February 26, 2024: A talk by Richard Eaton (Arizona)

The Mary Keatinge Das Lecture

A talk by Richard Eaton (Arizona)

“A Typology of Architecture and Power, and the Decline of Indian Buddhism”

Introduction by Katherine Ewing, Professor of Religion and Director, South Asia Institute

Description: The talk will elaborate on a long-standing interest of Prof. Eaton's, which is the relationship between architecture and power, and in particular what happens when power confronts monuments of earlier dispensations, defeated rulers, oppressed minorities, and the like. The talk will then consider the fate of Buddhism in India – one of the most vexed issues in Indian history – with a view to applying insights of a proposed typology to material and literary evidence respecting Buddhist structures in eastern India.

A graduate of the universities of Virginia and Wisconsin, Richard Eaton currently teaches South Asian history at the University of Arizona. His monographs include "Sufis of Bijapur: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India" (Princeton, 1978); "The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760" (California, 1993); "Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761:Eight Indian Lives" (Cambridge, 2005); "Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600" with Phillip B. Wagoner (Oxford, 2014). He recently published a history survey: "India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765" (Penguin, 2020). Last year Primus Books published a collection of his recent essays, "The Lotus and the Lion: Essays on India’s Sanskritic and Persianate Worlds". He is currently co-editing, with Ramya Sreenivasan, the Oxford Handbook on the Mughal empire.