OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The Dasam Granth, a text attributed to the tenth guru of Sikhism, Guru Gobind Singh, includes a composition with accounts of twenty-four avatars of the god Vishnu. The concluding story narrates the deeds of the future avatar Kalki and his battle with a figure named Mir Mahdi. Sikh exegesis of this text has often centered on why tales of Vishnu’s avatars appear in a Sikh text; this presentation will analyze this Kalki narrative in relation to other accounts of Vishnu’s final avatar and Indic accounts of the mahdi, a figure who in Islamic theology appears at the end of time.
