ZICILP Conference: For pleasure, for liberation? Discourses on the performing arts in classical and medieval India

Venue

University of Zurich, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, Room RAA E08, Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zürich

Content

A fundamental ambiguity characterizes premodern Indian discourses on the performing arts. They are represented, on the one hand, as spectacles in which the arts of music, dance, storytelling, or poetic recitations are performed for the sake of pleasure, entertainment, and social prestige, and on the other as instruments for attaining religious merit and liberation.
This conference moves away from modern interpretations of Indian art as “spiritual” and from an aesthetic paradigm disconnected from social and political contexts. The focus is on the historical embeddedness of performance practices, and on the religious, aesthetic and intellectual discourses that inform the relationship between pleasure-orientation and soteriological goals.

Keynote Lecture

Thursday, 29.06.2023, 5:30 - 6:30 pm

Lyne Bansat-Boudon (EPHE Paris): "Is Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka then not (or not entirely) a Mīmāṃsaka? A new approach to Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka’s exegesis on the first chapter of the Nāṭyaśāstra"

Organisation

Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies - Indian Studies