On January 20th-24th, 2020, the workshop “Networks of Temples and Networks of Texts in South India”, organized by Ute Hüsken and Jonas Buchholz (Universität Heidelberg) will take place at the EFEO-Pondicherry centre, followed by a field trip to Kanchipuram on January 24th-26th.
This workshop is organized in the frame of the DFG-project “Temple Networks in Early Modern South India”, hosted at the University of Heidelberg/South Asia Institute and led by Ute Hüsken and Jonas Buchholz. The main objective of this project is the study of the Tamil Māhātmyas and Sthalapurāṇas of the rich centre of Kanchipuram, the “Benares of the South”, from the 16th century onwards, in order to place this centre within the broader networks of temples and communities that were active in South India at that time. Read more about it here.
Given the time-frame of the sources of this project and the typology of texts they study, we plan to cooperate with Jonas and Ute in the next years and join forces in order to better understand the pheomenon of the formation of local Śaivism in the 16th-18th century. For this reason, several members of the Śivadharma Project will attend or participate in this workshop and the annexed field-trip, and we plan to organize more joined academic activities together soon.
