After two weeks of hiking in southern England, Rebecca Manring participated in a Faculty Writing Program two-day retreat in June. During the retreat she revised three more sections of her translation of Rupram Cakravarti’s Dharma-mangala. She delivered a paper at the Conference on the Study of Religion in India, held at Colby College. And she spent the entire month of July in India, largely in her capacity as Chair of the Language Committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies. She had a day in Delhi, when she visited the Crafts Museum and met incoming PhD student Sweta Dutta.
She visited the cities (and language programs) of Pune (Sanskrit, Pali, Marathi), Madurai (Tamil), Mysore (Kannada), Hyderabad (Telugu), Jaipur (Hindi), Chandigarh (Punjabi), Lucknow (Urdu, Mughal Persian), and her second home of Kolkata (Bengali). This was her first set of site visits since the beginning of the pandemic, and she enjoyed meeting colleagues again after so long, and seeing their students hard at work on their languages.
Several members of the weekly Zoom Middle Bengali Group joined her for a reading session at the AIIS premises in Kolkata (Naba Gopal Roy, Shyamal Bera, Manring, Sagnik Dasgupta, Dhurjjati Sarma, and Pronoy Roy; Sweta Dutta also participated). It was the first time most of us had met in person, after nearly three years of working together virtually.
The College of Arts