Deep in a bank vault of Mumbai’s Asiatic Society lies a revered treasure that is much studied in textbooks but rarely seen. The early 16th-century painted manuscript (dated 1516 CE), one of the oldest of its kind in the world, requires a committee’s approval to see the light of day – a committee that had remained elusive to Prof. Jinah Kim, an expert in South Asian art, for years. But last September, her proposal to study the painted manuscript finally got the go-ahead, and capturing the color from the rare piece of work may just change the study of South Asian art – and maybe all of Asian art – forever.
The Mittal Institute’s inaugural Distinguished Artist Fellow, Nilima Sheikh, will soon join us in residence on the Harvard campus from her home of Baroda, India. A renowned painter, Nilima has been a career artist for more than 50 years. We spoke with her about what led her to apply for a DAF, and her hopes for her experience.
Throughout its 150th anniversary year, Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ GSAS Voices is foregrounding the stories of some of its most remarkable alumni and students as they speak about their work, its impact, and their experiences at the School. Diana Eck, PhD ’76, is a Mittal Institute steering committee member and professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard University, where she also served as a faculty dean of Lowell House. Eck talks about her decades of work studying the religious traditions of India, the founding of the Pluralism Project, and how she learned to teach as a student at GSAS.
Jay Iyer ’25, a Molecular & Cellular Biology and Statistics dual concentrator, is working to unlock the secrets of rare brain disease. He spent a summer interning at three hospitals across India, where he explored the state of neurological healthcare and worked to pitch a new iPad application that uses machine-learning to aid in the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. He shares a personal account of his experience with neurological diseases, and his quest for further medical innovations.
On Friday, March 24, President Ranil Wickremesinghe joined the Harvard community live from Sri Lanka for a discussion moderated by professors Tarun Khanna, Harvard Business School, and Asim Khwaja, Harvard Kennedy School. The event, co-sponsored by the Center for International Development at Harvard and the Mittal Institute, covered a wide range of topics, from the recently announced IMF deal to social, economic, and political reforms to human rights issues and the way forward for the country.
This past fall, Harvard University welcomed Prof. Martha Selby as the Sangam Professor of South Asian Studies. She joined us from the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught since 1999. A scholar of South Asian literature, she shared more about her work and previewed her upcoming April 6 talk on “Sangam Tamil Lecture – Loss in Love and War: On Grief and Longing in Old Tamil Poetry.”
As we enter the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Shikha Kukreti, MPH, BDS, is focused on exploring the attitude of healthcare workers to vaccines, and their psychological wellbeing during the pandemic. A researcher with the Lancet Citizens Commission and a Ph.D. candidate at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, Shikha is spending the spring at the Mittal Institute. We spoke with her about her project.
The Mittal Institute has embarked on a major climate change initiative focused on South Asia, hosted at our Harvard Global Research Support Center India, an affiliate of Harvard University. This focus comes as Harvard awarded the Mittal Institute two multi-year grants to catalyze climate change research in South Asia. To build on the initiative, the Mittal Institute will host an inaugural climate change workshop on March 30-31 in New Delhi. The sessions will convene an interdisciplinary group of experts, policymakers and academics to set collective research and strategic priorities. LMSAI Director Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, spoke with us about LMSAI’s climate focus, and previewed the upcoming workshop.
The Mittal Institute annually supports faculty research projects that unite scholars from different fields and regions whose research relates to South Asia. Interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as projects that catalyze connectivity between scholars at Harvard and those in South Asia, are a funding priority. We are pleased to announce this year’s grant recipients—earning the highest individual funding amounts in Mittal Institute history—and their research initiatives.