An enthralling one-day seminar titled ‘Multiple Ways of Reading Texts and Tablets (Inscriptions)’ was organized by the Department of History in collaboration with the Institution of Eminence, on 7th February, 2025. This seminar emanated from the queries on the approaches to historical sources surfacing consistently in the classrooms. Divided in two sessions with three speakers in each, this seminar was inaugurated by Prof. B. J. Rao, the Vice Chancellor, University of Hyderabad and the chair was Prof. Jyotirmaya Sharma, Dean of School of Social Sciences. Professor Rao welcomed the idea of interrogating the sources of history through multiple lens and expressed his interest on a few of the themes to be discussed. In her welcome address, the Head of the Department and the coordinator of this seminar, Prof. Suchandra Ghosh emphasized on finding the varied voices in epigraphy and texts and the veracity of source-materials, setting the tone for the insightful sessions that followed. The Chair, Professor Sharma encouraged such endeavours and highlighted the importance of the theme.
The first session, chaired by Prof. Amba Kulkarni from Department of Sanskrit Studies, commenced with Prof. Sanjay Palshikar’s (Formerly of Department of Political Science, UoH) paper on ‘Reading as Enhancement: The Case of Bhagavad-Gita’ that exemplified the dissimilarities between the historical and doctrinal interpretations of this textual tradition. His critical engagement with Bhagavad-Gita and its commentarial traditions focused on the ambiguity of any final hermeneutical ground in these readings that enhanced the ‘text more than what it is’ with their deliberate amendments and derivations of new meanings.
Prof. Arlo Griffiths (EFEO, Jakarta), in his discussion on the ‘Digging to the Roots of Deccan History: Early Inscriptions of Andhradeśa’, masterfully illustrated the connection between the production of a detailed repository of early stone inscriptions from the Andhra and Telangana (Andhradesa) and the complexities of their materiality embedded in the cosmopolitan Buddhist networks. Besides, underscoring the typological continuity in the Sultanate coinages, Prof. Danish Moin (MANUU, Hyderabad) reiterated the importance of religious representation intricately associated with kingship together with the artistic productions of such artifacts, in his paper ‘Reading Religion through Coin Inscriptions’.
The second session, chaired by Prof. Arlo Griffiths, began with an incisive reflection by Dr. Kanad Sinha (Sanskrit College and University, Kolkata) on fashioning of the Mahabharata as an Itihāsa text. Traversing across the narrative and didactic sections, he highlighted the different significance of the Itihāsa, an early Indian historical tradition that distinguished it from the modern discipline of history. Dr. Dev Kumar Jhnajh (Formerly in Azim Premji University, Bhopal) outlined the changing historical contours of the artisan caste Akṣaśālikas as royal engravers in their migrations and proliferation through attentive analysis of a plethora of inscriptional material with the longue durée approach.
Finally, archaeologist Prof. Rajat Sanyal (Department of Archaeology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata) ingeniously unraveled the material roots of a medieval Maṭha at Wari in the Malda District of northern Bengal, based on his meticulous reading of inscriptions and settlement patterns of the site that brought forth the complex afterlives of the site and cults by different communities across the time and place. These remarkable presentations indeed evoked an engaging discussion session with keen participation especially from the postgraduate students of the department along with the faculty members and research scholars. At the end of this event, a thoughtful and sincere vote of thanks was delivered by Titas Sarkar, doctoral scholar of the department. The speakers of the two sessions were introduced by Shivani and Aashima, Masters students from 4th and 2nd semester respectively. Sagnik Saha, Doctoral scholar, Department of History