2016 Indu Bhatt Memorial Lecture

writing biography: living with ashokanayanjot lahiriProfessor of History, Ashoka University

Nayanjot Lahiri will look at the package of problems that a scholar writing about an ancient life faces, even when the subject is someone as extraordinary as Ashoka, the third emperor of the Maurya dynasty. Her lecture will be based on the challenges she has faced in crafting his biography which has recently been published as Ashoka in Ancient India (Harvard University Press). Recovering Ashoka’s life and times from what has morphed into legend, as she will argue, is an exercise in providing him with contextual flesh, and teasing out his individual psychology and personality to the extent possible from what was composed on his orders as well as from what is archaeologically knowable about the lifeways of more ordinary people of his times.

Biographical Note: Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor of History at Ashoka University. Previously, she was Professor in the Department of History, University of Delhi. Her research interests include Ancient India, Indian archaeology, and heritage studies. She is author of Pre-Ahom Assam (1991), The Archaeology of Indian Trade Routes (upto c. 200 BC) (1992), Finding Forgotten Cities- How the Indus Civilization was Discovered (2005), Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and its Modern Histories (2012) and Ashoka in Ancient India (2015). She is co-author of Copper and its Alloys in Ancient India (1996), editor of The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization (2000), co-editor of Ancient India: New Research (2009), Buddhism in Asia – Revival and Reinvention (2016) and an issue of World Archaeology entitled The Archaeology of Hinduism (2004). She is presently working on a history of Indian archaeology since Independence. Nayanjot Lahiri won the Infosys Prize 2013 in the Humanities-Archaeology.

5:00 pm, Tuesday, March 29, 2016 Luce Hall Auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

The South Asian Studies Council presents the

sponsored by the bhatt family fund