Séance en visioconférence

 

Dans le cadre de l'atelier thematique Littératures et histoire en Asie du Sud : fécondations

 

Past Futures: a survey of some literary utopias and dystopias from South Asia  

Hans Harder (Universität Heidelberg)

This paper surveys and discusses a set of utopian and dystopian writings from colonial and postcolonial South Asia. In a comparative glance over texts by Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Rahul Sankrityayan, Va. Ra., Manto, Ghulam Abbas and others, we will enter various ladylands, poets' islands, islamistans and shining Indias.

In what sense, I will ask, are these entirely literary, but yet so acutely historical? Where do the narrative universes of dream, history and fiction converge? In pulling together these narratives from Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and Tamil literature, I will try to show how all of them sketch alternative and fictional histories for the subcontinent in an "as if" mode.

 

“He is an abridged transcription of the world”: The Nūrnāma tradition and musalmānī literacy in eastern Bengal (c. 17^th-19^th AD)

Thibaut d’Hubert (University of Chicago)

This presentation deals with Bengali renderings of a Persian text titled Nūrnāma (The Book of Light), which relates the creation of the world by God through his prophet Muḥammad in his pre-eternal form as a luminous entity. These short accounts played two roles as conveyers of knowledge on basic Islamic beliefs and cosmology, and as ritual texts meant to protect and bring prosperity to those who read and preserved the physical artefact of the book that contained those teachings. In this presentation, I will discuss the relevance of the study of the Nūrnāma tradition in eastern Bengal to understand the various aspects of musalmānī (Islamicate) literacy. We will see how the content of the text itself prompted a reflection on language, script, and the codicological features of Islamic texts in a regional context, while its transmission through vernacular versions written in Bengali or Arabic script reflects the complex scriptural landscape of 18^th and 19^th-century Bengal.