Life in Mithila: History, Society and Politics in a Region: March 05 -06, 2022
Dear Colleagues,
We invite paper proposals for a two day online seminar, Life in Mithila: History, Society and Politics in a Region, to be held on March 05 - 06, 2022. This online seminar aims to pay intellectual tribute to Late Prof. Hetukar Jha (1944-2017), an illustrious and acclaimed sociologist, by engaging with his scholarship, questions, and provocations. Envisioned to be trilingual, the seminar is conceived of deliberations, conversations, and presentation of research papers in English, Hindi, and Maithili, with a broad thematic focus on the society in Mithila in historical perspectives.
For further details, kindly refer to the concept note below:
Life in Mithila: History, Society and Politics in a Region: March 05 -06, 2022
Concept Note
The two-day event, Life in Mithila: History, Society and Politics in a region, aims to capture the vast and complex canvas, dynamism, changes, and mobility in Mithila at the interface of society, culture, polity, and economy. To emphasize this interface, we deem the idea of social in Mithila as a kaleidoscope of experiences, reason, and narratives.
Mithila has a distinct place in the rich and diverse cultural tapestry of Bihar. In the realm of ideas and knowledge, it is the land of Gargi, Bharati, Dak, and Ayachi. In the field of art, different schools and traditions of Mithila paintings have made their strong presence at the national and global landscapes.
While we acknowledge that there exists a robust scholarship on the region, its history, and society, we strongly feel that a lot of avenues are yet to be explored, old questions can be revisited, and fresh forays can be made with potentials towards advancing the terrain of knowledge on Mithila.
With an inclusive and holistic approach, the seminar locates the complex issues of the social at the interface of various other domains of life. In implication, this shall broaden the understanding of concepts rooted in Mithila and routed through time and space. Scholars often deploy canonical terms without reflecting on the relation of roots and routes, time and space. Thus, for heritage, we often mean only the built heritage and the tangible remnants from the past and ignore intangible and non-material aspects like knowledge traditions, cultural memory, literary traditions, and so on. A focus on some of these aspects of Mithila with this proposed inclusive approach, we are sure, will not only lead to new scholarly explorations and theorizations but also deepen and expand our understanding of Maithili society both in historical and contemporary senses.
This seminar uses Mithila as a key ground in the socio-historical framework generating the potential to deliver contemporary concerns along with the engagement with the past. Social science and humanities-based engagement with the aspects of Bihar deliver a complex and comprehensive imagination. It is not a monolithic society, culture, and polity. In the middle of the superimposed society and culture, the complexity of grassroots, travails of ideas, and regimes of values also assume central importance. This seminar tends to be informed by and seeks to move forward from the preceding corpus of knowledge.
Instead of following any narrow understanding of the region, we conceive Mithila in broad terms and as a geo-cultural region with historically shifting boundaries. Thus, as a site for research and knowledge production, Mithila is not conceptualized here through national boundaries or administrative units but also includes Nepal and diasporic society created in and through processes of migrations.
With presentations of rigorously researched papers on Mithila from social science perspectives, the seminar is conceived as an occasion to pay tribute to the scholarship of the Late Prof. Hetukar Jha, an internationally renowned sociologist and an author of several paths breaking books and essays on wide-ranging subjects from Historical Sociology (Routledge) to The Social Structure of Indian Village (Sage) and authoritatively intervened at several scholarly debates of lasting importance, fearlessly challenging the settled and showing us alternative perspectives based on solid empirical research. It is unfortunate that so far, there is not a single conference or edited volume dedicated to the memory of a man who devoted his entire life to generating and preserving the knowledge of Mithila and Bihar.
Focused on Mithila, some proposed broad subthemes for inviting papers include:
- Socio-historical reasonings on and in Mithila
- Imagining the region: society, culture, and polity
- Contesting identities: religion, caste, class, and gender
- Change and continuity in Mithila
- Language and literature in Mithila
- Traditions of knowledge and practices
- Mithila’s folk traditions, art, and architectures
This is not an exhaustive but a suggestive list of themes. We welcome proposals on themes not mentioned here.
Languages of the Seminar: Maithili, Hindi, and English
Important Dates
Date of Seminar: 5 – 6 March 2022
Submission of proposed title of the paper along with an abstract (200-300 words): 31 July 2021
Submission of full paper: 30 November 2021
Publication Plans: Selected research papers will be published in a guest-edited peer-reviewed research journals and/or edited volumes by a reputed academic publisher
Regards
Mithila Study Group
Members:
Shrutikar Jha, Maharajadhiraj Kameshwar Singh Kalyani Foundation, Darbhanga <shrutikarjha@gmail.com >
Manish Thakur, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata < mt@iimcal.ac.in >
Dev Nath Pathak, South Asian University, Delhi < dev@soc.sau.ac.in >
Sadan Jha, Centre for Social Studies, Surat < sadanjha@gmail.com >
Mithilesh Kumar Jha, IIT, Guwahati < jhamk21@iitg.ac.in>
Mithila Study Grop <mithilastudygroup@gmail.com>
Members:
Shrutikar Jha, Maharajadhiraj Kameshwar Singh Kalyani Foundation, Darbhanga <shrutikarjha@gmail.com >
Manish Thakur, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata < mt@iimcal.ac.in >
Dev Nath Pathak, South Asian University, Delhi < dev@soc.sau.ac.in >
Sadan Jha, Centre for Social Studies, Surat < sadanjha@gmail.com >
Mithilesh Kumar Jha, IIT, Guwahati < jhamk21@iitg.ac.in>