Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

30th November 2018 
Sala Michele Pellegrino - Biblioteca Peterson 
via Giulia di Barolo 3a

h 9-18

The Department of Humanities, University of Turin, Italy, will host the 10th death anniversary international symposium in memory of Prabha Khaitan titled “Translating existentialism in South Asia,” under the auspices of the Prabha Khaitan Foundation, Kolkata, the Institute for Asian Studies (ISA), Turin, and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Women and Gender – CIRSDe, Turin.

The conference will disseminate the results of a three-year long research led by Prof. Alessandra Consolaro, Associate Professor of Hindi Language and Literature at the University of Turin. Funded by the Italian Ministry of University and by the Department of Humanities, the focus is on autobiography and the contact between Existentialist and Indian philosophy.
Hailing from the Marwari community in Kolkata, late Prabha Khaitan (1/11/1942 –20/9/2008) is renown as a writer, entrepreneur and feminist. Her writings reveal not only her private life and working experiences, but also her thought,
that combines Indian and European philosophy. 
The conference focuses on the philosophical aspect of Prabha Khaitan’s literary production. She is the Hindi translator of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, published in
1991 with the title Strī upekṣitā. She introduced Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism to the Hindi readers (Sārtr kā astitvavād, 1984; Sārtr: śabdoṃ kā masīhā, 1985) and published an essay on Albert Camus (Albeyar
kāmū: vah pahlā ādmī, 1993). Mr. Sundeep Bhutoria, Managing Trustee, Prabha Khaitan Foundation, Kolkata, will deliver the keynote speech for the international symposium. Both European and South Asian scholars and translators,
researching on different aspects of Existentialist thought and gender issues, will participate to the event: the program includes presentations by Monika Browarczyk (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland), Andrea Drocco
(University of Venice, Italy), Mara Matta (La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy), Pakistani poet and feminist Kishwar Naheed  (Urdu translator of The Second Sex, 1982), and Jayandra Soni (General Secretary of IAAS—International Association of Sanskrit Studies,Vienna). 

info: https://pkconference18.wixsite.com/prabhakhetanbeauvoir

alessandra.consolaro@unito.it