conference, participants – in the online format and on the in-person day – energetically discussed and debated a wide range of themes relating to the intersections of religious visions and socio-political processes across South Asian landscapes. Speakers were from a variety of academic institutions around the world including the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Cambridge Muslim College, University of Edinburgh, University of York, LSE, SOAS, Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), Ambedkar University (India), University of California, Australian National University, University of Queensland, and University of Toronto.

“Our aim was to foster inter-disciplinary conversations around the theme of religious expression in South Asia, and to explore how ‘abstract’ theological or philosophical ideas are concretely worked out, embodied, and lived on the ground. We followed a consistent thematic structure with four panels on each day, oriented broadly around the themes of sacred space, religio-political belongings, and aesthetic expressivities.

“Papers addressed the manifold enmeshments of religion, aesthetics, and politics, across different regions and historical periods, and thus afforded an insight into how ideas of the ‘sacred’ in South Asia are expressed in both physical space (i.e. in places of worship, museums, ritual gatherings) and in imaginative space (i.e. in conceptions of nationhood, literary universes, a community’s memories). The phrase “searching for” in the title of this conference highlights that these expressions of the ‘sacred’ are fluid, dynamic, ever-embedded in their regional and historical contexts, and so tantalizingly resist any neat systematization.

“Overall, the symposium proved immensely fruitful – not only did participants get a chance to meet other postgraduate students from around the world working on similar themes/themes of interest, the gathering also catalysed certain crucial conversations that are at the methodological forefront of many humanities disciplines today:

• how do we, as young scholars, address colonialism not only as a topic of academic exploration but as a perspectival reality that often shapes how we engage with our scholarly material (and indeed, what scholarly material we engage with at all)?
• can analytical categories applied to the religious traditions of the West be straightforwardly transposed onto the theological topographies of South Asia?
• is the distinction between ‘aesthetics’ and ‘politics’ a conceptually meaningful one?
• how are scholarly endeavours imagined and practised differently in settings where the operating paradigm is not logical rigour but spiritual sensitivity?
• and so on.

“We are now considering generating a publication from the conference proceedings, possibly as part of Routledge's South Asian History and Culture series.”