SubversiveSanskrit
A Critical Indology Reading Group
A space for those of us whose work draws on Sanskrit sources — scholars, students, teachers, practitioners — to think critically, and together, about the disciplines we inherit.
Historicization
Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life" · John Nemec, "Translation and the Study of Indian Religions"
What does it mean to practise philology today?
What inheritances and blind spots shape our reading of texts formed by colonial encounter, religious lineage, and modern reconstruction?
Is the discipline in crisis?
What do we owe the traditions we study, the communities for whom these texts are still living, and the broader life of the humanities?
Fortnightly in term
Thursdays, 6pm
A living room. Address goes out on the list; bring the reading, not a paper.
Foundations, placed in question
Our premise is simple. Sanskrit studies and the broader field of Indology rest on centuries of assumptions, institutional histories, and methodological commitments that deserve sustained reflection. We read one piece a fortnight and take it seriously enough to argue with it properly.
We mean subversive in an inquiring register rather than a polemical one — willing to place the foundations of our disciplines into question, and to hold those questions open long enough to think them through with care. The readings gather meditations on philology as a humanistic practice, critiques of Orientalism and the Indological tradition, and close engagement with the methodological problems that attend our work.
No paper is presented and nothing is assessed. Sessions are unrecorded and stay in the room. This term’s 4 sessions and the topics still waiting for a date are on the sessions page.
The zine is the antithesis of the journal.
The living room is the antithesis of the lecture hall.
Five things grow out of the reading group. All of them keep its register.
Strands
The reading group is the root. Around it: a salon for work in progress, an invited seminar, a zine, a day-long symposium, and a slow group translation.
Salon
One of us puts an article, a chapter, or a half-finished essay on the table and the room reads it properly. Precirculated, no presentation — the writer says almost nothing for the first twenty minutes and then we talk. Members and visitors both welcome to bring work.
Term-time · circulate a draft by email a week aheadSeminar
One invited talk a term, from scholars whose work has changed how the field reads itself. Forty-five minutes, then argument. Open to the university and to anyone outside it who wants to come.
MT 26 · [speaker to confirm] — the patriarchy of philologySanskritique
The zine. Short pieces, session notes, translations, complaints, and marginalia — printed cheaply, stapled, and given away. Not peer-reviewed and not pretending to be.
Issue 01 · Hilary 2027Symposium
One day, a keynote, and panels drawn from an open call. Sixty people at most, in a room where everyone can speak.
Trinity 2027 · call for papers opens OctoberReading Sanskrit
The other half of the argument: we sit with the primary texts themselves, slowly, in the original, and let the methodological questions arrive from the page rather than the literature.
Term-time · text chosen each MichaelmasRegistration opens Hilary. Bursaries for graduate students and unaffiliated scholars.
A day on what philology is for
Morning keynote, three afternoon panels from an open call, and a closing conversation between the keynote and the group. Small on purpose — a room where everyone can speak, not a conference where most people listen.
Recorded on purpose, separately. The reading group itself stays off the record.
Recordings
After a session the two of us sit down and have the conversation again, deliberately and on tape — what the piece claimed, what we think it got wrong, what it opened.
The first conversation is recorded after the opening session. Join the list and it arrives in your inbox.