Séminaire "Interactions between Islamicate and Indic Societies in South and South-East Asia: Comparative Perspectives"

Satoshi Ogura (Tokyo University of Foreign Sciences – professeur invite à l’EHESS), “Locating Farmulī’s Persian translation of the Laghuyogavāśiṣtha”

In 1602, the same year with the assassination of the Mughal emperor’s closest confidant Abū al-Fażl, Akbar had the Muslim intellectual Farmulī produce a Persian translation of the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha. This work is a Sanskrit philosophical text narrating the means to accomplish liberation in life (jīvanmukta) through dialogues between the prince Rama, the main role of the Sanskrit epic Rāmāyaṇa, and the sage Vasiṣṭha. Indeed, this Sanskrit work was once translated in 1597 by Niẓām al-Dīn Pānīpatī under the order of the prince Salīm. However, Akbar seemed to have an “own” translation. In this talk, I analyze the Akbar version’s commonality and originality compared with the Salīm version in translation strategies and interpretations of Sanskrit philosophical terms found in the original Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha.

Volker Gottowik (Goethe University Frankfurt), “Transgressive ritual practices: ‘Tantric fragments’ in the context of the Islamic veneration of saints in Central Java”

In Central Java, a number of pilgrimage sites exist that are visited by pilgrims of both sexes either to communicate with each other sexually or, in the case of male pilgrims, to have sexual contacts with prostitutes. These transgressive ritual practices have received widespread public attention in Indonesia since they became a mass phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s. As these practices are clearly at odds with the value system of the majority society, some anthropologists trace them back to Indonesia’s Hindu-Buddhist past and especially to tantric currents. This talk examines the above mentioned transgressive ritual practices as "tantric fragments" that have lost their ideological dimension but are still productive in social and religious terms. It explores interactions between Muslim and Hindu-Buddhist environments and shows how these interactions contribute to the syncretic and pluralistic character of Indonesian society.