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Graduating Students Recognized for Research on South Asia

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Four graduating students from the class of 2013 received awards for research on South Asia. The inaugural South Asian Studies Senior Essay Prize was awarded to Deirdre Dlugoleski, ES ’13, a History Major advised by Valerie Hansen; an honorable mention was given to Luke Connell, SM ‘13. Two PhD graduates, Radhika Govindrajan and Melanie Morton, were awarded the Theron Rockwell Field Prize and the George Trimus Prize respectively.

Deirdre Dlugoleski’s senior essay, entitled “Al-Biruni’s Eleventh Century Anthropology on India: The Moral and Legal Implications of Objectivity”, was awarded the South Asian Studies Senior Essay Prize. Her essay was recognized as a “remarkable piece of work that draws on primary sources in Arabic and Persian to explore the writings of this 11th century Persian writer and political advisor, who translated Sanskrit texts in Persian and produced several influential works of his own, notably “On India”. In her essay Dlugoleski argues that Al-Biruni was an unusual voice who advocated religious tolerance at a historical moment when religious warfare was the norm. She shows how his sympathetic portrait of “the Hindus” may have positively influenced political developments. She also shows how readings of Al-Biruni’s work have continued to play an important role in the political positioning of Muslim South Asia, particularly in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Finally, she looks carefully at the formal structures of Islamic legal argumentation to suggest that Al-Biruni was making a juridical argument to legitimize the categorization of Hindus as a “People of the Book”. With a remarkable scope that moves from primary source material in 11th century languages to an analysis of the role that historical scholarship plays in religious politics across a wide swathe of South Asia today, this essay is a substantive original contribution worthy of the highest recognition.

The South Asian Studies Council also accorded an honorable mention to Luke Connell of Silliman College, a Political Science and Religious Studies major advised by Phyllis Granoff. His essay, titled “Memory in Indian Narrative: A Collection of Essays”, is a lucid set of reflections of the role that memory and forgetting plays in religious writings of the Buddhist and Jain traditions. The work is analytically compelling and stylistically sophisticated, and engages deeply with primary sources.

Radhika Govindrajan, GRD ’13 in the Department of Anthropology, was awarded the prestigious Theron Rockwell Field Prize for her dissertation Beastly Intimacies: Human-Animal Relations in India’s Central Himalayas. The Theron Rockwell Field Prize was established in 1957 by Emilia R. Field in memory of her husband, Theron Rockwell Field, Ph.B. 1889. It is awarded by the Office of the Secretary of Yale University for poetic, literary, or religious works by any students enrolled in the University for a degree. Radhika’s dissertation traces the complex processes through which humans and animals, as agentive beings, shape and reshape each other into who they are and who they become. In the mountainous forest-edge villages in India’s Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, where Radhika conducted extended fieldwork, a range of animals occupy a diversity of positions in the economic, cultural and social worlds of people. In an economic landscape of agropastoralism, goats and cows are important as sources of food and capital. But they also play significant spiritual and emotional roles, acting as sacred matter in ritual sacrifices, as vessels for the divine, and, most of all, as companions with distinct personalities with whom villagers share complex, affective relationships. Living in forest-­edge villages also brings rural families into contact and often conflict with ‘wild’ animals like monkeys, wild boar and leopards, whose wildness was exposed to quizzical reflection by how much time they spent romping through fields, farms, and even households.

Melanie Morton, GRD ’13, received the Department of Economics’ George Trimus Prize for her dissertation titled Temporary Migration and Endogenous Risk Sharing in Village India. At the Graduate School Convocation on May 19, 2013, it was noted that Melanie’s dissertation “builds and estimates a model that incorporates the effects of migration on risk-sharing and the effects of risk-sharing on migration. She shows empirically, based on the model, by how much risk-sharing reduces migration and by how much migration decreases risk-sharing. These results, which take into account endogenous risk-sharing, are shown to have important implications for evaluating the welfare gains from migration and for the efficacy of formal risk-reducing programs such as guaranteed wage schemes.”