Upcoming Events
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The Fifteenth Pupul Jayakar Memorial Lecture – Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire by Anirudh Kanisetti
Date: 17th April 2025
Venue: Alliance Francaise, 72, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi
Time: 6.30 pm IST
Live streaming
YouTube link: https://youtube.com/live/cY8Ft2o9SMADear Friends,
It gives us great pleasure to invite you to the Fifteenth Pupul Jayakar Memorial Lecture on 17th April, 2025 at Alliance Francaise, New Delhi.
The lecture will be streamed live. The link for it is given below.
https://youtube.com/live/cY8Ft2o9SMAAll are welcome.
The Chola Empire (850–1279 CE) was one of the most remarkable polities in medieval Asia, as creative and imaginative as they were expansive and warlike. They built stupendous temples – the tallest freestanding structures on earth after the pyramids of Egypt. Chola queens popularized new forms of gods and worship, such as the iconic Nataraja and the singing of Tamil poems to deities: both integral to Hinduism today. And they were spectacularly daring, raiding not just the powerful Deccan and North India but also Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. All of these had lasting impacts on not just on South India but on the world.
In this boldly conceptualised lecture, award-winning historian Anirudh Kanisetti brings to life the world of the Cholas. Not just the world of kings and queens attended by retinues of generals and attendants – but the stories of the ‘little people’, whose lives were buffeted by big events. Based on thousands of inscriptions and hundreds of secondary sources, Lords of Earth and Sea is not just a procession of dazzling kings and queens but transports us from palaces to peasant settlements of over a thousand years ago.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian specialising in ancient and early medieval India. He is the author of Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire, and Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas. He hosts two podcasts: Echoes of India and YUDDHA: The Indian Military History podcast. Anirudh has won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman, and Tata Literature Live’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award. He was an Open Mind of 2022, and on the New Indian Express’ 40 Under 40. Anirudh was formerly Editor at the MAP Academy, where he worked on the Encyclopaedia of Indian Art. Prior to this, he was Associate Fellow at the Takshashila Institution. His work has received grants from Princeton University, the India Foundation for the Arts, and MAP Academy.
Join us for Tea at 6:00 pm before the event.
