On May 17, 2014, Harvard was reverberating with echoes of poets from different regions of South Asia at the 18th annual South Asian Poets Meeting. Each year, this event attracts poetic talents and wonderful pieces of poetry from diverse regions of South Asia. Twenty-seven poets from India, Bangladesh and Nepal participated in this year’s event. Among the participants from India, there were Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kashmiri, Kannada, Malayali and Oriya recitations.
Congratulations to SAI Founder and Former SAI Director Sugata Bose on being elected to the Jadavpur Lok Sabha seat in India’s national election. Bose won the seat in West Bengal as a Trinamool Congress candidate
This year, with the generous support of the Prasad family, the South Asia Institute has funded four Harvard College undergraduate students from various disciplines to study and complete internships in India this summer on issues ranging from the role of media in Indian democracy to environmental governance.
On Monday, May 5, SAI hosted a book talk with prominent Indian historian Romila Thapar about Thapar’s most recent book, The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India, which is a panoramic survey of the historical traditions of North India. In the book, Thapar reveals a deep and sophisticated consciousness of history embedded in the diverse body of classical Indian literature.
“This is not an India problem, or a South Asia problem. It is global,” said Lakshmi Iyer, Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School at SAI’s webinar ‘Women in Politics: The Case of India.’ Iyer was referring to the fact that women comprise only 21 percent of national parliaments worldwide.
Melissa Theiss, a junior psychology concentrator at Harvard College, will be interning this summer at VidyaGyan with support from a SAI internship grant. VidyaGyan is a school for rural underprivileged students in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, India that takes an innovative approach to providing transformational education for students from 6th to 12th grades
On Thursday, May 1, Muhammad Zahir, SAI’s Aman Fellow for the spring semester, shared his ongoing archaeology research at a seminar titled ‘Modern Ethnicities and Ancient Graves: The Deconstruction and Re-Analysis of the Protohistoric Cemeteries and Ethnic Origin Stories in Pakistan.’
This summer, over 30 undergraduates and graduate students will be in South Asia for research and internships, on topics ranging from the role of media in Indian democracy, Sanskrit study, to postwar resettlement in Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka.
On April 29, SAI hosted a book talk with Ramachandra Guha, who discussed his new book Gandhi Before India. The event, which took place at the Harvard Book Store with a packed audience, was moderated by Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Guha’s book, Mehta said, was a critical component of this new literature and was a monumental biographical account of Gandhi in South Africa. [Video]