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At a glance: the South Asia Institute
The South Asia Institute (SAI) coordinates activities at Columbia University that relate to study of the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as well as related areas such as Afghanistan, Burma, and Tibet. The Institute organizes conferences, seminars, film screenings, lecture series and brown bag talks that bring together faculty and students with diverse interests and backgrounds. SAI partners with departments, centers, and institutes at Columbia, and works with South Asia groups on campus and off, in order to reach new audiences and facilitate an exchange of knowledge. The Institute's outreach activities provide a broad range of resources for K-12 teachers interested in South Asia.
SAI administers a Master of Arts Program in South Asia Studies that draws upon affiliated Institute faculty who teach courses on South Asia in fourteen departments and six schools. Undergraduate and graduate students may study South Asia in a variety of degree programs across the university, and have access to the one of the oldest and largest South Asia collections in the country through the Columbia Libraries.
The South Asia Institute is located on the second floor of Knox Hall, Room 214, located at 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue.
Monday, February 6 - Lecture
A talk by Achyut Chetan
"Missing Mothers of the Indian Constitution and the Gender Politics of its Framing"
Achyut Chetan is a Visiting Fulbright Fellow at the South Asia Institute during the 2011-12 Academic Year. He is a Lecturer in English at Sido Kanhu Murmu University, in Dumka, Jharkhand, and is a doctoral candidate at Visva Bharati University. His current research focuses on gender politics of the Constituent Assembly of India.
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue
Wednesday, February 8 - Lecture
A talk by Blake Wentworth (Yale)
"Erotics of power: Tamil cosmopolitanism"
Co-sponsored by the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue
Thursday, February 23 - Books and Authors
A talk by Monica Ringer
Title to be announced
Co-sponsored with the Middle East Institute
Monica Ringer is Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College. She is a former executive director for the International Society of Iranian Studies and currently serves as co-editor of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is author of Education, Religion and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran (2001) and Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (2011), which explores religious reform and "modernization" in the Zoroastrian community in Iran and India in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Time: 12:30pm - 2:00pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue
Wednesday, March 21 - Lecture
A talk by Prathama Banerjee (Centre for Studies in Developing Societies)
Title to be announced
Introduction by Anupama Rao (Associate Professor, History Department, Barnard College)
Prathama Banerjee is Associate Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies in Calcutta. She studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University and earned her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and was a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences from 2000-03. Banerjee's current projects include an examination of 20th century Bengal through an intellectual history and the history of practices that produced the political as distinct domain, act and subjectivity, and a collaborative project on rethinking disciplinary formations and knowledge politics in post-1947 India. Banerjee is the author of The Politics of Time: 'Primitives' and history-writing in a colonial society (2006).
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue
Thursday, March 29 - Lecture
A talk by William Radice
"Coming out like a tremendous comet:
Can Michael Madhusudan Dutt do so again today?"
Introduction by Rachel McDermott, Associate Professor, Religion Department and Chair, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures (Barnard)
Well known for his translations of Rabindranath Tagore, William Radice has also worked for many years on the epic poetry of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873). His lecture will be based on The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad, his new translation of Madhusudan's masterpiece, Meghnadbadh kabya.
Radice has pursued a double career as a poet and as a scholar and translator of Bengali, and has written or edited more than thirty books. He earned a D.Phil in Bengali Literature at Oxford and in 1988 became a lecturer in Bengali language and literature at SOAS, University of London. From 1999 to 2002 he was Head of the Departments of South and South East Asia at SOAS. His prizes and honors include the Ananda Puraskar (1986), an honorary D.Litt from Assam University (2007), an Honorary Fellowship at the Bangla Academy in Dhaka (2007) and the title 'Rabindra Tattwacharya' from the Tagore Research Institute in Kolkata (2009). His latest books include a fully introduced and annotated translation of Michael Madhusudan Dutt's Meghnadbadh kabya (2010), a two translations of works by Rabindranath Tagore, The Jewel That Is Best: Collected Brief Poems (2011), and Gitanjali (2011).
Time: To be announced
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue
Monday, April 2 - Books and Authors
A talk by Deborah Baker
Ten Years On: Re-Imagining the Divide Between Islam and the West
Deborah Baker attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University. Her first biography, written in college, was Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly (1982). After working a number of years as a book editor and publisher, in 1990, Baker wrote In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994, and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (2008). In 2008-2009 Baker was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library, during which time she wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, which was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award.
The Convert narrates the life of a young woman, raised in a postwar New York City suburb, who converted to Islam, abandoned her name, her Jewish faith, and embraced a life of exile in Pakistan. It tells the story of Margaret Marcus of Larchmont, who became Maryam Jameelah of Lahore, and her relationship with her adoptive father and mentor, Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, the political leader and cleric who founded Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941.
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue
Monday, April 9 - Lecture
A talk by Elizabeth Kolsky (Villanova University)
"Ajab Khan Afridi and Miss Molly Ellis:
A Tale of Colonial Kidnapping on India's Northwest Frontier."
Elizabeth Kolsky is Associate Professor of History in the Department of History in Villanova University. She earned both her BA (MESAAS) and PhD (History) from Columbia University. Her areas of interest and teaching include South Asian history, history of the British Empire, modern world history, colonial and post-colonial studies and feminist theory. Kolsky co-edited Fringes of Empire: People, Power and Places in Colonial India (2009) and recently published her monograph on Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (2010).
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue
Saturday, April 21 - Hindi-Urdu Workshop
Organized by Professors Allison Busch and Frances Pritchett
The workshop is co-sponsored by the South Asia Institute and the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. It is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required. A link to the workshop website, with additional information and registration procedures, will be posted in the near future.
Time: 10am - 3:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue
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