Within Iran, the transformation in the Islamic legal understanding of the foreign (ajnabi) into a political concept was accelerated by the encounter with Europe during the 19th century. The classical Iranian understanding of otherness as a domain fully demarcated from the self was replaced by an internalized other, resulting in what we call here…[Read more]

This article examines the temporality of interlinear translation through a case study of the rendering of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry into Persian. We argue that, in its adherence to the word order of the original, the interlinear crib prioritizes the temporality of the instant (kairos) over the temporality of the linear sequence (chronos). Ka…[Read more]

In the summer of 2011, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) debuted on the Iranian stage. The director and playwright Amir-Reza Koohestani (b. 1978) created a production that was faithful to the classic status of this text while also maximizing its resonance with a contemporary Iranian audience. I explore how Koohestani achieved this b…[Read more]

This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. I propose the methodology of…[Read more]

Public talk for International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (February 24, 2021) https://youtu.be/77oz4tb8r0Y How did Hindu devotees come to worship an Indian goddess in the ‘Chinese Way?’ What was allegedly Chinese about these rituals and how is this related to the goddess’s Buddhist origins? When did Hindus start to think of Ch…[Read more]

Religion, language, and race have been among the most crucial factors behind the formation of various national and communal identities in modern South Asian history. Just like the political division of British India, the complex interplay of these factors also culminated in a bifurcation of linguistic boundaries along the religious lines according…[Read more]

Three types of academic sources are crucial for understanding the Hindu tradition in our times: a) scriptures and the classical texts that are available mostly in Sanskrit b) works in the English language produced by orientalists, religious studies scholars, and some modern Hindu religious leaders themselves, and c) writings of…[Read more]

A study of the Sanskrit allegory, Life Delighting (Jivanandanam), and the uses of allegorical literature for historiography.

file is too large for this repository so I list the links below:
Link to lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xtDwVTndx4&t=43s
Audio: https://soundcloud.com/unibirmingham/multilingualism-as-a-stimulus-to-islamic-literary-theory

In her lecture, Gould discusses how cross-cultural encounters have generated new literary theories and new…[Read more]

chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Translation & Activism

e popular idea, especially among the young, is that religion and spirituality are things of the old age. We generally think that spirituality is a post-retirement plan; something which has to be enjoyed with the gratuity, provident fund, and pension that you get after retirement. This is not true. Spirituality is something we need when we are…[Read more]

Can the Indian manuscript and manuscript library be art? In what follows, I reflect on this question by examining a set of photographs I created for an art project called Manuscriptistan. I explain what it has meant for me to aestheticise Indian manuscript libraries and manuscripts, and I offer some insights about why it is important for scholars…[Read more]

The hermit-poet of modern Persian literature, Bijan Elahi (1945-2010) was a modernist poet, a prolific translator of Eliot, Rimbaud, Michaux, Hölderlin, and the founder of Other Poetry, the leading avant-garde movement within Persian modernism. Elahi passed the last three decades of his life in seclusion in his house in Tehran. He stopped…[Read more]

Over the course of the last year the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) and the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (Roshan Institute-UMD) have begun collaborating with the Raja of Mahmudabad family on the preservation of their important manuscript collection. The project will help protect the…[Read more]

This article engages with cosmopolitan conceptions of culture that flourished in the nineteenth century Caucasus with a view to clarifying the relevance of these legacies today. I focus in particular on the polymath writer ʿAbbās Qulī Āghā Bākīkhānūf (1794–1847). As I explore Bākīkhānūf’s historical writing, I consider how the Persianate liter…[Read more]

Kashmir weaves a rich tapestry of geographical, cultural, and spiritual heritage. Kashmir Shaivism is the crowning jewel of this spiritual tradition, of which Lal Ded is a brilliant gem, being one of the earliest women gurus of the valley. Shonaleeka Kaul translates 101 teachings of Ded and arranges them in the four chapters of ‘Life of I…[Read more]

Contemporary engaged Buddhist scholars typically claim either that Buddhism always endorsed social activism, or that its non-endorsement of such activism represented an unwitting lack of progress. This article examines several classical South Asian Buddhist texts that explicitly reject social and political activism. These texts argue for this…[Read more]

Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) has been variously considered a mystic, a prophet, a devotee, and an early modern propounder of the harmony of religions. However, this spiritual luminary has seldom been considered a philosopher. Academic engagements with his life and precepts have been negligible. In Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri R…[Read more]

In the wake of modernism studies’ global turn, this article considers the role of translation in fostering Iranian modernism. Focusing on the poetic translations of Bijan Elahi (1945-2010), one of Iran’s most significant poet-translators, we demonstrate how untranslatability becomes a point of departure for his experimental poetics. Elahi used pre…[Read more]

Religions are widely accessible in the digital community and Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism Online engages with some of the internet’s representations of Hinduism, with a focus primarily on political and politico-nationalist representations. Juli L. Gittinger focuses on three organizations throughout the book: Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), R…[Read more]