The story of an epic and its afterlife in nationalist vernacular literary cultures

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences </strong> a Lecture <strong>The story of an epic and its afterlife in nationalist vernacular literary cultures</strong> <strong>Shail Mayaram</strong> Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi <strong>21st October 2015</strong> The talk will present part of a larger ethnography of transitions of Indian nationalism. It will examine the journey of a literary narrative concerning the twelfth century encounter between Prithviraj Chauhan and Shahabuddin Muhammad Ghuri. It will analyse how a popular version of the encounter available in the P?thviraja-raso became iconic in a series of vernacular literary cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was read as epitomising the Hindu-Muslim relationship. Shail Mayaram is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Publications include, Against History, Against State: Counter perspectives from the Margins; Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity; coauthored, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of Self(1995). Edited volumes are The Other Global City and Philosophy as Samvada and Svaraj: Dialogical Meditations on Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi and co-edited, Subaltern Studies: Muslims, Dalits and the fabrications of history. She has worked on subaltern pasts and moral imaginations of peasant, pastoral and forest-based communities, living together in the city and on nationalism and decolonizing knowledge. Israel as the gift of the Arabs: Letters from Tel Aviv is her most recent book and her current research project examines contestations between Sufis and Salafis