On October 4, Madhuri Desai led several colleagues in discussion of an article published posthumously by our late colleague Kumkum Chatterjee, “Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal.”  A conference in honor of Prof. Chatterjee’s life and scholarship was held at Penn State on October 5-6.

Henriette-Rika Benveniste, Jon Brockopp, Samar Farage, Art Goldschmidt, Gregg Roeber, Annie Rose and Rebekah Zwanzig attended the seminar, which focused on several of the major themes in this article, including the relationship of vernacular texts and Persian histories and a re-imagining of the role of the Mughals in the local history of Bengal. Contrary to views that Indian perceptions of religion are timeless and unchanging, Chatterjee demonstrated in this article that changing images of the Goddess responded to local and regional perceptions.

Our broad-ranging discussion included comparisons with representations of Mary in 19th and 20th century America and also perceptions of the Mughals as Muslim rulers “interrupting” a continuous sense of Hindu history. This relationship that Chatterjee describes between religious symbolism and political power is a very fruitful one that has implications for many other religious traditions.