Please join us for the final Eurasian Empires workshop meeting of fall quarter 2023. Professor Indrani Chatterjee (University of Virginia) will share a chapter titled "Unseeing Monastic Subjects."
About the Speaker
Professor Chatterjee’s research is based on the principle that all politics begins with the social. Her pioneering monograph Gender, Slavery and the Law (1999) peeled apart the layers of relationships within Islamicate governing households of precolonial India. Some of these relationships centered on slaves and servants. In the process, she recognized that the history of gender in households containing inter-sexed persons was considerably more complex than hitherto understood. While she remains interested in comparative slave-systems both within the subcontinent and beyond it, she continues to probe the indigenous social roots of political formations by looking at the ways monastic lineages worked on the ground in Northeast India. In Forgotten Friends (2013), she traced the ways in which Buddhist and Vaisnava monastic governments and their "subjects" together organized the flow of money and commodities between far-flung markets. This work has raised further questions about the ways in which the layers of monastic and non-monastic authority together shaped the working of caste, class and gender in the same periods. She is currently at work on a monograph that can answer a part of this question and refine histories of subalternity and politics in the subcontinent.