Early Indian Afterlives

This seminar combines close looking and reading with writing imaginatively. With the help of an array of textual and visual material we explore how early South Asians thought about death, dying, and the afterlife. Students will be encouraged to react to these primary sources in order to develop their writing muscles and incorporate a range of ekphrastic stances into their writing. You have the option to write weekly creative texts for which prompts will be given or produce a critical reading response. Final projects can be either a research paper or a longer creative work such as a literary essay, poem sequence, short story, film, or mixed media project. Topics of discussion include the moment of death and the kinds of death valorized by various social groups, rituals of mourning and remembrance, the iconography of death, conceptions of afterworlds and their inhabitants, the afterlives of objects and persons, and such Indic concepts as rebirth, karma, samadhi, and nirvana. We will read literary, political, religious, and art-historical texts, and consider Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina perspectives as well as contemporary prose and poetry. Visual examples run the gamut: memorial buildings, relics and reliquaries, prints capturing the rewards and punishments of the afterlife, mandalas and cosmological maps, and the striking portrayals of the god of death and ghosts and ghouls on temple walls, paintings, and textiles.