Secular Heritage, Sacred Reclamations: Making Sense of Buddhist Relics in Modern South Asia
With a focus on Buddhist corporeal relics, Dr. Sraman Mukherjee zooms in on the complex interplay between secularisation of archaeological heritage and politics of religious reform and revival across India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
This lecture engages with the complex interplay between secularisation of archaeological heritage and politics of religious reform and revival across India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on one particular corpus of material objects, Buddhist corporeal relics, circulating between Europe, South and mainland Southeast Asia, in response to demands of scholarly introspection, and religious as well as nationalist repatriations, Dr. Sraman Mukherjee will argue for a co-constitution of secular and sectarian identities around heritage in the public spheres of the colonies and post-colonial nation-states.
Dr. Sraman Mukherjee is affiliated postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden. His research interests include modern South Asian material culture, with special focus on colonial power and politics of knowledge production, nationalism and politics of heritage and cultural patrimony, decolonisation and postcolonial public spheres, and disciplinary and institutional histories of archaeology and museums. Dr. Mukherjee has previously taught at Calcutta University, and at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he has held a postdoctoral fellowship. His present research focuses on the competing social agencies of specialist scholars and political interest groups in the production and management of built structural heritage across sites of religious practice in postcolonial South Asia.
Drinks afterwards
Free Entrance, Reception Afterwards.
Organisation
This is a lecture in the Modern South Asia Seminar lecture series.