Seminar - Introduction to Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā (Tarinee Awasthee)

Session title: Introduction to Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā
Dr Tarinee Awasthi, Assistant Professor, Humanities and Languages, FLAME University, Pune
Date: Thursday, 8 August 2024
About the session: Of traditional Sanskrit disciplines, Mīmāṃsā is most directly concerned with establishing the validity of and interpreting the Veda. In their attempt to read each statement in the Veda in an unambiguous way, Mīmāṃsakas came up with complex principles of sentential analysis, and theories pertaining to language in general and Vedic language in particular. Mīmāṃsā was hugely influential in Sanskrit intellectual culture all the way to the eighteenth century, for a variety of reasons including a) its interaction with other disciplines like Nyāya; b) its relationship with Vedānta, also called Uttara-Mīmāṃsā; and c) the employment of Mīmāṃsā principles to read other things than the Veda. In this talk, we will touch upon some of the fundamental principles of Mīmāṃsā and a brief survey of its history.
About the speaker: Dr Tarinee Awasthi is a historian of Sanskrit and adjacent intellectual cultures, with a particular focus on Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. She is also interested in Rāma narratives, and questions around religious experience.