While the Kings College initiative in creating an India Centre, and Professor Khilnani's return to the U.K. are to be welcomed, the situation that he described in his interview for The Hindu was, happily, far from accurate (“U.K. universities lack focus on modern India,” Op-Ed, Feb. 17).
While the word ‘modern' may refer to the last 500 years in South Asian studies, it is simply untrue to say that we in the U.K. and Europe neglect ‘contemporary', post-1947 India in favour of ancient Indology, colonial history or what The Hindu calls “post-colonial ‘stuff'”. To find this out for himself, we invite Prof. Khilnani to join the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS), which numbers around 200 members, >http://www.basas.org.uk/. Celebrating its quarter century this year, BASAS's annual conference this year is devoted to research on Forms of Power. Throughout its life BASAS has been deeply engaged with policy debates.
The British Academy's South Asia Panel was also formed for this purpose, and provides support for networks on contemporary South Asia, and for conferences and workshops. Last autumn the BA mounted a flagship conference on China and India's economy and society. The next BA South Asia conference will be of non-economists meeting to argue over the persistence of poverty.
Kings will be joining a strong group of universities with post-graduate courses in contemporary South Asian studies: School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Edinburgh have entire masters; many more have South Asia options — for example Bristol's politics and Cambridge's geography, while in 2008 Oxford created the first multidisciplinary masters in Contemporary India in the world — and it's going strong!
European universities are also buzzing with activity. Contemporary South Asia used to be the preserve of the SAS-net sociologists in Lund, the Asian centres in Leiden and Amsterdam and the renowned South Asia Institute at Heidelberg. But in the last few years new specialist centres have come to life — Warsaw University's India programme reaches out to Eastern Europe with backing from Brussels, the Copenhagen Business School has an India Centre, Gottingen has a centre for Modern Indian Studies, Turin University has an India Summer School — to name but a few. All of these are multidisciplinary projects creating synergy by developing knowledge in new ways relevant for the 21st century.
And while Prof Khilnani calls for Indian government and private sector support — we could all do with it — the U.K.-India Education and Research Initiative already unites the two governments in support for joint research projects.
It has been a ‘resounding success': >http://www.ukieri.org/.
We are glad that Prof. Khilnani is joining us but despite the crisis of British Universities, Contemporary India is a fertile and blooming oasis and not the desert he describes.
Professor Barbara Harriss-White,
Director,
Oxford University's Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme
