After a Master in Classical Philology (2014) from the Université de Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France and a Master in Oriental Philology (2015) from the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Amandine Wattelier-Bricout began her academic career with a doctoral fellowship from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris, Paris, France. PhD in Indology specialised in Sanskrit philology and Purāṇic Studies, she bases her research on the critical edition of primary sources, both manuscript and epigraphic.
Her research mainly focuses on the ritual prescriptions, especially those on gift and adoption, and examines how these rites are legitimised and justified in purāṇic literature and how they are implemented. For that, she deals with a wide corpus of Sanskrit literature, including purāṇas, dharmaśāstras, gṛhyasūtras, dharmanibandhas, as well as religious texts and epigraphical records. Her survey on the ritual of tree adoption brought her to explore numerous rituals dedicated to trees and to go in for the issue of the status and the powers attributed to trees in Ancient India.
She also studies the forms of early Śaivism, in particular the Pāśupata movement, its doctrinal texts and its rituals. She tries to understand the relationships between the Pāśupata movement and the myths told in the Skandapurāṇa by assuming an ideological purpose under the mythological discourse. In the Skandapurāṇa, she primarily examines the status assigned to the Goddess, notably through her motherhood, and its consequences on the role allocated to women in ritual prescriptions. Indeed the examination of the rituals of birth, pregnancy and breastfeeding in Ancient India is also one of her main research fields.
For the ERC-DHARMA Project, she has already encoded and translated a set of Bengal charters from the Gupta and Post-Gupta corpora. As Research fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, she concentrated on the documentation, edition, translation and interpretation of an epigraphical corpus from Orissa dedicated to the Somavaṃśin dynasty. She mainly focused her study on the self-presentation of the Somavaṃśin kings and on their legitimation strategies. The results of this research were presented at two international symposia and will be published soon. They provide a reassessment of the history of the dynastic succession line and suggest new hypotheses for the problematic attribution of a couple of copper plate sets issued by some Somavaṃśin kings.The analysis on the contents and on the structure of copperplates carried out during this task has brought her to reflect upon the ritual practices underlying the gift practice, and more specifically upon the functions of the benedictive and exhortative stanzas.
Currently researcher in social history of ancient India at the CESAH Centre d’études sud asiatiques et himalayennes-UMR8077 (CNRS, Paris, France), she is leading a research project born form this interest and entitled BESTOW “Benedictive and Exhortative Stanzas, a Thread of Officially uttered Words”. From the broad presence of the benedictive and exhortative stanzas within the epigraphical records spread in almost south-east Asia as well as in other sources like law treatises, purāṇas or Dharmanibandha works, she suggests studying their dissemination over space and through time, but also inside different social groups that quote them. In doing so, she will seek to define if this common heritage pertains to indianization processes or is the result of the Hinduism institutionalisation. In this way, this sub-project will be an integral part of the DHARMA project and will contribute to its aim by exploiting the DHARMA database and by gathering the research results of the different task-forces.
Besides her research activities, she also really gets involved in Sanskrit teachings, for which she resorts to active pedagogy, co-operative learning and digital materials. Her reflection on the didactic approach have begotten the research blog she maintains: Le sanskrit en question(s). Her teaching experience at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France, at the Université de Lille, Lille, France and at the Institut des langues rares, Paris, France, comprises both courses dedicated to beginner and advanced students, as well as to general public. Convincing by the benefits of Open Science and Education, she shares and deposits her course material on the Open Access Archive HAL.
CV and list of publications : https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/amandine-wattelier-bricout
Selected bibliography :
2023, “The Path to Salvation : A Key to Identifying the Religious Affiliation of the Original Skandapurāṇa”. In Puspika: tracing ancient India through texts and traditions : contributions to current research in Indology . Volume 6. Proceedings of the 12th International Indology Graduate Research Symposium (Vienna, 2021), edited by Vitus Angermeier, Christian Ferstl, Dominik A. Haas, et Channa Li, 199‑239. Heidelberg: Asian Studies Publishing HASP. 10.11588/hasp.1133.c15534
2021, “Les plus anciennes communautés de yogis”, “Les yogis dans les purāṇa, mythes et légendes”, “Une grande maitresse du yoga”, “De puissants yogis au Karnataka, les Kālāmukha”, in Tardan-Masquelier Y. (ed.), Yoga. L’encyclopédie, Paris, Albin Michel, pp.231-239.
2020, “The Tree Adoption as presented in the Dharmanibandhas’’, in De Jonckheere H., Gorisse M-H. & Rostalska A. (eds), Puṣpikā: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions: Contributions to Current Research in Indology, volume 5, Oxford-Philadelphia, Oxbow books, pp.95-127.
2018, “Adopter un arbre : un rite unique décrit dans les chapitres 158 et 162 du Skandapurāṇa’’, in Filliozat P-S. & Zink M. (eds), L’Arbre en Asie, Paris, Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres, pp.257-272.
2018, “La dimension dévotionnelle du Skandayāga: Atharvavedapariśiṣṭa XX sur le rituel en l’honneur de Dhūrta’’, in Dejenne N. & Tignol E. (eds), Archiv orientální, Journal of African and Asian Studies, 86, Special Issue: Expressions de la bhakti dans les littératures indiennes, pp.205-219.
2017, “Le stéréotype de l’adoption par l’allaitement dans le Skandapurāṇa’’, Le stéréotype: fabrique d’identité, Traits d’Union 7, pp.60-67.
2016, “Du tableau esthétique au récit de bataille: un exemple sanskrit de transposition de genre du Kumārasaṃbhava au Skandapurāṇa’’, in Actes des 19èmes rencontres Jeunes chercheurs de l’ED268: Altérité Langagière : stratégies d’adaptation et d’appropriation, pp.1-16.
