Hello everyone and welcome back!

We hope you have all had restful and productive summers and are as excited about the new academic year as we are! We have a lot of interesting talks, discussions, performances, and special events planned for this year that we’re sure you will enjoy. Please join us for as many as possible and visit our website for regular updates. To sign up and receive regular notification of events please write to: south.asia@yale.edu. The Council can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.

The South Asian Studies Weekly Colloquium will continue to meet Wednesdays at 4:30 PM in Luce Hall. A number of interesting speakers from India, Europe, and USA will grace the series with presentations on their newest research. The colloquium series will be inaugurated on September 12, 2012, by Prof. Anand Yang, historian from University of Washington, Seattle, speaking about Indian convicts who built Singapore in the nineteenth century. Other visitors will speak on topics in anthropology, economics, religion, cinema, food, and health. Our graduate student-run South Asia Brown Bag series is also continuing, with meetings scheduled on Thursdays over lunch. Many of our students and postdocs will be speaking in the series, so stop by when you can to hear them and join them for lunch. For more information on these colloquia, and other events and resources, please go to our website: www.yale.edu/macmillan/southasia

In collaboration with the East Asian Studies Council we are also planning a few events that will bring us together with scholars at Yale who study other parts of Asia, and we will also have a joint lunch meeting with the other Asia Councils later this term. Our cultural performances and musical season is off to a flying start with Rekha Surya’s Sufi music concert and a performance by flutist Shashank in September and October, respectively. We bring these concerts to campus in collaboration with the Yale Raga Society. Later in the term we will also have a lecture-demonstration on aspects of Bharatanatyam, the classical dance tradition from south India. This, featuring Visiting Fellow in South Asian Studies, Rasika Khanna, will be part of the graduate-student run series of events.

In what have become much-anticipated annual features, we will continue to mount the Modern South Asia Workshop, the Language and Literatures Workshop, and the Yale Hindi Debate, all in April 2013. Preparations for these events have already begun in committees of faculty, students, and postdocs. Our annual international conference for this year, to be held as usual on the last weekend of April 2013, will be on: Inequality, Mobility, and Sociality in Contemporary India.

This year we will also be supporting other faculty-led conferences, including one held in Religious Studies called �The Matter of God�, another on �Goa: A Postcolonial Society between Cultures�, in Literature, and a third on Himalayan Connections: Disciplines, Geographies, Trajectories�, as part of the growing activities of the Yale Himalaya Initiative. This initiative will also feature its own speaker series throughout the year, for details you may visit: http://himalaya.yale.edu/. In addition you can look forward to events led by the various South Asia focused student organizations at Yale College and several of Yale�s professional schools. If you have events that you are planning with South Asia content, allow us to advertise it for you through our events calendar and weekly briefing.

Do join me in welcoming our several visiting faculty, postdocs, and students for the year, including Professor Tanika Sarkar of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, who will be with us in Spring 2013 as the inaugural Dhawan Visiting Professor of South Asian History, Ashok Acharya, from Delhi University, who is the Rice Visiting Lecturer in Global Justice and South Asian Studies, and Shailaja Paik, who will join us as the Malathy Singh Visiting Lecturer in South Asian Studies for the year. Visiting students will be joining us from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, University of Chicago, and the Institute for Development Studies, Geneva.

And let me also draw the attention of all students to a fine slate of language and non-language courses offered through South Asian Studies this year. You can find them on our web site and on the online catalog, and do come and talk to the DUS South Asian Studies Dr. Sara Shneiderman, or the Director of South Asian Language Programs, Dr. Harry Blair, in the offices of the Council if you want to learn more about this exciting and important field of study.

Have a great start to the fall semester!