Meanings of Modern: South Asia before and after Colonialism

2008 Burdick-Vary Symposium: Speakers: Susan Friedman Partha Chatterjee Sanjay Subrahmanyam Vinay Dharwadker Chris Chekuri V. Narayana Rao David Shulman Satya P. Mohanty Charles Hallisey Aparna Dharwadker Rama Sundari Mantena   Schedule: Friday December 5. Morning 9:00 Keynote address: Susan Friedman, Director: The Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW–Madison: “Planetary Modernism and the Modernities of Empires and New Nations”. 10:00 Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University: “Rammohan Roy and Early Modern Anti-Absolutism in India.” 11:00-11:15 Coffee break 11:15 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles: “Historian-Scribes and the World of Early Modern South Asia.”   Friday December 5. Afternoon 2:00-3:00 Vinay Dharwadker, University of Wisconsin–Madison: “Modernities, Modernisms, and Postcolonial Literatures: Some Theoretical Issues in the Indian Context” 3:00 Chris Chekuri,  San Francisco State University: “Reliable and ‘Spurious’ Inscriptions: Modernity, History, and the Precolonial Past of Vijayanagara.” 4:00- 4:15 Coffee break 4:15 V. Narayana Rao, University of Wisconsin–Madison: “Something was different in 16th century Andhra. Was it Modernity?”   Saturday: December 6. Morning 9:00 David Shulman, Hebrew University, Jerusalem: “Rethinking the Imagination in Sixteenth-century South India: Notes on Ratnakheta Srinivasa Diksita’s Bhavana-purushottama.” 10:00 Satya P. Mohanty: “Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as Radical Pedagogy.” 11:00-11:15 Coffee break 11:15 Charles Hallisey: “The Familiarity of the New:  Literary Cultures and the Modern in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Sri Lanka.”   Saturday,  December 6. Afternoon 2:00 Aparna Dharwadker, University of Wisconsin–Madison: “Pre-Modern, Modern, Anti-Modern: The Contested Teleologies of Indian Theatre.” 3:00 Rama Sundari Mantena, University of Illinois at Chicago: “Conceptualizing Modernity in Nineteenth-century Andhra.” 4:00-4:15 Coffee Break 4:15 Roundtable: General Discussion, Thongchai Winichakul, Teju Olaniyan, Donald Davis, Jr., All participants   This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Center for South Asia, and the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters & Sciences.