In 2020, 1.05 billion (24% of) people worldwide lived in slums (UN 2022), an increase from 689 million in 1990. With an estimated 23.2 million population in 2023, Dhaka is the fourth largest mega city in the world having with fastest population growths. It is the topmost densely populated cities with nearly 43,500 people/km2 metropolitan […]
Papers
How does “nyen” become a virus? Pre-modern Tibetan medical concepts and interpretations of nonhuman entities in the times of COVID-19
In Tibetan medicine (Sowa Rigpa), different types of infectious disease are clustered under the term nyenrim (gnyan rims). Foundational sources—such as the Four Tantras of the twelfth century, and its seventeenth-century textual and iconographic commentary, the Blue Beryl—describe disease-causing demons (gdon, gnyan) troubled by humans through improper activities, such as burning food, slaughtering animals, or inappropriate […]
Pained by prolonged illness – the changing perception of a ritual solution for the diseased and elderly
Sanskrit ritualistic literature preserved information about a rite (sarvasvāra) for people wishing to die and enter the other world free from diseases. The ritual has recently met with renewed scholarly interest because of its self-sacrificial character. Traces of its performance can be found in the literature of Mīmāṃsā, and although Vedic exegetes were interested in […]
Fever and Widespread Disease in Thirteenth-century Tibet
Fever was a popular subject for the physicians and scholars of thirteenth-century Tibet. There are sixteen separate chapters on fever in the Four Tantras (Rgyud bzhi), for example, and Darma Gönpo’s (Dar ma mgon po, 13th c.) Epitomes (Zin thig yang thig) include about fourteen more. Throughout these complex and textually intertwined chapters, one finds […]
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From Stone to Text: linking pre-modern healthcare institutions and āyurvedic epidemiology
There is considerable archaeological and epigraphic evidence to guide us in the study of early hospitals in South and Southeast Asia. A growing number of studies has engaged with healthcare institutions from ancient Sri Lanka and Cambodia, while evidence from the Indian Subcontinent has been surveyed by Wujastyk (2022). And yet many aspects remain obscure, […]
Interrogating the Idea of Hygiene in the Early Indian Monastic Practices through the Lens of Textual Sources.
This paper explores the importance of practices of cleanliness and personal hygiene in the ancient Buddhist monastic community and to what extent local practices influenced them. Several Pali terms like ārogyavijjā (hygiene), ārogyayijjāyatta (hygienical), āragyasattha (hygienics) show the importance attached to the concept of hygiene in ancient Indian monastic Buddhism. A detailed perusal of the […]
Epidemic Prevention: Precursors of Public Health in Early Āyurveda?
Āyurveda, the predominant medical system in pre-modern South Asia, is by definition a very individualistic tradition of healing, discerning and treating the patients under special consideration of their personal constitution, diet, physical strength, habituation, character and age. Furthermore, the āyurvedic source texts show a strong commitment to preventive procedure, frequently suggesting avoiding unwholesome influences and […]
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The shifting face of ‘legal’ violence: the lived experience of nonreligious Bangladeshi asylum seekers in Sweden
Attacks on secular humanists are on the rise in South Asia. As a corollary, more South Asians seek asylum on grounds of nonreligion. A small number of nonreligious cases have been examined for their legal reasoning (Nixon, 2020), but little has been said about the lived legal experiences of secular asylum seekers themselves. Given the […]
The “Securitisation” of Muslims in India: Anti-Minority Violence as Governance
This thesis argues that the present observed increase, and shift in the nature, of “communal” violence in Modi’s India, marks a sharp departure from the past, with the crucial difference being the transformation of anti-Muslim violence from a “modality of politics” to a “modality of governance” under the BJP. I, thus, propose the framework of […]
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Complexes of Hate:Hostile Speech, Embodied Affects and Political Aggression in North India
The spring of 2022 witnessed a wave of violent hate speech against Muslims and Dalits(ex-untouchable) communities in India. In response, calls to introduce new, comprehensive hate speech legislation have grown louder across the country. However, scholars and activists heatedly disagree on the parameters of such legislation and have struggled to answer a few basic questions: […]
