South Asian Studies Initiative hosts daytime lectures, (formerly part of CSAMES Brown Bag lectures), organized as South Asia Friday Talks @ 11. All Friday Talks are virtual, on Fridays from 11 AM to 12 PM.
Talk: Book talk on Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims
Epsita Halder's book Reclaiming Karbala explores how the Karbala event is remembered and reinterpreted in Bengal through multilingual expressions. She focuses on the efficacy of the Maidan-e-Karbala region, a site of public mourning and performance, as a space where historical and mythical narratives are continually reshaped. Karbala is a recurring, ritualistic, living history of Bengal that has been documented across time and space, and Halder’s book on Karbala further demonstrates the power of ‘storytelling’ in making that faith and history tangible. This lecture will look into multilingualism and the efficacy of region as categories of discussion, and make conversations with recent debates in World Literature.
Epsita Halder is Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is currently a research Fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt, Germany (2025). Epsita researches and publishes on the Muharram-complex and Shi'i identity formation in the Bengali-speaking regions specially focusing on Kolkata and Dhaka. Her monograph, Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims (Routledge, 2022), on Muslim cultural nationalism and literary modernity in colonial Bengal, received the Book of the Year Award of Iran (2025) and a book award from the Indian History Congress (2023). She has edited and co-translated two anthologies of short stories by the Bengali Muslim authors, Stayed Back, Stayed On (2025) and The Open-Winged Scorpion and Other Stories (2021).