The Conference on the Study of Religions of India (CSRI) invites proposals for its upcoming Annual Meeting to be held at the University of Madras, India on July 21-24, 2020. The conference theme is"Containment, Collection, and Arrangement in South Asian Religions.” We invite proposals representing a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches that focus on the actual, metaphorical or conceptual storage, movement, or organization of objects and substances of significance in religious texts, ritual practices, institutional structures and/or individual behaviour. Possible topics could include the organization of mūrtis in temple architecture; the disposition of materials in ritual; episodes of hiding, finding or losing sacred objects in Epics and other narrative traditions; philosophical or theological accounts of perception and memory; classificatory schemes that demarcate the structure of the human person (e.g., cakras, faculties), the cosmos and/or social and cultural institutions; monastic traditions of manuscript collection and organization, and so forth. Conference organizers welcome individual paper proposals that articulate a clear argument and its connection to the conference theme of no longer than 250 words to be submitted through the CSRI website at https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/csri/ no later than February 1, 2020.

Proposals must include a clear statement of a thesis or argument to be advanced and must be clearly related to the conference theme. Abstracts that do not meet those criteria cannot be considered.

Housing and Registration: Conference participants will bear the cost of their own lodging. We have arranged room blocks at the moderately priced New Woodlands Hotel and the modestly priced University of Madras Guest House, both in the vicinity of the university conference site. Conference registration fees will be as follows, with additional concessions for graduate students: Scholars from South Asia = ₹1,000; Scholars from outside South Asia = US $50.