School of Humanities
The School of Humanities is engaged in research in the broad areas of philosophy, psychology, literature, fine arts, and culture. Research in the School currently focuses on philosophical foundations of sciences; cognitive sciences; scientific and philosophical studies of consciousness; Indian psychology and philosophy; history and philosophy of biology; archaeometalurgy and analysis of ancient metals; and translations of literary classics in Kannada into English.
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Samayita Banerjee
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Post-Doctoral Associate
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Samayita Banerjee is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Heritage Science and Society Programme at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru. Her work at NIAS focuses on the spatial documentation and GIS analysis of cultural heritage landscapes across India as part of the project Towards a National Cultural Landscape Information System, which is developing the KASTURI Portal, India's first curated geospatial heritage platform hosted on ISRO-Bhuvan. Her contributions include landscape mapping, dataset validation, and the development of spatial narratives for understudied archaeological sites. Her broader research specialisation lies in the landscape archaeology and geoarchaeology of South Asia, with a particular focus on human-environment interactions in the deltaic and coastal zones of Bengal and the forested uplands of central India.
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Patanjalian wisdom personified: The Yogasutric reading of vari
This article examines vārī, the pilgrimage practice of the Vārkarī Saṁpradāya through the conceptual lens of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras. By linking Patañjali’s philosophy with the Vārkarī literature and fieldwork reflections, the paper argues that vārī is not only a devotional journey but also a structured yogic path, one that has preserved and reinterpreted the discipline of Yoga within a bhakti framework.