The Philosophy Department at UH Mānoa collaborated with the Center for South Asian Studies, under the auspices of the RWCLS (Rama Watumull Collaborative Lecture Series), to invite Dr. Keya Maitra of the Philosophy Department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Dr. Maitra visited UH Mānoa during the week of Oct. 7, 2024, to offer a public lecture and workshop. She is an expert in several schools of Indian philosophy, as well as in feminism, virtue epistemology, and cross-cultural philosophy.
In her workshop titled “Sultana’s Dream: Philosophical Accounts of Decolonial Feminist Consciousness and Social Identity,” Dr. Maitra pointed out that ten years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Bengali Muslim writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain published Sultana’s Dream (1905) in pre-independent India, a feminist utopia imagining a world where women lead and men live in seclusion. To walk attendees through the historical, cultural, and political context, Dr. Maitra introduced Rokeya’s often-overlooked text and highlighted its critique of purdah and zenana in colonial Bengal. Following Roushan Jahan and Hanna Papanek’s claim that the work reflects feminist ideas rooted in indigenous contexts, Dr. Maitra examined how Sultana’s Dream offers a space for engaging questions of decolonial feminist consciousness and postcolonial identity.
In her public lecture “Emotions in the Bhagavad Gita,” Dr. Maitra illuminated how cross-cultural philosophy of emotion can be developed in new ways by examining the Bhagavad Gita’s account of the moral role of emotions. Building on Bilimoria and Johnson’s interpretation of the Gita as offering a socially constructed view of emotion within moral reasoning, she explored with participants a different angle—whether equanimity (samatvam), central to the Gita’s ethics, can itself be understood as an emotion. While often seen as emotional detachment through cognitive mastery, samatvam in the Gita is also associated with positive emotions like compassion and joy, revealing deeper semantic layers than commonly thought.
Focused discussion immediately followed Dr. Maitra’s talks, with wide-ranging questions from the audience demonstrating philosophical engagement at its best. Her lectures and workshops were of substantial interest to the UH Mānoa community, including the Philosophy Department, History Department, Religion and Ancient Civilizations Department, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for South Asian Studies (Rama Watumull Collaborative Lecture Series), which lent support to create this academically enriching opportunity. The CALL Uehiro Program was able to provide assistance to the community effort that made this successful event possible.