Event Date
EMERGING SCHOLARS IN JAIN STUDIES
VIRTUAL LECTURE
Departments of Religious Studies at UC Davis and UC Riverside
Friday, October 9, 2026 | 9:00 - 10:20am PDT
Interpreting Early Jain Sites Through Performance
Anna Tosato, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This talk builds on Anna Tosato’s earlier work examining sculptural representations of dance and music as primary sources for understanding the religious and cultural world of early and medieval India. She proposes that sculptors reproduced specific postures, gestures, and choreographic conventions from a shared tradition of nāṭya and śilpa, since these movements carried deliberate meaning for historical viewers, making this vocabulary essential to understanding the sites where it appears.
Her methodology combines sculptural depictions of performance, inscriptions, and the śāstras. Two case studies illustrate this: First, dance images from Mathurā, where inscriptions recording patronage by performing artists connect directly to the site’s sculptural program. Second, the Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves in Odisha, where royal patronage, inscriptions, and dance imagery converge within a single Jain complex. Together, these cases show that performance is a valuable, still underused source for studying early Jainism, speaking to both the religious worldview and the status of sculptors, performers, and patrons alike.
Speaker Bio
Anna Tosato is a lecturer in Jainism and South Asian Culture and Religion in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She studied for her MA and PhD at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari and the University of Mysuru in Karnataka, where she spent 5 years on an Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) fellowship studying Sanskrit and the śāstras on performing and visual arts with eminent scholars (H. V. Nagaraja Rao, M. A. Lakshmithathachar, M. S. Nagaraja Rao). Her research focuses on performing arts and performing artists in early and medieval India, with special interest in their relationship to epigraphy, temple architecture, and sculptures.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER ON ZOOM
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. If you have any problems registering for the event, please contact us at [email protected].
