Adi Shankara:Meditations on a Life

<strong>Centre of German Studies School of Language, Literature &amp; Culture Studies </strong> <strong>JNU Philosophy Colloquium</strong> a lecture by <strong>Susan Visvanathan</strong> Center for the Study of Social Systems, SSS, JNU, on<strong>Adi Shankara:Meditations on a Life</strong> Susan Visvanathan focusses on the map as a site for reading travels and cultural osmosis. The map as an experiential space is not merely an abstraction, or the authoritative practise of statecraft, it is memoir and biography. She uses a fictionalised life of Adi Sankara to work with both the questions of pilgrimage as well as charisma, to question and work with received traditions about the story. In a Bakhtinian sense, the trope is to know the story, and to internalise it, and create a meta text, which is not biography, but fiction. Chair : <strong>Saugata Bhaduri</strong> Centre for English Studies, JNU, Date :<strong> 25th February 2015</strong>