Letter from the Director
This has been a year of firsts for the Harvard South Asia Institute.
This has been a year of firsts for the Harvard South Asia Institute.
SAI welcomes submissions for its summer blog from Harvard students, faculty, alumni, and affiliates on an array of topics pertaining to South Asia.
At SAI’s Annual Symposium on May 6, a panel discussion moderated by Homi Bhabha, with Deepa Mehta, Adil Najam, and Michael Sandel addressed questions of democracy across the world.
At an event on May 19 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, faculty leaders from the Kumbh Mela project shared why studying the world’s largest gathering provided so many lessons for fields such as business, public health, and urban planning.
SAI spoke to several graduating students who have been involved with SAI during their time at Harvard.
On May 15, poets from around New England interpreted the idea of “environment” through poems in Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Urdu, Koshali, Gujarati, Nepali, and more South Asian languages.
How have liberal freedoms (such as freedom of expression, religious practice, and association) been managed in democracies across the world? At SAI’s Symposium on May 6, a panel facilitated by Ashutosh Varshney, Brown University, addressed this question and more.
What should a school of education in Pakistan look like? On May 6, SAI hosted a roundtable discussion at Harvard to address this question with scholars, administrators, and leaders in the field of education from across the US and Pakistan.
“Nepal’s constitution is a milestone, and it’s a living document that should be taken to the people for broader engagement,” said Alaina B. Teplitz, US Ambassador to Nepal, at a recent meeting in Kathmandu of the Harvard Alumni Group in Nepal.
From April 25 to April 29, The Future of Diplomacy Project and India and South Asia Project hosted the annual South Asia Week with influential practitioners and experts of diplomacy from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and the U.S.