Paul Olav Bodding (1865-1938) Photo: Wikimedia (photographer unknown)

Note on the partners and organizersThis symposium is a three-way partnership between University of Tromsø, University of Oslo and National Library of Norway. The vision and early initiative to this event came out of the Scandinavian-Santal Heritage Initiative headed by Professor Tone Bleie (UiT). As partners, we hope this landmark symposium will offer policy guidance and concrete recommendations for future collaboration with likeminded museums, research bodies and the rightful stakeholders to the Santal – Bodding Collection in South Asia. The University of Tromsø and the University of Oslo by the Museum of Cultural History are the organizers of this symposium.

VenueThe conference venue in Oslo is the restored historic Professor Residence in Karl Johansgt. 47, located just across from the Museum of Cultural History.

RegistrationThe deadline for submitting proposals for papers with abstracts is March 1st. Deadline for registration as participant is August 15th. Conference fee will not be charged.

Grants Participants are in general expected to find their own financial arrangements, enabling attendance. The organizers hope to provide supporting grants for select participants from South Asia. Support to paper presenters from European destinations can be considered on need basis.

Symposium organizersFor further information contact Profs. Tone Bleie: tone.bleie@uit.no and Øivind Fuglerud: oivind.fuglerud@khm.uio.no.

Detailed programme and other practical details will be available online from March 2015.

Belief, Scholarship and Cultural Heritage:

Paul Olav Bodding and the Making of a Scandinavian-Santal Legacy

3-5 November 2015

An international symposium organized byMuseum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo and University of Tromsø

First announcementCalls for papers and Panel Contributions

Abstracts up to 250 words emailed to:

tone.bleie@uit.no and oivind.fuglerud@khm.uio.no

Deadline: March 1st 2015

The Bodding Symposium 2015

Paul Olav Bodding and the Making of a Scandinavian-Santal Legacy

This symposium will bring together prominent scholars on the Santals and related peoples of Central India, Bangladesh and Nepal alongside literary, heritage and minority and indigenous rights professionals and church leaders from South Asia and Europe.

The symposium, commemorating the 150th anniversary of his birth, is the first ever to address comprehensively the diverse and endur-ing legacy of the scholar-missionary Paul Olav Bodding (1865-1938). Unlike his predecessor, the charismatic and celebrated Lars Skrefs-rud, one of the founders of the Indian Home Mission to the Santals, Bodding’s personality was strikingly reclusive and unassuming. Yet he possessed a remarkable intellectual capacity and scientific skills and felt a boundless loyalty to the missionary cause. These capabili-ties Bodding unconditionally offered the Santal Mission through nearly four decades of service. From his early years in India in the 1890s, Bodding and his accomplished native collaborators started analyzing and collecting material objects of everyday and ritual significance and transcribing the Santals’ extraordinary rich oral heritage into textual form.

The Ethnographic Museum at University of Oslo was given custodian-ship of a huge collection of prehistoric and ethnographic objects and manuscripts donated between 1901 and 1935. The Santal - Bodding Collection is the most comprehensive of its kind anywhere in the world and may rightly be characterized as the national treasure for the more than 6 million Santals who reside in India, Bangladesh and Nepal.

After Skrefsrud’s demise in 1910 and until 1922, Bodding headed the Santal Mission of the Northern Churches through a painful transi-tion where it expanded from a largely homegrown India mission to a conventional transatlantic missionary society headed by boards in Copenhagen, Oslo and Minneapolis. Bodding’s imprint on institutional development and reform and how Scandinavians came to concep-tualize the Santals as a significant “other” and their own “civiliza-tional” mission in colonial India – has yet to be fully recognized and researched.

In his latter years in India as a full time literary scholar (1922-1934) and his retirement in Norway and Denmark (until his death in 1938), Bodding completed and published a number of monumental linguis-tic and ethnographic works – which remain to this day the standard reference in India and internationally. They continue to serve as in-valuable repositories of new research, education in Santali, creative writing and recognition as a distinguished nation/tribal people. In much of the Santal-inhabited territories in Central and Eastern India, North-Western Bangladesh and Jhapa and Morang Districts on the Indo-Nepal border, P.O. Bodding is not only the most well-known and, indeed, revered Norwegian-born personality, his is probably the most influential Scandinavian ever.

As a cultural hero, Bodding continues to inspire, inform and spark controversy. The increasingly educated strata of Santal society is concerned about way in which the University of Oslo and National Library of Norway manage the trusteeship of their national treasures and would like to gain fuller access and influence their management as entirely new opportunities emerge through digitalization and greatly improved cool storage conditions. Digitalization is no panacea. Nev-ertheless, it offers exciting opportunities to repatriate the historical legacy, but it raises challenges as well. It is therefore essential that we learn from the weaknesses of earlier efforts to repatriate parts of the manuscript collection in analog form (microfilm) in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This landmark symposium will primarily interrogate Bodding’s scholarship as a linguist, ethnographer and collector from the van-tage point of contemporary European and Indian scholarship on the Santals and related Adivasis and of the Santals’ own civil society organizations. Papers and other contributions analyzing the earlier and contemporary importance of the Bodding legacy – the pinnacle of the Lutheran Santal Mission’s pastoral enlightenment project – and the Northern Santals’ ethno-nationalist and other movements are welcome. This also includes its more controversial aspects, caused by an exceedingly complex language politics (including the divisive issue of script). This politics is reflecting different and partly competing political, social and cultural Santal-led and supported mass movements and the particular center-state-tribe construction in post-colonial India. We also welcome contributions that move beyond simplistic assertions of faith-colored scholarship to more subtle yet rigorous textual analyses of Bodding’s influential magazine Pera Hor, his popularized books on missiology, the biography Sona and his beloved hymns and Bible translations.

Finally, we invite contributions (papers and inputs to panel discus-sions) on a revitalized custodianship and collaborative uses of the Santal Bodding Collection in a digital and post-colonial era. Contri-butions on the digitalization efforts of the Santal mission and those of the successor missions (in Denmark, Norway and the US) are invited. So are comparative papers on the management (including digital repatriation) and uses of other ethnographic and manuscript collections in Norway and abroad.

Sessions1. The Santal Mission in the broader historical and contemporary context of Indo-Scandinavian relations – including the former colonies of Denmark-Norway in South Asia, trade linkages, external missions in Asia and Africa and Scandinavian-Indo relations after Independence

2. Revisiting Bodding’s scholarship: his mentors and gurus; the linguist, ethnographer and collector

3. Revisiting Bodding as theologian, bible translator, hymnologist and administrator

4. Museums of cultural history, national libraries and missions as custodians: towards a post-colonial digital era

Excursions to the Bodding collection’s manuscript section and to the ethnographic sub-collection form part of the programme.

Photo left: Arm ring of copper from Santal ParganasPhoto right: Stone axe from Santal ParganasBodding collection. Photo: Ulla Schildt, Museum of Cultural History