Indira Viswanathan Peterson

Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Professor Emerita of Asian Studies, Mount Holyoke College, specializes in Indian literature in Sanskrit and Tamil, Hinduism, and South Indian cultural history and performing arts. Other interests include translation, European-Indian culture contact and comparative literature. Her publications include several translations, critical studies of major works, and edited volumes: Poems to Śiva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints (1989), Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravi (2003), Arjuna and the Hunter (2016); Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in modern South India, with Davesh Soneji (2008); and Tamil Geographies: Cultural Constructions of Space and Place in South India, with Martha Selby (2007).

Indira Peterson is completing the monograph Tanjore Renaissance: King Serfoji II and South Indian Modernity, on the nineteenth-century encounter of multiple Indian and European knowledge systems, arts, and sciences in an Indian cultural center, under the leadership of the royal polymath and innovator Serfoji II. Also in progress are Drama, the Court, and the Public in Early Modern India, and An Enlightenment Library in Nineteenth-century India: The Personal Collection of King Serfoji II of Tanjore (r.1798-1832).

Read more about Indira Peterson