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Centre For Indian Aesthetics and Postcolonial Studies

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Devi Durga Killing the Buffalo Demon
Red Sandstone, Central India, 10th Century

This 10th-century relief from Central India captures the moment of Devi Durga’s triumph over the water buffalo demon. The Goddess is shown as Mahishasuramardini. With her multiple arms bearing ayudhas given by the Devas, her lion vahana at her feet, she pins Mahisha , as shown emerging from the severed buffalo neck in human form and pierces him with the trishula. The iconography follows the description first given in the Markandeya Purana where all the gods infuse their tejas into one supreme Goddess to vanquish the asura who could not be killed by any male god.

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soon, the nine sacred nights will come again. Navaratri 🪔

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Source: The Kienzle-Hardt Museum Collection, Treasury Part II, Zacke Auctions, Vienna by @ciaps_official

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Durgā subduing the buffalo demon
Nepal, Malla Period, 1550–1650 CE. Gilt copper.

Source of Images from Bonham website

This is Mahiṣāsuramardinī Durga at her most iconic. by @ciaps_official

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The presiding Tantric Goddess Mahavidya Bagalamukhi at Baglamukhi Bankhandi, Kangra HP. by @ciaps_official

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Devi Durga slaying the water buffalo demon Mahisha.

11th / 12th century CE. India, Tamil Nadu, Chola Dynasty, Exhibited at Museum Rietberg, Zurich, Switzerland.
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Source & Credits
Image 1 :Jan van der Crabben via World History Encyclopedia
Image 2: Museum Rietberg, Zurich by @ciaps_official

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Mahiṣāsuramardinī—The Buffalo Demon Slayer
Orissa, eastern India, 13th century CE
Chlorite schist | British Museum, London
Photo: Peter Rivera

Power carved in stone.

This 13th-century Durgā from Orissa captures the climactic moment: the goddess drives her triśūla into Mahiṣa as he emerges from the buffalo, while her lion mount tears into the demon’s fallen body. Eight arms wield weapons,sword, shield, bow, arrow, śūla, crowned and bejeweled, she is both sovereign and warrior.

Look closer: the buffalo’s severed head lies beside the lion, Mahiṣa’s human form twists in defeat, and Durgā’s face remains serene. This is vīrya(heroic energy)frozen in chlorite.

Orissan sculpture of this period, under the Eastern Gaṅga dynasty, mastered this tension: violence and grace, motion and stillness, divine power grounded in regional stone. Today she stands in the British Museum, far from the temple she once inhabited.

Why this matters: Durgā’s cult was deeply political in medieval India. Kings identified with her as slayer of chaos. To install Mahiṣāsuramardinī was to claim divine mandate. Her image traveled from temple walls to royal charters to battle standards; theology as statecraft.

Decolonial note: Objects like this raise urgent questions of provenance, access, and repatriation. Whose heritage? Whose museum? Studying them means reckoning with colonial collecting histories while honoring the living traditions they came from. by @ciaps_official

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🔻 Kali, seated, Tamil Nadu, c. 1000-1099 CE, Government Museum, Chennai. 🔻

Provenance: Found in Nerkumram / Nerkundram, Chennai region, Tamil Nadu, India.

Visible iconoclasm can be seen on the image, probably indicating historical desecration and iconoclastic interventions.

Photo Source: American Institute of Indian Studies, Digitized with financial support from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. by @ciaps_official

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Excerpts Part I | Gayatri Spivak: ‘Learning From Below’
In conversation with Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay at the House of Literature, Oslo

In this conversation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits and reiterates her foundational formulation of the subaltern. The discussion offers a timely clarification at a moment when the term is frequently used loosely and often as a misnomer.

“Not every suffering group is a subaltern. Subaltern is a position without identity.”
— Gayatri Spivak

Spivak underscores that the subaltern must be understood not as a generalized identity of marginalization, but as a specific condition of epistemic exclusion from structures of knowledge, citizenship, representation, and power. One must take careful notes as she traces the precise meaning of the concept.

It is hoped that this restatement will bring clarity to inflated and often exaggerated definitions that have circulated in contemporary academic and popular discourse. As the author of the seminal essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), Spivak herself delineates what the subaltern signifies in the context of Gramsci, and in doing so, restores conceptual rigor to a term that has been subject to considerable dilution.
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Note: This clip uses excerpts from a longer talk. Please see the full recording for nuanced understanding and engagement with the speaker's ideas. by @ciaps_official

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Some binge-watch Netflix, some binge-watch Gayatri Spivak lectures on YouTube. Which one are you?

In her 1.5 hour talk Margins and Marginalities delivered at the Centre for Theory and Criticism, Central University of Kerala, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak treats the lecture hall as a space of ethical inquiry and critical confrontation. She rejects any romanticisation of “the margin,” arguing that margins are not academic metaphors but material conditions shaped by capital, caste, gender, and the structures of the global university. Moving through planetarity versus globalization, the politics of translation, and the role of NGOs in development, she insists that marginality means structural exclusion from both representation and redress.

The lecture is striking for how Spivak addresses her critics. To Marxists who claim she neglects class, and to feminists who find her prose opaque, she responds with precision and self-awareness. She interrupts her own arguments, uses irony, and employs pauses to stage her points, showing that difficulty in theory is an ethical demand rather than elitism. Because easy access can reproduce the very silences she critiques. Her sense of humour is a must-watch: she delivers sharp, unexpected asides and uses rhetorical shifts to unsettle assumptions about liberal guilt, academic authority, and narratives of rescue.

Spivak returns throughout to pedagogy as “a non-coercive rearrangement of desires,” framing learning as a slow practice of unlearning privilege and listening to subaltern epistemes. By the close, “the margin” emerges not as a location to study from a distance, but as a relation that calls for sustained responsibility.

Source & Credit : Professor Gayatri Spivak on “Margins and Marginalities” by Centre for Theory & Criticism, Central University of Kerala ( Available on YouTube.) Part I. #GayatriSpivak by @ciaps_official

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In her lecture “The Rohingya Issue in a Global Context” at Cornell University, Prof. Spivak framed the Rohingya crisis as both a humanitarian emergency and a crisis of representation. She called on her audience to see the Rohingya not merely as an oppressed minority, but as fellow human beings, urging us to shift from “they are like us” to “we are like them.” Drawing on her own encounters with Rohingya refugees, Spivak discussed issues of statelessness, citizenship, sexual violence, and the politics of “speaking truth to power.” She also talked about W.E.B. Du Bois and the need for secular and critical education.
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Source & Credit: Lecture delivered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Oct 30, 2017, Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. Video available on the YouTube channel CornellTL ScienceXMedia by @ciaps_official

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Paradoxology: The Art of Praising the Deity

In this inaugural Hindu Way of Life Lecture delivered at Harvard Divinity School for the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), Prof. Vasudha Narayanan (@earthgoddessvasu ) examines the Sri Vaishnava tradition through the lens of paradox. She argues that paradox offers a more productive framework for understanding the multilayered nature of Hindu and local traditions, rather than forcing them into neat theoretical categories as is often done by some in academia.

Drawing on her decades-long scholarship on the tradition, Prof. Narayanan focuses on the Tamil Alvar poet Nammalvar and his praise of Vishnu.

As Prof. Narayanan notes, “Markandeya is self-consciously aware of his being included and contained within the deity. His outside and his inside is a nice analogy for those of us who do ethnography and even think contemplatively about our own traditions, and it is from this liminal space that he praises Vishnu and speaks of him as the Supreme Lord.”

[Prof. Vasudha Narayanan is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida and served as President of the American Academy of Religion (2001–02).]
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Note: This is an excerpt from a longer lecture. For fuller context and nuance, viewers are encouraged to watch the complete recording. by @ciaps_official

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o — Why do Africans hate their own languages?

In this conversation with Kenju Waweru, Prof. Ngũgĩ unpacks the real crux of language politics in postcolonial nations and how people are made to believe that their own mother tongue languages divide them. Prof. Ngũgĩ immediately rebukes this, calling it “absurd.”

He also reflects on what led him to write his seminal book, Decolonising the Mind.

“If you know all the languages of the world and you don’t know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, and add all the other languages to it, that is empowerment. In reality it is impossible for any person to know all the languages in their own country, let alone the world. This is where the art of translation comes in.”
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, The Language of Languages

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Note: This clip uses excerpts from a longer conversation. Please watch the full recording for a more nuanced engagement with the speaker’s ideas.

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Source & Credit:
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o — Why Africans hate their own languages | Diaspora Connect: Ep. 23. (2019) Available on YouTube @MadarakaFestival by @ciaps_official

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Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a Māori scholar from Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou iwi in Aotearoa New Zealand, wrote the seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which reshaped how scholars interrogate the relationship between research, imperialism, and Indigenous knowledge systems. As she puts it in the book: “Research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized.” Extending those arguments, in the lecture ‘Decolonizing Methodologies’ delivered at the CUNY Graduate Center, Smith examines how Western research has functioned as a mechanism of colonial power. She argues that decolonizing research requires more than changing methods; it demands questioning who benefits from knowledge, centering Indigenous sovereignty and epistemologies, and recognizing research as a site of struggle where communities reclaim control over their stories, data, and futures.
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Source & Credits:
INQ13 | Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Eve Tuck – “Decolonizing Methodologies”, CUNY Graduate Center, YouTube, 29 Apr 2013. by @ciaps_official

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