Guest lectures by Anthony Cerulli, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, NY, and Research Fellow at Institut d'Études Avancées de Paris.

Tradition-Making and Education in Modern Ayurveda
"This talk explores the modern history of ayurvedic education in India, looking in particular at how and to what effect the colonial encounter of ayurvedic practitioners with purveyors of western biomedicine during British colonialism shaped the development of India’s nationwide curriculum for Ayurvedic Colleges. It also considers a precolonial institution of medical education, the gurukula (“family of the teacher”), that fell into near total disuse as the western-style college became the primary place to teach Ayurveda during and after the colonial period. Drawing on my fieldwork at two south Indian gurukulas and Ayurvedic Colleges in south India, I take up questions of medical synthesis and tradition formation in light of India’s colonial history and, in the contemporary training of ayurvedic physicians, the changing role of the Sanskrit medical classics, which are generally seen by educators and students in ayurvedic colleges and gurukulas as the cornerstone of Ayurveda."

Narrativity and Indian Historiography
"In this talk I probe two elements in the reading and writing of history in South Asia: first, I consider the place and the potential uses of narrative literature in the historian’s production of the past and, second, I reflect on various modes of representation in historiography. I approach these issues with an eye on the broader context of history as a discipline. Yet, to keep the discussion grounded in the reading of texts and writing of history in India I examine an early-eighteenth century Sanskrit allegorical drama, The Joy of Life (Jivanandanam) of Anandarayamakhin, and ask what it might offer in our historical understanding of the south Indian context in which it was produced."