Wednesday
10
September 2025
4 PM IST
Location
Room 008, Amrut Mody School of Management
Central Campus
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Maritime India: Littoral Communities and Transnational Heritage
Talks
Himanshu Prabha Ray
Tagore National Fellow
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi
Speaker
Of all the oceans of the world, the sailing world of the Indian Ocean was regulated by the rhythms of the monsoon winds and criss-crossed by cultural routes that inter-locked at various times in History into powerful geo-cultural entities, transforming connections through the transmission of ideas, oral traditions, narratives, music and ritual practices.
Based on archaeological research this lecture will highlight two major issues: one, the wider maritime networks of Coastal Monuments; and second, transoceanic movements of religious functionaries who were well versed in the texts and endowed with many other skills, such as writing and medicinal knowledge to name a few.
Speaker
Himanshu Prabha Ray
Himanshu Prabha Ray is Tagore National Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is series editor, Routledge Archaeology and Religion in South Asia and was earlier Research Fellow, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, Oxford. From 2014 to 2019 she held the Anneliese Maier research award of the Humboldt Foundation. She was the first Chairperson of the National Monuments Authority, Ministry of Culture in New Delhi, India from 2012 to 2015, and former Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. One of her books of relevance to the talk is Coastal Shrines and Transnational Maritime Networks across India and Southeast Asia, Routledge, 2020.
Her writings may be accessed at: https://independent.academia.edu/HimanshuPrabhaRay
