Dear Friends,

I am pleased to announce the first speaker in the Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series, an ongoing guest speaker series that is part of the ERC funded Gandhāra Corpora Project.

Title: Visualising Rituals in Gandhara

Speaker: Ashwini Lakshminarayanan, Cardiff University

Timing: Thursday, June 05, 2025 @16.00

Location: Ghent University, Faculteitszaal, Blandijn faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte (Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent)

In-person and ONLINE

All are welcome. Please register for the series through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6

Details may also be found here.

Abstract: 

It has long been recognised that the bases of Buddha and Bodhisattva schist statues from the ancient region of Gandhāra depict to some extent scenes that echo ritual practices that were normative for the region. While they have been the focus of sporadic assessments in the last decades, this paper is a systematic analysis of statue bases coming from ancient Gandhāra, a region located in the Northwest part of the Indic subcontinent, within the wider context of Gāndhārī donative inscriptions and Chinese travelogues. Dating broadly from the second century CE onwards, the statues bases, this paper argues, were a new venue to visually reinforce the ritual efficacy. As part of the systematic analysis, this talk showcases a work in progress, shedding light on the conventions used on statue bases and the actions of figures represented within them.

Short bio: 

Dr Ashwini Lakshminarayanan is a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Cardiff University leading the project ‘GRAVE: Gandharan Relic rituals and Veneration Explored’. This project analyses the visual material from Gandhāra (present day Pakistan and Afghanistan between the 1st and the 4th centuries CE) in its socio-religious context, focussing on contemporary Gandhari relic donative inscriptions and later Chinese accounts of relic veneration in the region. Besides rituals, Ashwini Lakshminarayanan’s work also focuses on gender, multi-cultural and multi-religious interactions within the Kushan kingdom.

Looking ahead:

I also take a moment to announce our next speaker, Lewis Doney (Bonn) who will give a talk on June 10, 2025 titled: "A Corpus of Ritual Literature from Dunhuang and its Links Further West". A separate announcement for this talk will follow but those interested may simultaneously register via the same link above.