Public Lecture: Holy Rivers and Healthy Landscapes: Contrasting Visions of the Kaveri River Delta in Early Modern South India with Jay Ramesh, Ph.D.

Join the Religious Studies Department on January 30, 2023 from 5:00pm-6:15pm in Murphey 118 for this job talk and public lecture. Reception to follow in Carolina Hall.

Jay Ramesh (PhD Columbia, 2020) is Lecturer in Tamil and Sanskrit in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, having also taught previously at Claremont McKenna College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stony Brook University. His doctoral dissertation, “Abodes of Śiva: Monuments and Memory in Medieval and Early Modern South Indian Purāṇas,” examines the history of the talapurāṇam (literally, “place-lore”), a type of medieval and early modern poem written in the Tamil language which describes the legends associated with Hindu shrines as well as the manner in which rituals at the temple must be conducted. Through an analysis of the poetics of these texts, the stories that they narrate, and the historical circumstances surrounding their popularity, he demonstrates how the Tamil talapurāṇams mark a conscious and sustained effort to unite a community of devotees around a set of shrines that existed in South India by appealing to and simultaneously producing the collective memory of a distant past. His current research explores the imagination of the natural world, and of fluvial landscapes specifically, in Sanskrit and Tamil devotional literature.