Lecture | VVIK lecture
When the Rains Came: A Medieval Moment in South Asia
- Date
- Thursday 2 April 2026
- Time
- Explanation
- The lecture will be followed by drinks in the LIAS common room of the same Herta Mohr Building (first floor).
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.16
Abstract
The period ca. 850-1200 was marked by fundamental transformations in the histories of polity, culture, language, religious formation, and everyday life across the region now called South Asia. This same period also comprises the widely (if still controversially) accepted paleoclimatic phenomenon dubbed the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA). In the first steps toward a re-periodization of premodern South Asia, I propose to take the MCA as an outermost condition of possibility for a new interpretation of this time and place. How can awareness of the paleoclimate in any way influence or improve the work of a philologist or more conventional cultural or social historical scholarship? Presenting two entangled test-cases, drawn respectively from ninth century Kashmir and early eleventh century Tamiḻakam, I suggest that this is indeed possible, while also gesturing towards a wider scope of the region as a whole.
Whitney Cox
Whitney Cox is a Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, focusing on Sanskrit and Tamil philology and the history of medieval South India. Besides numerous articles, he is the author of Politics, Kingship, and Poetry in Medieval South India: Moonset on Sunrise Mountain (2016) and Modes of Philology in medieval South India (2017), and is presently completing an edition and translation of the Kashmirian Sanskrit poet Bilhaṇa's Vikramāṅkadevacarita.