142083 UE "Burn them! Eat them! Wear them!" (2020W)

In this seminar, we will explore different uses of “sacred texts” in contemporary South Asia from the point of view of material culture and text performance. The focus here will be not so much the content of “sacred” texts from a theological or philosophical point of view, but on how these texts are used by their communities and by those who consider them a threat to their interests. This seminar seeks, therefore, not merely to find what these texts mean, but what these texts do and how they matter in practice.
We will engage in how premodern textual materials (scriptural, narrative, pseudo-historical, etc.) in either Sanskrit or local vernacular languages are reinterpreted and reused in modern and contemporary traditions and performances (oral, audio-visual, digital, textual).
By analyzing the elements of continuity and discontinuity, the seminar aims at historicizing contemporary religious practice involving sacred texts. For instance, we will study the ritual performance of the old Vedic texts in modern India, the inscription and worship of the Bhagavadgītā in so-called “Gītā temples” in north India, the worship of the book as the master personified in Sikhism, the stage-performances of stories from the Mahābhārata, or the ritual burial of Vaiṣṇava and Buddhist texts. We will also look at collective burning or desecrating of books as forms of Biblioclasm and the ingestion and imprint of sacred texts on the human body as forms of embodiment.
In the seminar, we will explore how premodern textual artifacts are reanimated, but also contested in modern discourses and ideologies in contemporary Indian society. Students will be challenged to become aware of the sensorial nature of texts, and of communication itself. The seminar aims at addressing theoretical and methodological debates drawn from the latest scholarship in South Asian Area Studies, such as the interaction between the disciplines of Indology and Anthropology; the relationship of premodern regional languages and texts, the interpretation of contemporary religious communities, and texts as tangible material objects.