Venue: Christ Church, Oxford (in person)
Dates: 2nd May – 4th May 2025
To celebrate its 50th anniversary as the foremost UK academic event on Indian religions, this year’s symposium invites papers that address the theme of festivals and celebrations.
South Asian festivals play a pivotal role in the social and religious lives of millions. Festivals, broadly defined by Grimes as a “ritual form of celebration” (1982), often take place within the public space, and they invoke “alternative worlds that are connected with special expectations, special connections and special modes of consumption.” They occur “in separate spheres in terms of time and space” (Hüsken and Michaels, 2013), thus functioning as “a liminal time set apart from the ordinary,” (Ilkama 2023). It is in these spheres that text, ritual, material, performance and much more come together to form a “festival” that is greater than a sum of its parts. This symposium invites papers that explore public, ritualised celebrations taking place in South Asia or having South Asian origins from a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods.
The symposium this year is held over three days on the first weekend in May at Christ Church, and the conference dinner will be held at Balliol College on Saturday 3rd May.
Friday 2nd May
12.15-12.45: Registration, Arrival
12.45-1.00: Opening welcome
1.00-2.00: Opening Keynote: Professor Diwakar Acharya, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, University of Oxford
15 min break
2.15-3.45: Panel 1
- Sucharita Adluri (Cleveland State University): Festivals Inscribed in Stone: Public Celebrations in Late Medieval South India
- Elizabeth Cecil (Florida State University, USA): Epigraphic Events: Sanskrit Inscriptions as Performative Media
15 min break
4.00-5.30: Panel 2
- Peter Bisschop (Leiden, Netherlands): Festivities of the Asuras in the Skandapurāṇa
- Mandira Sharma (Independent Scholar): Wheels of Devotion: Understanding Śiva’s Rathotsavam (Chariot Festival) in South India through Śaiva Literature
Evening Break
7.00: Film Screening & Discussion at Balliol College
Saturday 3rd May
9.00-10.45: Panel 3, Postgraduate
- Kush Depala (Heidelberg University): Virtual Venerations and Digital Devotion: Celebrating a VR Janmajayanti during the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Jackson Stephenson (University of California, Santa Barbara): Night on Bald Mountain: Performing Enlightenment through Song
- Kainat Bashir (Toronto, Canada): Being Catholic the Punjabi Way: An Analysis of Material Acts of Religion in Mariamabad Shrine Punjab, Pakistan
- Sujata Chaudhary (McGill, Canada): Bhagwan” and “devtas” of Kullu Dusshera – an analysis of Dusshera of Kullu District
15min break
11.00-12.30 Panel 4 & Panel 5
Panel 4
- Annalisa Boccheti (University of Naples « L’Orientale »): Between Eid and Holi at Shāh ʿĀlam II’s court: ritualised power or powerful rituals?
- Manik Bajracharya and Rajan Khatiwoda (Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities): Power and Patronage in Motion: The Buṅgadyaḥ Yātrā of Kathmandu Valley
Panel 5
- Saran Suebsantiwongse (Leiden University): Celebrating Divine Kingship: The Tiruvempāvai-Tiruppāvai Festival in Thailand and Its South Indian Heritage
- George Pati (Valparaiso University, USA): Embodiment, Spatiality, and Materiality at the Uthra Śīvēli Festival in a Kerala Temple
Lunch: 12.30-2.00
2.00-3.30 Panel 6 & Panel 7
Panel 6
- Richard David Williams (SOAS, University of London): The Pleasures of Bhīm: Festivals and Courtly Time in Early Nineteenth-Century Udaipur
- Ananya Vajpeyi: Centre for Study of Developing Societies, India: The Arts Festival: Transformations of the « Classical » in Contemporary Carnatic Music and Kudiyattam Theatre
Panel 7
- Christopher Fleming (Oxford, UK): The Legal Regulation of Festivals in Contemporary Indian Law: Essential Practices and Constitutional Principles
- Nicole Karapanagiotis (Rutgers University, USA): Negotiating Public and Private, Legal and Banned: Rathayātrā of the International Sri Krishna Mandir (ISKM) in Singapore
30min break
4.00-5.30 Panel 8 & Panel 9
Panel 8
- Daniela De Simone & Ramesh Nanjundan (Ghent University & University of Hyderabad): The Toda Salt Giving Ceremony: A Study of Ecological and Cultural Rituals in the Nilgiri Hills
- Hab Cezary Gaiewicz (Jagiellonian University, Poland): Imagined Festivals and Genuine Emotions: the Candrikāvītthī of Rāmapaṇivāda to be staged in celebration of Śivarātri in premodern Kerala
Panel 9
- Smytta Yadav (University of Sussex, UK): Liminal Spaces and Cultural Continuity: Diasporic Hindu Festivals as Sites of Heritage and Identity in the UK
- Aarti Patel (Pennsylvania State University): Pandemic Festivals: Transcending Geographies and Expanding Accessibility
Plenary 5.30-6.30: Celebrating 50 years of Spalding Symposium
Evening 7pm: Group dinner at Balliol College, Oxford
Sunday 4th May
9.00-10.30 Panel 10
- Leah Comeau (Saint Joseph’s University / Universität Hamburg): Shared Blessings: The Role of Sacred Sarees in Tamil Christian Festival Celebrations
- Ewa Dębicka-Borek (Jagiellonian University, Poland): From Theft to Reverence: The Ritual Theft of Jewelry in Ahobilam
15min break
10.45-12.15 Panel 11
- Christophe Vielle (University of Louvain, Belgium): Aspects of the Festival of Love in premodern Kerala
- Liwen Liu (SOAS University of London): Festival, Architecture, and Kingship: An Ethnographic Study of the Dasaiṃ Festival at Hanuman Dhoka, Kathmandu
15min break
12.15-1.15: Closing Keynote: Professor Ute Hüsken, Head of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia, Heidelberg University
1.30 Conference END