Rights, Religion, and Secularity Salon with Tanika Sarkar
Acclaimed scholar of history, gender and colonialism Tanika Sarkar joins BCRW for the third event in the annual Salon Series, which offers an opportunity to dive into the implications of texts that make a critical intervention in their field. In this conversation moderated by Anupama Rao, Neferti Tadiar, Winnifred Sullivan, and Abosede George respond to Sarkar’s latest work, “A Just Measure of Death? Hindu Ritual and Colonial Law in the Sphere of Widow Immolations,” which explores the relations among law, personhood and Hindu idioms of entangled selves in colonial India. The article discusses how gender and empire become entwined with religion and secularism as religious notions of ‘sacrifice’ and good widowhood interrupted British notions of the legal person.