Darshan and the Savarna Sensorium

This talk is sponsored by the Center for South Asia. 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 pos