The Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies will host a daylong symposium dedicated to exploring the Ganges River – its heritage, threats to its sustenance and planning initiatives to conserve it.
The symposium will begin at 9 a.m. Oct. 9 in the Heritage Room of the ACES Library Information and Alumni Center.
The Ganga (Ganges) River embodies the continuity of the Indic civilization, its religious ethos and its rich cultural traditions. Rarely has any river gathered in itself so much meaning and reverence as the Ganga has over three millennia. This heritage is at stake as the polluted Ganga – dammed and channelized – begins to fail in its role of sustaining cultural practices, artistic traditions, worship rituals and to lose thereby its centrality in the cultural and religious imagination of India. The efforts by the Indian government to clean the Ganges since the mid-1980s have achieved only mixed results and are widely considered to have failed.
Symposium speakers will include Illinois faculty members Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, religion; Trevor Birkenholtz, geography and geographic information science; Pradeep Dhillon, education policy, organization and leadership; and Amita Sinha, landscape architecture. Off-campus speakers: Anthony Acciavatti, Columbia University; Kelly Alley, Auburn University; Swati Chattopadhyay, University of California at Santa Barbara; Alpa Nawre, Kansas State University; and Rana P.B. Singh, Banaras Hindu University.
A complete program can be seen at the conference website. Registration is free and can be done online.
The symposium is funded partly by the U.S. Department of Education Title VI Grant awarded to the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in 2014 and co-sponsored by the department of religion, the department of landscape architecture and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies India Studies Fund. For more information, contact csames@illinois.edu or 217-244-7331.
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