All are welcome!
Imaginaries of Ignorance: Five Ideas of the University and the Place of the Humanities Within Them
Prof Rukmini Bhaya Nair
Date: Friday, October 30, 2015
Time: 4.00 pm
Venue: C V Raman Auditorium, LHC, IISER Pune, Dr Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan, Pune 411008
Abstract: Much has changed since Thomas Carlyle declared with magisterial certitude in the nineteenth century that “the true university of these days is a collection of books”. This paper seeks to imagine the contours of a ‘true university’ in the 21st century by examining five templates of higher education, each of which conceptualizes the role of the humanities in somewhat contradictory ways. Can the height and heft they accord to the humanities be the principle pathfinder that helps decide which, if any, of these frameworks might emerge as prima inter pares in the future? The question is discussed here with special reference to the history of the modern university. When this ‘western’ narrative is placed within the challenging context of an extremely plural India, a host of conceptual difficulties seem to arise since institutions adjudged the best purveyors of ‘true and certain knowledge’ cannot always be said to be humane and those that may be humane tend to escape the strict Cartesian criteria by which ‘true knowledge’ is conventionally determined.
About the Speaker: Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English at IIT Delhi. She received her PhD from Cambridge University and has since taught at a number of universities across the globe. Her research interests are in the fields of cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, English Studies, the philosophy of language, techno-cultures, literary, narrative and postcolonial theories, gender studies, and creative writing. She is a widely published essayist and academician.
Her publications include Poetry in a Time of Terror (2009), Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture (2003), Lying on the Postcolonial Couch (2002); Translation, Text and Theory: the Paradigm of India (2002); and Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom (1997). In 2013, she published the first novel— Mad Girl’s Love Song —of a trilogy. Her novel was long-listed for the prestigious DSC prize. She is also a widely published poet, and her several volumes of poetry have been extensively translated as well.
Professor Nair is the recipient of several awards (including The J.N. Tata Scholarship, the Hornby and Charles Wallace Awards, the Dorothy Leet Grant) and also holds several honorary positions (such as President’s Nominee at the Central Universities of Kerala and Tamil Nadu).
Ashoka: Interweaving Archaeology with the Emperor’s Story
Prof Nayanjot Lahiri
Date: Friday, October 30, 2015
Time: 6.00 pm
Venue: C V Raman Auditorium, LHC, IISER Pune, Dr Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan, Pune 411008
Abstract: Nayanjot Lahiri will look at the package of problems that a scholar writing about an ancient life faces, even when the subject is someone as extraordinary as Ashoka, the third emperor of the Maurya dynasty. Her lecture is based on the challenges she has faced in crafting his biography which has recently been published as Ashoka in Ancient India (Permanent Black). Recovering Ashoka’s life and times from what has morphed into legend, as she will argue, is an exercise in providing him with contextual flesh, and teasing out his individual psychology and personality to the extent possible from what was composed on his orders as well as from what is archaeologically knowable about the lifeways of more ordinary people of his times.
About the Speaker: Professor Nayanjot Lahiri is a leading archaeologist and Professor at the Department of History, University of Delhi. Her research areas include Indian archaeology, archaeological theory, heritage studies, and ancient India. She has established her reputation as an accessible historian of Indian antiquity with publications such as Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern Histories (2012), Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered (2005), The Archaeology of Indian Trade Routes (upto c. 200 B.C.) Resource Use, Resource Access and Lines of Communication (1992), and Pre-Ahom Assam: Studies in the inscriptions of Assam between the fifth and the thirteenth centuries AD (1991).
She was awarded the Infosys Prize in Humanities-Archaeology in 2013.
Futurama: does the past cloud our thinking about futures to come?
Dr Jonathan Turney
Date: Saturday, October 31, 2015
Time: 5.00 pm
Venue: C V Raman Auditorium, LHC, IISER Pune, Dr Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan, Pune 411008
Abstract: Any conversation about the future tends to invoke the past in the first minute or so. That makes sense, as there are no facts about the future, even though it fascinates us. That past, though, contains plenty of old visions of the future, and more and more as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first.
About the Speaker: Jonathan Turney has been a science writer, reviewer and editor since the early 1980s. He is the author of I, Superorganism: Learning to love your inner ecosystem (2015) about the human microbiome, The Rough Guide to the Future (2010), which was shortlisted for the UK Science Book Prize, Lovelock and Gaia: Signs of Life, and Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture (1998), which won the British Medical Association Award for Popular Medical Book of the Year. He has worked for the Times Higher Education Supplement and Penguin Books, and taught at University College London and Imperial College. He enjoys writing and editing on assignment, especially around life sciences, futures, science and society and policy issues and has written for a wide range of audiences, producing everything from books to museum exhibition guides to school resources.
Prof Mahesh Rangarajan
Date: Monday, November 2, 2015
Time: 5.00 pm
Venue: LHC101, IISER Pune, Dr Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan, Pune 411008
Abstract: The world may be a unified ecological unit, with deep economic links but it is divided into nearly 200 nation states. India is not alone in trying to reconcile the imperative for economic growth with the search for space for nature. The processes of economic growth as also demographic expansion exert new pressures on the soil, water and air as also on the ability of ecological processes to enable repair and renewal.
Yet, the very idea of a nation often coheres around symbols of nature: a mountain, a lake, a river or an iconic animal. The attempt to imagine a people as a nation may be and is contested but it often is about showing that the nation is a product of nature. Over the last century and more, securing nature via protection has often been a project of the nation state, the tiger in India, the panda in China and the bison in the US being exemplars. But as with the bounds of the nation, this is also a deeply ambivalent project with questions of who encloses nature and for whom. Is the nation in enclosing nature protecting it, preserving it or hastening its decline?
This raises a larger issue of how far these iconic symbols of modern nations draw on older lineages of kings and notables who too had exclusive hunting grounds and parks. Much of India too saw princely reserves as well as government forests that enabled elite capture of larger landscapes and waterscapes. How can democracy enable peace with nature but also create conditions for peace among people is a major question bequeathed by history and part of our living present.
About the Speaker: Professor Mahesh Rangarajan completed his BA in History with Honours at Hindu College, University of Delhi and then a MA and PhD at the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was till recently Professor in Modern Indian History at the University of Delhi and subsequently was Director of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. He has also taught as a Visiting Faculty member at Cornell University, Jadavpur University, Kolkata (Calcutta) and at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru (Bangalore). His most recent works include the co-edited Environmental History as if Nature Existed (OUP, 2010), India's Environmental History (Permanent Black, 2012), Nature without Borders (Orient BlackSwan, 2014) and Shifting Ground (OUP, 2014). His own collection of essays entitled Nature and Nation is now in press with Permanent Black. The paper is part of a larger and continued engagement with animal/ human histories in India.
