[Sarai Newsletter] Talk @ Sarai: Of Saints and Justice: On Presence-ing the Past in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi

[The Sarai Programme]

    *Talk @ Sarai *
    *Friday August, 12th, 2011 *
    *Place: CSDS Seminar Room *
    *Time: 4- 6pm*

    *Of Saints and Justice: On Presence-ing the Past in the Medieval
    Ruins of Delhi
    *
    *Anand Vivek Taneja, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University*

    Anand Taneja's work in Delhi has been centrally concerned with
    contemporary ritual practices around medieval ruins. In a rapidly
    modernizing city where its elite mourns the lack of "historical
    sense" among the common people, people in the thousands regularly
    come to the ruins of Delhi's past, and often form deep affective
    bonds with them. For many, the ruins are experienced not as
    locations of history as past, but of presence. 

      Medieval ruins in post-colonial Delhi are often monumentalized and
    celebrated as heritage sites, sites of cultural memory, whereas
    paradoxically, they are sites of forgetting, where the lives and
    practices associated with them are absent. And like graffiti being
    scribbled on the walls of monuments where the scripts of the
    original inscriptions are now meaningless to most people, where the
    life-worlds associated with them are largely forgotten, new meanings
    seem to be inscribed onto some of these monuments by ritual
    practices. But are these practices as random as the graffiti, or do
    they hint at some kind of continuity of meaning with the past? 
    Anand Taneja's presentation deals with these questions. within the
    larger template of urban memory and forgetting.


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