Religion-based Family Laws, Corporate Kinship, and Wealth Accumulation in Modern India: a Sociological Investigation
Prof. Christel Gärtner and Prof. Matthias Casper invite to a lecture by Prof. Anindita Chakrabarti. Ms Chakrabarti is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Kanpur and currently a visiting scholar at the Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics. Her research interests also lie in the field of law and religious studies.
On Tuesday, 28 May 2024, at 18:00, she will give a lecture on "Religion-based Family Laws, Corporate Kinship, and Wealth Accumulation in Modern India: a Sociological Investigation". The lecture will take place in the Cluster building, Johannisstr. 4, room JO 101. Participation is also possible via Zoom.
Abstract
In India, religion-based family laws (also referred to as personal laws) function within the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom (articles 25-30). But they operate within a futuristic promise of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) also enshrined in the directive principles of the Constitution. In post-independence India, the UCC which is supposed to replace diverse religion-based family laws has become a short hand for gender justice, resolutely opposed to religious obscurantism in general and ‘Muslim misogyny’ in particular. In the recent decades Muslim personal law has been the cynosure of the debate on UCC and gender justice. Decentring the debate from an abstract notion of gender to the workings of family, kinship, and wealth transfer, the lecture draws attention to the intricacies of law in practice. Thereby it shows how the ideas of legal pluralism can offer a framework to reimagine the binary between cultural relativism of family laws and a statist UCC based on the ideal of ‘one nation, one law’.
On 13 May 2024, the official opening of the Asian Studies Centre took place at Heereman'scher Hof (University of Münster Professional School). In addition to the objectives and tasks of the Asian Studies Centre, the certificates and the new logo were presented. Prof. Dr. Carmen Brandt, Chairwoman of the German Association for Asian Studies (DGA) and Professor of Contemporary South Asian Studies at the University of Bonn, gave the keynote speech. The event concluded with the annual Study India Day with guest of honour Mubarak Bawa Syed, Consul General of India from Frankfurt.
Elections made in India: die indische Wahl für deutsche Augen verstehen lernen
Vom 19. April bis zum 4. Juli 2024 findet in Indien die Wahl für das Bundesparlament, den Lok Sabha, statt. Mit knapp einer Milliarde Stimmberechtigter ist die Wahl wie schon die Male zuvor eine logistische Herausforderung und innerhalb des Super-Wahljahres 2024 eine wichtige Kennmarke. Nichtsdestotrotz ist für viele hier in Deutschland Indien weiterhin eine große Unbekannte. Irgendetwas zwischen Yoga, heiligen Kühen und Callcentern. Der Indienwahlabend, gefördert vom Förderverein des Instituts für Politikwissenschaft (IfPol), setzt hier an und möchte die Wahl in Indien verständlicher machen und Interesse wecken, sich mehr damit zu beschäftigen. Es soll somit nicht nur um die aktuelle indische Politik und die Wahl gehen, sondern auch einen Bogen spannen warum dies auch für Deutschland eine wichtige Wahl ist. Der Abend wird geleitet von Anica Roßmöller, die vor ihrer aktuellen Tätigkeit als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am IfPol mehrere Jahre Referentin am Bayerisch-Indischen Zentrum für Wirtschaft und Hochschulen war.
Place: Institute for Political Science, SCH100.2 (Campus map) Date: 07th May 2024, 7 PM (s.t.)
From December 2023 to April 2024, the Asian Studies Centre launched a logo competition. There were many creative and beautiful ideas. The three winners will be honored at the opening of the Asian Studies Centre on 13 May 2024.
The designs of the participants who agreed to publication can be found in an image gallery.
The Asian Studies Centre would like to thank everyone who took part in the competition!
The First International Conference on Critical South Asian Death Studies
18th - 20th April 2024
The long twentieth century has been regarded variably as a 'century of death.' The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a proliferation of academic literature inquiring experiences of death and mourning. While much has been penned about the paradigms of death in the 'Global North,' there exists uneven temporalities in the academic reception of death, specifically in South Asian contexts. Death Studies as a discipline is widely conceived from within individualist, white Western hegemonies and through their appendant epistemologies that foreclose engagements with, among others, South Asian relationalities, belief systems, and established structures of mourning. The First International Conference on Critical South Asian Death Studies situates itself in this gap, paying heed to critical approaches to death, dying, grieving and end-of-life care in South Asia; mobilizing critical, intersectional, and radical contextualisms that emphasize distinct bio-medical, metaphorical, cultural, and social forms of death.
