Seventy Years of Asian Studies: Highlights from Hawaii

From March 31-April 3 2011 the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) celebrated its 70th anniversary in a unique joint conference with the International Convention of Asia Scholars in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Founded in 1941, the Association of Asian Studies is the largest scholarly body of its kind, bringing together approximately 7000 researchers worldwide involved in the study of Asia.  Recognizing excellence in the field of Asian Studies, this year’s conference conferred awards on both emerging and established scholars, including several from the field of South Asian Studies.  Juned Shaikh, PhD candidate in History at the University of Washington and a Postdoctoral Fellow with the South Asian Studies Council at Yale for the 2011-2012 year, was awarded the Best Graduate Student Paper Award for his paper titled “Kamyunista Jahirnama (The Communist Manifesto): Mavali, Dalit and the Making of Mumbai’s Working Class”.   Professor Sumit Sarkar, Professor Emeritus, Delhi University, received the AAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies in recognition of his scholarship on the history of modern India, including The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903-1908, (New Delhi, 1973); ‘Popular’ Movements and ‘Middle Class’ Leadership in Late Colonial India: Perspectives and Problems of a “History from Below” (Calcutta, 1983); Modern India: 1885-1947(New York, 1989); and Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism and History, (Bloomington, 2002).

As President of the AAS, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Professor of Anthropology and Forestry and Environmental Studies and Chair of the South Asian Studies Council at Yale, welcomed participants and delivered the Presidential Address “Environment, Law and Democracy in India”, based on his ongoing research regarding the legal construction of the environment in India.   Taking on the timely question of the meanings and processes of democracy and democratization, Professor Sivaramakrishnan also convened and chaired the President’s Roundtable on “Democracy and Pluralism in Asia”.  The 70th anniversary of the Association was marked by a retrospective roundtable “Looking Back and Looking Forward: AAS and Asian Studies, 1960-2010”, which considered how the Association has engaged with and shaped issues in the field of Asian Studies.

This year’s conference included over 700 panels, roundtables and workshops, with more than 60 panels on the South Asian region alone.  It also featured musical performances and the film exhibition “Seeing Asia Eye to Eye”, a rich collection of over twenty documentary films from across Asia.  The distinctive pasts and futures of the Asian region and the diversity of scholarship within Asian Studies were represented in keynote addresses by noted historian, Ramachandra Guha, in a talk titled “Arguments with Gandhi” and by Shinichi Kitaoka, Professor of Modern Japanese Politics and Diplomacy at the University of Tokyo, who spoke about “A New Asian Order and the Role of Japan”.