This lecture will focus on commemorative practices in the Deccan as reflected in the archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the first half of the first millennium CE. The first centuries of the Common Era witnessed the emergence of memorial steles in the Deccan, which later became widespread across southern India.

In the first part of this presentation, Prof. Dr. Vincent Tournier will introduce a recently surveyed corpus of such memorial steles. The context of sustained exchanges with the Mediterranean world further allows one to account for the presence of some of the recurring motifs in the iconography of the memorial steles. He will further discuss what they reveal about social hierarchies and the beliefs concerning the afterlife within the Sātavāhana and Ikṣvāku domains in particular.

In the second part Prof. Dr. Vincent Tournier will adress Buddhist funerary and commemorative contexts, presenting the results of an ongoing study of the largest monastic funerary complex known from the Deccan: a group of approximately 100 brick stūpas from Site 87 at Kanheri. Focusing on the inscribed stones inserted into some of these stūpas, he will show what they reveal about the identity and self-representation of the monastic community active at the site, as well as its possible connections to transregional Buddhist networks of the period.