Séminaire mensuel DELI
Littératures d’Asie du Sud
Ouvert à tous
Séance du vendredi 11 mars de 10h à 12h
BULAC salle RJ.24
65 Rue des Grands Moulins
75013 Paris
Francesca Orsini (SOAS)
What can kathas tell us about multilingual literary culture in north India?
Tales are ubiquitous in the premodern literary culture of north India, as elsewhere, and they come in all shapes, languages, and inflections. For this reason, following them allows us to travel into and across most of the levels/milieux of this multilingual literary culture. But precisely because of their ubiquity even within texts, when we move from the microlevel of individual texts to the macrolevel of literary culture it becomes difficult to say anything more than – they were there, they circulated, they often retold the same stories in new ways, or mixed familiar elements to produce new texts. By taking into account material evidence, the geographical and linguistic distribution of kathas, socio-historical locations, and shifts within the texts and in their performance practices, this lecture seeks to arrive at a nuanced and productive sense of the role that story-telling played within this multilingual literary culture.