[INDOLOGY] ECSAS 2025: pāṭṭu & song cultures of the Far South

[Elena Mucciarelli]

Dear friends and colleagues,

we would like to share this call for submissions to our panel on “Literary islands of the Far South: the quixotic archipelago of pāṭṭu songs” at the European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) that will be held at Heidelberg in 2025 (October 1-4).

The deadline for the submission of paper proposals is January 30, 2025 through this link: https://ecsas2025.com/call-for-panels/
 
Please feel free to circulate this call for papers with your friends, colleagues and students who do research related to these topics.

Warmly, 
Elena Mucciarelli & Cezary Galewicz 

— 
Literary islands of the Far South: the quixotic archipelago of pāṭṭu songs
The soundscape of South Asia is steeped in songs: from morning songs to wake up the goddess to sub-regional and trans-regional epic songs, from work songs to literary poetic compositions, from topographical songs conjuring up the cultural memory of a place to liturgical texts recited to activate a curse. Archipelagos of lived-in traditions that demands a multidisciplinary approach combining textual, sonic, performative and material studies.
In the Deep South, we are met with the Malayalam word pāṭṭu and its cognates, cf. Kan. paḍdana, Tam. pāṭṭu, meaning 'song'. But this terms also refer to literary genres creatively embracing the performative aspects of songs. Pāṭṭu invokes dozens of regionally inflected traditions of narrating local histories through songs.  Songs linking clusters of villages or travelling with itinerant musicians. 
Songs of power and revenge. Of beauty and despair. Of community and erotic union with the deity. This panel aims at looking at pāṭṭu-song as a complex cultural object and open a new conversation on how to bring the lived-in song traditions in historical conversation with forms recognized as literary. Building on the concept of sensorial epistemologies, we want to adopt a media-archaeological frame to look at the archipelago of song cultures of South India as a whole and question basic assumptions on the relation between oral and written cultures, by introducing the concept of a trans-medial form of textuality (oral, performative, embodied) and understand its internal and integral modes of exchanges and hybridisations.
We encourage papers looking into specific lived-in song cultures as well literary strands that have been seen as pāṭṭu by asking questions about their patterns of circulation, communities of practice, performers, audiences and patrons, as well as concepts, ideas and beliefs that made them into knowledge systems. Including actual social practices that would produce spaces of social interaction, belonging and trust, competition and contest, resistance and subversion.

—
 
Dr. Elena Mucciarelli 
From 1st to 31st of May 2025, Visiting Professor of History of Religious Traditions at University of Trento, Italy
Assistant Professor of Hinduism in the Sanskrit Tradition - Gonda Lecturer 
Director of the Institute of Indian Studies Groningen

Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society
Room 236
Oude Boteringestraat 38, NL-9712 GK Groningen 
The Netherlands

New articles - read online:
2022 Polluted by a purifying text: The order of signs in a pre-modern literary Malayalam world <https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/kervan/article/view/7016>. In Kervan, University of Turin.
2022 Tēvāram: Worshipping Gods on Stage. In Numen, Brill
2021 "How to Carve a King: Janna’s Inscription in the Temple of Amṛteśvara” <https://doi.org/10.1163/25425552-12340022>. In Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, Brill



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