From JNU to Yale: Fox and Fulbright-Nehru Fellows Share Experiences of Exchange

This year, three PhD students from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi are in residence at Yale under two significant exchange programs, Yale’s Fox Fellowship and the Fulbright-Nehru  Doctoral and Professional Research Fellowship program.  Manju Menon, Shrimoyee Ghosh, and Charu Singh recently took time to share their experiences of exchange with the South Asian Studies Council.

Manju Menon is in the final year of a PhD program at the Center for Studies in Science Policy at JNU.  At Yale as a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral and Professional Research Fellow, her research examines the mobilization of public discourse on hydropower in Northeast India through a project titled, “Making Environmental (Non) Knowledges: Public Hearings and Hydro-electric projects in Northeast India”.  This research builds on and critically reviews her previous work with the environment and development research team at Kalpavriksh, an NGO focused on research and advocacy for conservation, environmental governance and environmental education.  Vast library holdings and a vibrant intellectual life are aspects of Manju’s Yale experience that she observes have allowed her to develop her research in new directions.  While completing chapters for her dissertation, Manju has participated in Yale graduate seminars on South Asia, including K. Sivaramakrishnan’s Research Seminar in the Anthropology of South Asia and Mark Turin’s Himalayan Languages and Cultures.  She has also participated regularly in the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, most recently acting as a discussant for a paper presented by Professor Sara Shneiderman.

Shrimoyee Ghosh, a Fox Fellow at the MacMillan Center, came to her PhD at the Center for the Study of Law and Governance at JNU having already distinguished herself as a practicing lawyer specializing in family law, domestic violence, and human rights in Bombay and Delhi.   Like Manju, Shrimoyee initially envisaged that her dissertation would draw directly on this professional experience, but ultimately found it untenable to approach ethnographically the legal cases for which she had once acted as a legal representative in court.  Her dilemma, she explains, centered on how to “do the law and think about the law” simultaneously.  In her dissertation project, Shrimoyee overcomes this dilemma by focusing on an object, stamp paper, as it circulates through and intertwines law and social life.  During her time at Yale, Shrimoyee observes that she has a rare opportunity to focus solely on her research.  She spent her first semester at Yale taking courses on Ethnographic Writing and Representation and Economic Anthropology, both of which she notes helped to formulate her ideas.  Now in the second semester of her program, she has immersed herself in research and recently gave a talk, “Paper, Truth, Money: The Telgi Stamp Paper Scandal and the Life of Law in India”, in the Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium.

For Charu Singh, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU, the Fox Fellowship at Yale has facilitated the growth of her work on the historical configurations of the Indian monsoon.  Building on research conducted during her MPhil, she notes that her interaction with historians of science and anthropologists has helped to push her work in new directions.  After presenting some of her research at the Environmental History Workshop in Yale’s Department of History in the Fall where she has also served as a commentator, Charu has recently begun new research on indigenous discourses of weather in the spring semester, which she presented at the SASC’s Graduate Students’ Brown Bag.  Charu observes that one of the values of the Fox Fellowship is that it has allowed her to interact with other students and scholars who engage with similar concerns in different regions of the world.  The study of South Asia, she notes, is very different from within South Asia, and from outside, South Asia.  Within India, it provides a structuring, national, frame for higher education and research while, she has found during her time at Yale, it is one region among others in the world that is a subject of study.  Charu remarks that the ability to move within Yale’s own campus, and across campuses in the US through participation in graduate student conferences and workshops at Columbia, NYU and the University of Chicago, creates unique opportunities to enrich and expand the intellectual possibilities of her project.