FYI: Leslie Orr talk this Friday

Orientalists, Missionaries and Jains: The South Indian Story

Speaker: Leslie Orr
Concordia University, Department of Religion

Friday, March 14, 2008
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

208N – Seminar Room, North House
Munk Centre For International Studies
1 Devonshire Place

Register online at: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=5484

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several British colonial administrators based in Madras, in collaboration with Indian scholars, made significant advances in Indology, particularly with respect to the language, literature, and history of South India. This group of men – “the Madras School of Orientalism” – had a very different orientation and different interests from those of their more famous contemporaries of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in Calcutta. Colin Mackenzie and F.W. Ellis were at the centre of scholarly activities in the South, with Ellis’ important contributions to the study of the Dravidian language group and of Tamil literature and Mackenzie’s large-scale collection and documentation of manuscripts, oral traditions, inscriptions, sculptures and monuments. These men, together with the Abbé Dubois – and earlier Jesuit and Protestant missionaries – had a particular interest in the Jains, and in the role of the Jains in the history of South India. In contrast to other scholars at the time, the Madras Orientalists recognized that Jainism was a religion separate from both Hinduism and Buddhism, and they thought it quite possible that the religion of the Jains had preceded Brahmanism in South India. In this presentation Leslie will examine the unique view on the history of religions developed by the South Indian missionaries and the Madras Orientalists, and will explore the reasons for their distinctive perspective and its impact on subsequent scholarship.

Leslie C. Orr is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 1993. Her research interests include the religious and social history of medieval South India, especially Tamil Nadu of the Chola period (9th to 13th centuries); women in pre-colonial South Asia; and the interaction of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.