Speakers

Dube's talk thinks through the claims to decolonize and the clamour for decolonization in our present by turning to writings of 'native' catechists in early twentieth- century Chhattisgarh. Here, the exact ordinariness and the very details of these texts, shaped by procedures of vernacular translation, constitute key registers of evangelical entanglements. They reveal acute travels of the Word and the world as conjoining and unraveling colonial and indigenous terrains. These prescient palimpsests bid us to critically sieve millenarian assumption and millennial promise in articulating the problems and possibilities of decolonial imaginaries and decolonizing visions.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o famously suggests that 'decolonizing' has a lot to do with the mind. In case of most South-Asian contexts, this is true not just in the sense that the mind is/could be the main locus of 'decolonization', but also because the mind plays a role in the intellectual life of pre-modern South-Asia that could arguably be called 'central'. Salvini's talk will focus on how this emphasis on the mind translates into words and images relating to travel, and on how the idea of 'magic' may help in understanding and indeed 'de-colonizing' contemporary perspectives on travel.

Naik's talk will discuss the imagery of travel within the landscapes of Raga music, specifically from the perspective of the tradition and discipline of the Dagarvani school of Dhrupad music. It will touch upon: (1) the emergence of ‘being’, transformation and travel of the Daguri clan of musicians, their journey through time and history; (2) impact and role of the Partition, patronage, migration and urbanization on this art form and its ecosystem; and (3) how the notion of travel becomes an integral component in the process of creation within the art form.

Bausch's talk will explore modalities of travel implicated in the agnihotrabrāhmaṇas. The ritual passages explicating the Agnihotra, the small but mighty śrauta ritual performed twice a day every day of the āhitāgni’s life, describe numerous types of travel and the means by which to go. The places the Agnihotrin goes and how he travels provide information on the Vedic ritual discourse of traveling, specifically in terms of causality and relative existence, found in the later Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇa texts. The talk will briefly trace how these ideas in middle and late Vedic travel throughout Indian intellectual thought and continue to travel and constitute part of colonial philosophical and historical discourses and the Indological aftermath.

Chattopadhyay's presentation juxtaposes two texts, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s novella, Kapalkundala (1866), and Rani Chanda’s memoir of childhood days, Amar Ma’r Baper Bari (1972), to consider the surprising reveals and roles of water travel in Bengali literature. The talk focuses on the description of coastlines, river passages and waterscapes in these two works, both keen on recovering a lost landscape but separated by over a hundred years, to explore strategies through which bibliomigrancy—movement between languages—and movement through space are memorialized in these works.

A commercial travelling sensation in early twentieth century, Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879-1961), published over forty articles on his travels in America in a span of just five years (1906-11) in Saraswati, the leading Hindi magazine of the time. Taking these travel writings as its axis, Gupta's presentation will examine how ideas of freedom drove Parivrajak's travelogues toward selectively celebrating the West and pushing for a Hindu nation. Here, descriptions of freedom, self-cultivation, civility and ascetic masculinity came to be portrayed as distinctly American, German and Hindu traits, in contrast to the British colonizers on the one hand and Muslims on the other.

Rahul Sankrityayan’s was a life (1893-1963) marked by ceaseless exploration—physical and mental. In his autodidactic quest for liberatory epistemologies and practices, he was heir and robust contributor to several contemporary socio-political movements—primarily the Arya Samaj, resurgent Buddhism, and nascent Marxism—which in turn were (re)shaped in the crucible of history, including the (post)colonial. Drawing on his vast oeuvre, including his autobiography, Meri Jeevan Yatra, Ghumakkarshastra and Volga se Ganga, Joshi's talk attempts to unpack the complexity of the interplay of region, nation, and empire in his thought.

Ludden is interested in de-nationalizing theory and history by lifting the national boundaries around decolonial frames that naturalize the nation as a subject position for theory and as a territory for travel and border crossing. His talk posits India itself a 'traveling theory', which changes as it travels through space and time and produces the identities and power relations of native indigeneity; and thus problematizes 'Indian analytical tradition' as exclusionary imperialism. It argues that mobility is never inherently external -- or "foreign" -- to sedentary territorial indigeneity. Rather, territorial authorities and ideologies externalize mobility, in order to control it by separating insiders and outsiders. Nations emerge from empires whose mobile spaces nationalists partition, expelling travels and people that made nations possible.