The varied landscapes and multiple land-use practices to be found in South Asia, now and in the past, lend themselves to a variety of interpretive readings and different disciplinary perspectives. The landscape can be understood, for instance, as central to the construction of a particular regional or ethnic identity (assuming that imagined communities need to be spatially situated within landscapes that are equalled imagined). They can be seen subjectively as material embodiments of sickness and poverty, as signifying the gendered (or gendering) nature of a locale, or as a site of colonization or resistance (in the many sense of both those terms. Landscapes imagined (as much as real) have figured in the understanding and expectations of rulers, in the fashioning of religion and art and in the articulation of science and medicine. Even the language we employ with respect to South Asia – jungle, ghat, bund, Terai – communicates culturally-informed notions of what the landscape represents and not just statements of material shape and form.

The conference conveners invite delegates to submit proposals for ‘Landscapes of the Imagination’ papers (or panels). We aim to encourage discussion of the ways in which we as academics and, more importantly, the people and societies we write about and study conceive of landscape, and the extent to which these landscapes assume a particular significance in the South Asian context.