The Department of History and Archaeology is delighted to invite you to an online symposium on ‘Inscriptions and Political Culture’ to mark the publication of Social Worlds of Premodern Transactions: Perspectives from Indian Epigraphy and History (Primus Books: 2021), edited by Meera Visvanathan, Digvijay Kumar Singh and Mekhola Gomes.
The essays focus on how inscriptions shed light on political, social, and economic contexts of pre-modern transactions. Building upon the concerns of the volume, the symposium is planned as a discussion on what a close study of inscriptional sources can tell us about pre modern political cultures. Newer approaches to the early history of South and Southeast Asia have placed questions of courtly culture, textual traditions, legal, and religious institutions at the heart of political processes. This symposium seeks to bring the burgeoning field of inscriptional studies into conversation with approaches to understanding pre-modern political cultures.
Join us for a conversation between Dominic Goodall (Professor, EFEO), Sanjukta Datta (Assistant Professor, History, Ashoka University), and the authors of the volume, as they reflect upon the field of the ‘political’ in premodern South and Southeast Asia.
Join here