The Department of English, Cotton College in collaboration with the South East Asia Ramayana Research Centre, Guwahati has organized a National Seminar on “Reading the Ramayana : Text and Context” on 11 and 12 February 2014 at Cotton College, Guwahati.
The epic Ramayana besides serving the role of a religious document has also been a veritable reserve of domestic and political ideals, tradition and ethics, economics and sociology, science, warfare, diplomacy and the like for the people of South Asia in general and the Indian subcontinent in particular.
Divergent versions of the text, again, tend to offer crucial avenues of textual criticisms co-relating to authorial interventions of different orders in diverse historical junctures. The reading and appreciation of this mammoth socio cultural epic narrative thus offer multiple perspectives as already enumerated or otherwise still remaining to be explored.
The aim of the seminar is to bring together scholars from a variety of intellectual and disciplinary backgrounds to dilate upon the relevance and import of the Ramayana in the context of the pasts, presents and futures of South Asia in general and the Indian subcontinent in particular. Consequently, the philosophical and devotional elements apparent in the text of the Ramayana find concurrent reference in the social and political milieu of various sections and communities in distinctive linguistic and cultural representations.
