This exploratory talk engages the visual, tactile sculptures of the kuratti or hill-dwelling fortune teller that are found at Tamil temples in the greater Madurai area, as objects that complicate how we may read embodiment in the literary Kutrala Kuravanji. What does this embodiment look like in stone? What does it look like in narrative performance? Noting the imbricatedness of the visual and the literary in South Asian precolonial cultures, the talk presents human, non-human, and supernatural agency and action in sacred geography, as ornamental.

Dr Manasvin Rajagopalan (he/they) holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, with a Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion, from the University of California, Davis, where he also completed his Masters. Focusing on the premodern and early modern expressive cultures of South Asia and Western Europe– specifically France, he is interested in theatrical and multimodal performance history, criticism, and literary aesthetics. His doctoral work interrogated methodologies of comparison across cultural and spatio-temporal discontinuities and disconnections, mobilising Tamil poetics to read French canonical texts. Dr Manasvin’s research interests run the gamut of the interdisciplinary humanities, including art history, translation studies, food studies, performance studies, queer studies, religious studies, medical humanities, environmental humanities, and the social sciences. His work has previously been supported by generous funding from the College of Letters and Sciences at UC Davis, and the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, among others.