Harsha Gautam
Harsha Gautam (she/her) is currently Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow (2024-2025) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In the Department of Religious Studies at UT Austin, she is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Religions in History track. She specializes in the study of ancient South Asia, focusing on early Buddhism in particular and early Indian society at large. She studies Pāli and Sanskrit texts, with considerable assistance from visual and material evidence and explores issues of religious identity-formation, socio-religious interactions, law, power relations and the agency of subordinate and marginalized subjects. Her research interests also include South Asian Art, religious landscapes, Sufism, Navayāna Buddhism and religious conversions in contemporary societies.
Before joining UT Austin, she graduated from Miranda House, University of Delhi (2016) with Honors in History and Political Science as her allied discipline. She then earned an M.A. (2018) and an M.Phil. (2020-21) in Ancient History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. In the summer of 2024, she was a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) sponsored Research Scholar at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, Germany.
Supervisors: Oliver Freiberger (chair), Janice Leoshko, Martha Newman, Donald Davis Jr., and and Ute Hüsken
Address: harshagautam@utexas.edu | harsha.gautam@metmuseum.org
Before joining UT Austin, she graduated from Miranda House, University of Delhi (2016) with Honors in History and Political Science as her allied discipline. She then earned an M.A. (2018) and an M.Phil. (2020-21) in Ancient History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. In the summer of 2024, she was a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) sponsored Research Scholar at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, Germany.
Supervisors: Oliver Freiberger (chair), Janice Leoshko, Martha Newman, Donald Davis Jr., and and Ute Hüsken
Address: harshagautam@utexas.edu | harsha.gautam@metmuseum.org
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Through the analysis of inscriptions and material evidence from Mathura, with some assistance from the avadānas, I will argue that the ‘Nāga cult’ of Mathura was initially an independent religious tradition and juxtapose its inclusion into the major religions of the time, namely Buddhism, Jainism and Brahmanism, with the appropriation of the Buddha into the Brahmanical religion as the avatāra of Viṣṇu. I will discuss in detail two recently discovered sculptures from Mathura, one that of a Nāga deity from the Kuśāna period and the other depicting the Mahāparinibbāna of the Buddha, which today house in two separate Hindus temples and are worshipped with entirely new identities. Finally, emphasizing on the plurality and instability of boundaries through the example of the Nāgas, I will also highlight the role of religious actors in the process of religious boundary-making and in defining the concept of ‘religion’.
Through the analysis of inscriptions and material evidence from Mathura, with some assistance from the avadānas, I will argue that the ‘Nāga cult’ of Mathura was initially an independent religious tradition and juxtapose its inclusion into the major religions of the time, namely Buddhism, Jainism and Brahmanism, with the appropriation of the Buddha into the Brahmanical religion as the avatāra of Viṣṇu. I will discuss in detail two recently discovered sculptures from Mathura, one that of a Nāga deity from the Kuśāna period and the other depicting the Mahāparinibbāna of the Buddha, which today house in two separate Hindus temples and are worshipped with entirely new identities. Finally, emphasizing on the plurality and instability of boundaries through the example of the Nāgas, I will also highlight the role of religious actors in the process of religious boundary-making and in defining the concept of ‘religion’.