Kheya Melo Furtado, an expert on health systems financing and public health, joins the Mittal Institute as our Spring 2023 Jamnalal Kaniram Bajaj Visiting Research Fellow. She is a faculty member in the Healthcare Management program at the Goa Institute of Management, India. Kheya shared more about her research and endeavors while an LMSAI Fellow.
Francis X. Clooney, a born and bred New Yorker, was following a fairly traditional path toward Jesuit priesthood when he took an unexpected detour that would change his religious and world view forever. Clooney, now Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard, is a leading scholar in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India and the developing field of comparative theology. He has written numerous books, including Hindu God, Christian God (2001) and the more recent Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics (2019). How he found himself at the forefront of Hindu-Christian studies began in 1973 with a trip to Kathmandu, where different religious traditions were not just in books but all around him.
The Mittal Institute offers funding opportunities for scholars and practitioners to engage with the university’s vast resources to advance self-driven, independent research. Annie Rachel Royson joins the Mittal Institute as the second class of India Fellows, based at the LMSAI Delhi office.
During the fellowship, Annie aims to explore key works of translation from colonial South Asia to explore the critical relationship between translation, geography, sacredness, and memory. Annie’s research project will provide a South Asian perspective to the current ‘spatial turn’ in translation studies and will explore the links between translation, landscapes, and memory in the context of colonialism in the region.
Arshaya Sood, a Master’s student in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design, spent her summer in Mumbai, India, conducting fieldwork in the Urban Development department at the World Resources Institute Mumbai. Her work, part of an LMSAI student grant, explored urban planning and urban development efforts on the Mumbai Climate Action Plans Urban Greening & Biodiversity action track, under Cities4Forests initiative. The program works with the city and state governments and the community to improve greening efforts within underserved areas of Mumbai. Arshaya shared her experience in the Q&A below.
This year marks the 20th season of the India Conference at Harvard. The conference, organized by students from across Harvard, will run February 11 and 12 at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. The conference theme, “Vision 2047: India at 100 Years of Independence” will explore how India can fulfill her global potential. The conference hopes to build upon its strong legacy of hosting conversations with India’s leading politicians, business leaders, government officials, academics, artists, athletes, philanthropists for meaningful dialogue on India’s path to global recognition. The conference is supported by WNS, with additional contributions from Zydus and the Mittal Institute.
We spoke with conference organizers Anushree Singh (Harvard Business School), Dhananjay Goel (Harvard Kennedy School), Harkirat Bhullar (Harvard College), Umang Daga (Harvard Business School), and Vidhi Lohia (Harvard Kennedy School) about what attendees can expect from the two-day event.
Electric Rehi, or e-Rehri for short, is a 2022 Seed for Change grant recipient that is working towards providing affordable, electric and modular carts for street vendors in Indian cities, making the daily delivery of fresh produce efficient for both the vendors and the consumers alike. Electric vehicle technology is retrofitted to traditional Indian street carts, creating an incremental and affordable transition to green energy. Using this method, any existing cart can be transformed into an electric vehicle while retaining its ability to function as a mechanical tricycle cart.
The Mittal Institute presents its Spring Fellows and Visiting Artist Fellows.
The Mittal Institute’s New Delhi Office was a beehive of activity over winter break, playing host to two separate major events: an interdisciplinary conference on indigeneity and a celebration of LMSAI’s past year and new focus on climate change.
On Tuesday, January 17 the Mittal Institute will host the “Interrogating the Indigenous in Northeast India: Political Movements, Cultural Poetics, and the Performative Capital” conference, which will trace “indigenous” as a historical category, investigating the ways in which the indigenous question has become a shared language of social critique in Northeast India. The conference will begin with a keynote lecture on “Indigeneity and Contemporary Northeast India: History and its Contingencies” by Professor Arupjyoti Saikia, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. We spoke with conference convener Ankur Tamuli Phukan, Mittal Institute India Fellow based in our Delhi office. He shared the motivations behind the conference, and what he hopes attendees can glean from the panel discussions.
Komal Shahid Khan, based in Islamabad, Pakistan, was a Visiting Artist Fellow at the Mittal Institute in 2016. She received a master’s in fine arts from the Fatima Jinnah Women University in Rawalpindi, Pakistan with a specialization in miniature painting and was awarded a Gold Medal for her thesis show. After graduating, she started her career with a focus on group shows in art galleries in Islamabad/Rawalpindi and later moved to Lahore and Karachi. She also taught at the National College of Arts Rawalpindi, Pakistan, as a Lecturer. In 2016, she held her first solo exhibition titled “Imagined Immortals” in Karachi, Pakistan. We caught up with Komal to learn more about life after her LMSAI Fellowship.
We are pleased to welcome Monika Setia as she joins the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute as Associate Country Director in the India office. Monika will assist with building bridges between Harvard and India related to research in and about the region. She will play an instrumental role in increasing LMSAI’s presence in India through coordination with stakeholders in the region. Monika will also be working closely with the Harvard LMSAI office to support Harvard faculty visiting India, building partnerships with academic institutions and support ongoing Harvard faculty research and all endowed fellowships.