Professor Patrick Olivelle
Keynote lecture: “An Invitation to Listen and to Learn – Ideological Diversity and Ashoka’s Ecumenism”
Abstract:
Diversity is at the heart of contemporary societies—ethnic, linguistic, cultural, ideological, religious, political. It is both a blessing and a curse. How can we manage diversity? How can we make diversity an asset rather than a liability? How can diversity enrich individual and community lives? Does Ashoka, the 3rd century BCE Indian emperor, provide any lessons? Can a person so removed from our times be in any way relevant?
In one part my recent book, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King, I attempt to interpret Ashoka’s inscriptional corpus and the program of moral education of his subjects as an ecumenical project. In its modern usage, the term ecumenism has been restricted to Christian sects. I attempt to broaden its semantic compass to include religious—and even ideological and political—diversities, implied in the now famous Sanskrit adage: vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam, one’s family truly is the whole world.
The pivotal terms Ashoka uses to instill the spirit of ecumenism among diverse religious and philosophical groups, the so-called pāṣaṇḍas, are derivatives of ‘listen’, words derived from the Sanskrit root √śru. In the original Prakrit/Sanskrit śravaṇa carried with it the added and implied meaning of learning. Ashoka’s message is that a person cannot be truly learned, bahuśruta, unless that person listens to and learns from others who are different. No one has a monopoly of the truth. This is the meaning of ecumenism that we can associate with Ashoka. He believed that beneath and beyond the apparent and real differences, there is a fundamental unity that is expressed in the term dharma.
Learning by listening, so intimately and so intrinsically connected in Indian languages, is Ashoka’s message to posterity. This talk seeks to explore both Ashoka’s writings on this topic and their relevance to modern society.
About Patrick Olivelle:
Professor Olivelle is noted for his work on early Indian law, religion, and asceticism,. His latest work, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (2024) is a biography reconstructing the life and legacy of this unique figure and most famous emperor in South Asian history.
Olivelle received his BA and MA from Oxford University and PhD from University of Pennsylvania. He taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington (1974–1991), where he was the Department Chair 1984-90, and in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin (1991–2013), where he was the Department Chair 1994–2007.
Elected as President of the American Oriental Society (2005), and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), he has received the Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago (2016); Prize of Fondation Colette Caillat of the Institut de France (2017) for his book Dharma Reader; and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996). He was the Gonda Lecturer at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. His publications include the ground-breaking work The Āśrama System: History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (winner of the 1994 American Academy of Religon book award) and acclaimed English translations of the major Upaniṣads (winner of the 1998 Association for Asian Studies Ramanujan prize for translation), Pañcatantra, Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita, and Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, as well as critical editions and translations of Dharmaśāstras, including those of Manu, Yājñavalkya, and Viṣṇu. He has edited or co-edited significant volumes: Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE (2006); Dharma: Studies in Its Semantic, Cultural, and Religious History (2004); Reimagining Aśoka: Memory and History (2012); The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law: A New History of Dharmaśāstra (2018); Gṛhastha: The Householder in Ancient Indian Religious Culture (2019), and most recently the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law (2024).
Associate Professor Malvika Maheshwari
Keynote lecture: Until I too, in my time – slough off the snake-skin’ – Dona Luisa Coomaraswamy and the Collected Writings of her Husband
Abstract:
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the pioneering historian and philosopher of Indian art, died in Boston in September 1947. His wife at the time, Dona Luisa, spent the rest of her life – the next twenty years – with the singular objective of putting together the ‘collected writings’ of her husband. The aim of achieving this end informed Dona Luisa’s consciousness and every life decision. The gravity of her aim can be summed up by the fact that she decided to keep his ashes with her until the task was completed. Till her last breath, Dona Luisa systematically translated, edited, and updated Coomaraswamy’s writings, took to court those who plagiarized and pirated them. And most importantly, she re-negotiated contracts with his publishers across North America, Europe, and South Asia, the income from which was indispensable for her survival, and wherein the posthumous significance of his scholarship lies, because these new contracts made a wider distribution of his books possible.
Her contribution has not been acknowledged anywhere.
Dona Luisa’s transition from a submissive wife to a fierce and productive intellectual not only brought her face to face with some of the leading scholars of the time, but in subtle and complex ways, her experience also transformed Coomaraswamy’s work. Her obligations, choices, biases, and limitations became part of his writings. In an attempt to restore some balance, intellectual and political history of art, which has concentrated upon remarkable men, like Coomaraswamy, must come to terms with the labour of their women as central to the politics of what we read (and therefore, appreciate).
The hopeless contrariness of the mid-century related to the advancement of women’s education was such that although an opportunity, the constraints of domesticity had not yet snapped. It gave women, particularly widows, a status which was both prominent and problematic. While a husband’s passing imagines the woman transformed, there is little understanding of the process of that transformation, what Dona Luisa Coomaraswamy – the Argentinian-American, photographer, scholar, Coomaraswamy’s fourth wife, twenty-eight years younger than him – called the “sloughing-off the snake’s skin.” Weaving alongside the narrative of her remarkable life, spanning over four continents, five languages, her three maiden names, and endless hours of study, the complexity and the celerity of this “sloughing off” will be the focus of my presentation.
About Malvika Maheshwari
Malvika Maheshwari is Associate Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University. She holds degrees in political science from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and she completed her doctorate at Sciences Po, Paris, in 2011. Before joining Ashoka University, she taught South Asian politics at Sciences Po (Paris and Le Havre) and served as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Her research lies at the intersection of political thought and art practice, focusing on phenomena such as violence, power, democracy, and state capacity. Her first book, Art Attacks: Violence and Offence-taking in India, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Her research articles have appeared in several esteemed journals, including India Review, Raisons Politiques, Studies in Indian Politics, Economic and Political Weekly, and The Arts Politic.
In Fall 2022, she was a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at Cambridge University, working on her second book project on the National Akademies of Art and the politics of administering aesthetics in postcolonial India, partially funded by the Global Humanities Initiative travel grant. Additionally, in 2023 she received the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fellowship and in 2024, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University.
