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University of Hyderabad
About the speaker

cordially invites you to a

Distinguished Lecture

The Audacity of
Genre:
Enchanting History
in Colonial India
by

Dr. Leela Prasad

Department of Religious Studies
Duke University, Durham, NC

on
Tuesday, January 5, 2016 at 3.00 pm

Venue
School of Humanities Auditorium
Vice-Chancellor will preside

http://www.uohyd.ac.in

Leela Prasad is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at

Duke University, USA. After her Ph.D. in Folklore & Folklife at
the University of Pennsylvania, she guest-curated the first
exhibition on Indian American life in Philadelphia. She was the
inaugural Director for the Duke Center of Civic Engagement,
served for many years on the Board of the Duke Center
for Documentary Studies, and now serves on the steering
committee of an Andrew W. Mellon-funded Transformative
Humanities Initiative at Duke called Humanities Writ Large.
Her research spans anthropology of ethics, lived Hindu
traditions, colonial anthropology of South Asia, public culture
and modernity, and religion and physics. She is interested in
how early imaginations of Hindu art and the divine inflect
modern notions of personhood and the dialogue between
disciplines. Her book Poetics of Conduct: Narrative and Moral
Being in a South Indian Town was awarded the Best First Book
in the History of Religions Prize by the American Academy of
Religion in 2007. She is currently completing two books. The
first, on vernacular ethics, looks at how ethical authority and
agency emerge through subjective engagement in everyday
life and yet provide the basis for a transcultural language of
ethics. The second book (Annotating Pastimes) examines
the remarkable writings of Indian folklorists in late colonial
India through the lens of their own ethnographic personae
and the memories of living descendants. This work suggests
that a broad understanding of enchantment is necessary to
any theorization of Indic life worlds. Leela is also co-directing
an ethnographic documentary film called Moved by Gandhi
that explores the Gandhi who lives beyond his biography to
move individuals to be one way or the other. She is fluent in
Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Hindi.

Lecture Abstract
The untold story of Medara Venkataswami, a prolific
Hyderabadi scholar--folklorist, historian, essayist-shows
how India remained intrepidly enchanted during the late
colonial period. Writing exclusively in the English language,
M. Venkataswami drew on his familys oral treasures and
social relationships to vivify Indian pasts using precisely
those literary and linguistic genres that an imperial reading
public and literati believed it had exclusive mastery over.
His creative experimentation opens up the larger question
of whether history and the political self can be imagined
without enchantment.

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