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After a successful New Delhi workshop in December 2015 the project team have a panel at the 24th ECSAS (European Conference on South Asian Studies) at the University of Warsaw from 27 to 30 July 2016.
Keep up to date with all our conference news here.
University of Edinburgh, 1-3 September 2016
What is the relationship between ‘translation’ and ‘religion’? While all ‘religions’ travel and engage in translation of one kind or another, what gets translated? How do the different components of what is currently understood as ‘religion’—texts, practices, experiences, inner faith or belief systems—translate differently? How can we analyze such commonly held beliefs that some languages simply are sacred and should not be translated? And what are the implications of such questions for understanding religious conversion? What can translation concepts and methods tell us about the way religions and the study of religions are constructed?
Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, December 14-15, 2015
The project team organised an intensive workshop examining traditions of life writing in Indian languages in December 2015. The workshop’s theme on the articulation and representation of ‘self-transformation’ across a range of texts and language traditions gave us the opportunity to embed the project’s focus on conversion accounts in a wider comparative context. There was an enthusiastic response to our Call for Papers from scholars in India working on specific autobiographical texts exploring various kinds of transformation, including the perceived self-transformation engendered by religious conversion.
What elements of a ‘life’ can be captured in narrative and conversely how do narratives handle the ‘unspeakable’?
In several of the autobiographical narratives we discussed at the Delhi workshop, we noticed the palpable presence of emotion, challenging us to examine the function of the ‘affective’ in narratives of transformation. At various points, narrators are overcome by doubt, fear, anger, remembered pain, shame or even disgust. Accompanying these emotionally charged moments, we noticed references to the inexplicable: ‘sins,’ ‘miracles,’ ‘tears,’ ‘prayers,’ even ‘physical illness.’ These moments of pain, recollected through narrative, connecting reason and the irrational, associating the body,
This research project is funded by the AHRC within the ‘Translating Cultures’ theme. Its full title is “Conversion, Translation and the Language of Autobiography: Re-inventing the Self in Transitions to Christianity in India (1700 - 1947)” and will run from November 2014 to May 2017. See 'About us' page for information on individual project members and academic advisors.
