Arya Adityan is an alumna of IIT Gandhinagar’s MA program in Society and Culture. She is currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. Her research focuses on religious and cultural traditions of South Asia, specializing in Hinduism, sacred space and landscape, performance, rituals, and cultural expression in the contemporary landscape of South India.

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Abstract of the Lecture

Sacred mapping and meaning-making in pre-colonial Indian literature
A cartographer’s map reveals the latitudinal and longitudinal attributes of a region. These mathematically rendered maps convey a layout of the physical world with its quadrants and borders. Within the Indian context, local and trans-local regional networks, like pilgrimages, speak multiple stories and communicate another worldview. The convergence of such stories and geographies is also a method of worldbuilding. This lecture will survey a few pre-colonial, pan-Indian and regional works of literature to understand this practice of sacred mapping.