VISITING

Research visit by Dr. Ashwini Lakshminarayanan promotes collaboration between DiGA and GRAVE

In February, Dr. Ashwini Lakshminarayanan visited CERES as a guest researcher as part of her MSCA-UKRI research project GRAVE: Gandharan Relic rituals And Veneration Explored (Cardiff University). An integral part of the project secondment at CERES was the implementation of the standard vocabulary developed by DiGA-The Digitization of Gandharan Artefacts Thesaurus.

During her stay, Dr. Lakshminarayanan examined scenes related to relic veneration and ritual activities within the corpus of Gandhāran art compiled for the GRAVE project. In collaboration with Jessie Pons, she worked to ensure interoperability and dialogue between the DiGA Thesaurus and the GRAVE dataset. This collaboration proved fruitful in refining and adapting the existing terminology of the DiGA Thesaurus while simultaneously developing new terms for describing and classifying Gandhāran art. The discussions and methodological approaches used to classify the data and develop these terms will be made available within the scope of the GRAVE project in the coming weeks.

This visit to CERES was funded by the Horizon Europe Guarantee Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship for the project GRAVE: Gandharan Relic rituals And Veneration Explored. Based at Cardiff University, the project examines how relic rituals and acts of veneration were visually conceptualised and communicated in Gandhāran art. Particular attention is given to the types of relics represented, the actions of figures such as donors and devotees, the ritual accoutrements depicted, and the contexts in which these activities take place.

Led by Dr. Ashwini Lakshminarayanan, the project brings together an interdisciplinary suite of research methods related to ancient Gandhāra. It intersects the visual corpus of Gandhāran art—produced broadly in regions of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan—with contemporary Gāndhārī inscriptions (in collaboration with Dr. Stefan Baums). It also integrates standard vocabularies for the classification of visual motifs (in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Jessie Pons) and contextualises the visual material using the later Chinese travelogues on relic veneration (under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Max Deeg).

The project draws on Dr. Lakshminarayanan’s expertise in the art and archaeology of Buddhism in pre-modern Central and South Asia. Her research and publications focus particularly on gender and performance in religious contexts. Her international academic education took her from St. Xavier’s College in India to the University of Kent (UK) and the International Hellenic University (Greece), before she completed her doctorate at Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). In her PhD dissertation, Gender in Gandhāran Art: Representations and Interactions in the Buddhist Context (1st–4th centuries CE) —published in 2024 and supervised by Prof. Marco Galli— she examined gender and gender interactions in Gandhāra.