WAR
LITERATURE

War is older than civilization itself—and literature has been bearing witness to it since the beginning. Long before nations acquired names or borders were etched onto maps, conflict was the primal language through which power first asserted itself; whoever prevailed on the battlefield laid claim to dominance, and warfare became, quite literally, the engine of history. It is a phenomenon that predates literature, and yet, paradoxically, it remains one of literature's earliest and most enduring preoccupations. From The Iliad and the Mahabharata to Beowulf, the epic tradition itself was forged in the crucible of war: literature's very origins are inextricably bound to the chronicle of human conflict.

As human societies advanced, so too did the machinery of their violence. Every leap in civilization was shadowed by a corresponding leap in the instruments of destruction—sharper weapons, more calculated strategies, more systematically organised campaigns of conquest and colonization. Bloodshed and brutality were never incidental to this progress; they were its constant, inescapable by-product. With each technological advance, war grew not merely more lethal but more impersonal, more mechanised and, in profound ways, more dehumanising—a trajectory culminating in the atrocities, trauma and large-scale devastation that came to define the character of modern warfare.

It is precisely this transformation that literature has been compelled to bear witness to. Where early narratives often exalted the warrior and celebrated valour upon the battlefield, a slow but unmistakable descent began to reveal itself: from bravery to psychological anguish, from triumph to torment. The romanticism once attached to war came under increasing scrutiny, its glorification interrogated rather than uncritically celebrated. Writers turned their gaze inward, toward the soldier's fractured psyche, the civilian's forced displacement, and the silences that history so often leaves unspoken.

Alongside this shift, the very idea of the nation—its geographical boundaries, its claims to sovereignty, the human toll exacted in its name—became a site of searching literary and philosophical inquiry. Imaginative and creative literature, in particular, gave shape to these unarticulated effects, allowing readers to inhabit the interior devastation that official histories so frequently omit. In doing so, literature became an active participant in a changing discourse on war—no longer merely a chronicle of heroism, but an unflinching witness to loss and its long afterlife.

The very nature of war, too, has undergone a profound metamorphosis. It ceased to be waged solely over land and territory, and increasingly came to be fought over ideologies, belief systems, identities and abstractions for which human lives continue to be offered up as sacrifice. Today the face of war has been altered so drastically that it often appears to have shed its human dimension entirely, reduced instead to strategy, data and calculated distance. And yet the oldest questions persist, more urgently than ever: Why war? What necessity does it truly serve?

From Jerusalem to Kashmir, from the shifting and volatile alliances entangling America, Iran and Israel, contemporary conflicts continue to raise the same unresolved dilemmas that literature has grappled with across millennia. It is within this charged and pressing context that the present conference finds both its urgency and its relevance. Violence, death, displacement, trauma and demolition are not distant abstractions confined to the page; they are lived, ongoing realities that continue to shape our present moment.

This conference asks whether such violence has become an unquestioned necessity of a world increasingly governed by capital, power and ideology—or whether it is, in fact, perpetual and self-perpetuating, resistant to any lasting resolution. In bringing together diverse literary and scholarly perspectives, it seeks not merely to document war's atrocities, but to interrogate why, after millennia of literature bearing witness to its costs, humanity continues, still, to wage it.

In classical Indian literature—most enduringly in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—war is never rendered as mere spectacle of material ruin or political ambition. It is, instead, woven inextricably into the fabric of Dharma: cosmic order, ethical duty and moral discernment. Where Western war literature has tended to dwell on physical violence, psychological trauma and existential despair, the Indian paradigm approaches conflict as an option of last resort, one inseparable from questions of righteous conduct (Dharmayuddha), post-war reconciliation and the wider welfare of humankind (Lokasangraha).

India's literary and historical inheritance offers a remarkably sophisticated meditation on conflict and its aftermath. The Shantiparva of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita stand among humanity's earliest philosophical treatises on the trauma of combat, the anguish of moral choice and the long labour of healing that follows war. By setting contemporary theories of war alongside these classical Indian perspectives, this conference seeks to open a genuine dialogue between Eastern and Western paradigms—one that yields a more comprehensive understanding of war, its representation and its aftermath.