We are delighted to announce the launch of the South Asian Humanities Initiative (SAHI), a forward-looking venture whose objective is to promote new directions in the humanistic study of premodern South Asia.
SAHI’s aims are both local and cross-institutional. Here at Yale, our objective is to foster conversations and collaborations among Yale humanities faculty who study premodern South Asian pasts and their colleagues. We also seek to promote solidarity and build relationships with other programs around the world where research in the South Asian humanities is being undertaken.
As an incubator for new ideas and fresh approaches, SAHI is convening a series of events at Yale:
- Workshops that bring scholars of the South Asian humanities together to discuss emerging topics of interest, to explore new potentials for specialized research on South Asian pasts, and to stimulate conversations with other fields and disciplines
- An invited speaker series, spotlighting new work on premodern South Asia that speaks to wider audiences as well
- Book launches to celebrate new scholarship
Dilip Menon once described the attempt to “think through categories of experience, ethics and politics from indigenous concepts” in South Asian history as an “enterprise abandoned even before it was begun.” At Yale, we would like to begin that task again, keeping in mind Menon’s warning that Indian languages and Sanskrit, or Arabic and Persian, are often invariably seen only as objects of learning, and “not as repositories of concepts and a social imagination” (our emphasis). Which is to say, we seek to consider the salience of a South Asian Humanities for its conceptual and experiential affordances.