Touched by the Gods: Darshan and the Savarna Sensorium

This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia and the Department of Art and Art History.
About the event
This presentation pulls back from a post-Enlightenment genealogy of the senses to ask how we might resituate the sensorium, and with it ideas such as darshan, in relation to the habitus of caste. Drawing on collaborative research in progress inspired by Dalit Studies scholarship on sensory experience, it revisits some relevant Sanskrit texts to suggest that in many traditions, all the senses—not least vision—can be understood as a certain form of Touch (capitalized to distinguish it from skin touch). Here, contrary to our post-Enlightenment common sense, it is not so much through vision per se as through this Touch that power flows. 

About the speaker
Kajri Jain is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, on popular prints (Duke University Press, 2007), and Gods in the Time of Democracy, on the emergence of monumental statues alongside India’s economic liberalization (Duke University Press, 2021). ​​She also writes on contemporary art and on the discipline of art history, with chapters in The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023) and How Secular Is Art? (Cambridge University Press, 2023).