“Welcome to the start of another busy, transformative year at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University. The Mittal family’s generosity will enable us not only to continue our quest to research and understand the region and its relationship with the world, but will also allow our faculty, students and affiliates to push even further to produce new and useful knowledge.”
The recent floods that hit Kerala have been the worst floods the State has faced since 1924. Many places in the state are neck-deep in water, massive landslides have laid waste to roads, houses and other infrastructure, thousands of hectares of crops are ruined and hundreds of people have lost their lives. The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University and the America India Foundation are encouraging monetary donations from people in the US.
As part of the India seminar series, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University partnered with Sangath and It’s Okay to Talk for an event titled ‘Unspoken Story’. The event was a conversation between Vikram Patel, The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health, Harvard Medical School and two young women on their personal journey and experiences with mental health.
The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University and the Harvard Club of India have come together to organize a collection drive for those affected by the floods. We are setting up various collection points around Delhi and urge citizens to donate items in kind.
2018 Visiting Artist Imran Channa is a contemporary artist from Pakistan. His art practice interrogates the intersection between power and knowledge. Channa’s primary focus is on the documentation and dissemination of historical narratives and events. He explores how fabricated narratives can override our collective memory to shape individual and social consciousness and alter human responses. In this interview, we discuss how he first became interested in installation artwork and the benefits of making art abroad.
As part of our deep commitment to South Asian art, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University partnered with Mumbai’s most important museum, the Chhattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangralaya (CSMVS), to host a two-day event around art and heritage conservation in India.
“On 28th April 2018, I Interviewed Mr. Milkha Singh (Flying Sikh), one of the finest athletes India has ever produced” beamed a very excited Akshay Veer, a Partition ambassador at the Mittal Institute, Harvard University. Akshay was part of a 55 student cohort that worked on a project titled, ‘Looking Back, Informing the Future – The 1947 Partition British India: Implications of Mass Dislocations across Geographies.’ As part of this project, student ambassadors collected and documented oral stories from survivors of the Partition.
Suraj Yengde is India’s first Dalit Ph.D. holder from an African university in the nation’s history. He is currently doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School. We sat down with Suraj to discuss caste, apartheid and the idea of a fourth world think tank.
As part of the ongoing India Seminar Series, we hosted Rohit Chandra, a PhD graduate from the Harvard Kennedy School to present his work in New Delhi. Rohit’s talk titled, ‘The Past, Present and Potential Future of Coal in India’, focused on the workings of the Coal sector in India. The seminar was moderated by Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Consulting Editor, Business Standard.