Welcome Back from Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Chair, South Asian Studies Council

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 tradition of weekly South Asian Studies Colloquia continues on Wednesdays at 4:30 pm in Luce Hall, for the most part. In addition we have a number of special talks by noted writers like Amit Chaudhuri, Gurcharan Das, and the famous film scholar, Ravi Vasudevan from SARAI, India. The colloquium is inaugurated on September 15, 2010 by our new colleague, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Sara Shneiderman, with a discussion titled, �The �Lingering Effects� of Affirmative Action in Nepal and India: Cultural Practice, State Policy and Social Science.” Later, on October 20, the colloquium features Dr. Ratna Kapur, visiting Professor of Law and Coca Cola World Fund Faculty Fellow. She will be talking about �The Citizen and the Migrant Subject: Postcolonial Anxieties, Law, and the politics of Exclusion/Inclusion.” Several of our colleagues are gracing the colloquium in November and December, including Associate Professor of Anthropology, Barney Bate, speaking about �Bharati and the Tamil Modern�; Karuna Mantena, Assistant Professor of Political Science talking about �Gandhi�s critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjunctures�; and Shital Pravinchandra, Assistant Professor of English, who will bring the Fall Colloquium to a close with a talk titled, �Not Just �Prose�: the South Asian Short Story and Postcolonial Studies.� For more information on these colloquia, and other events and resources, please visit the events page.

An exhibition of photographs taken in India by the noted photographer Fred Roberts has just opened in the Whitney Humanities Center, and this will be on till mid-October 2010. Please do find time to view it. We have arranged talks, films, and other performances in conjunction with this exhibit, all to be held in the Humanities Center during September and October, and a full listing of these events can be found on our and their web sites.

We have started planning for the third annual Modern South Asia Workshop which will be held on the 9-10 of April 2011. The workshop will feature the ongoing work of students and scholars concerning topics of current interest in modern South Asian Studies. In partnership with Janaagraha, Bengaluru, we are planning a series of events on urban India, and the first of these is our annual international conference, which will be titled �Urban India: Historical Processes and Contemporary Experience�. It will include inaugural and plenary sessions and panels on topics like urban utopias, livelihoods and informality, cities and public culture, urban infrastructure and land, desire and belonging in Indian cities, citizenship and urban governance, with papers by distinguished visitors from India and major research centers in the USA and Europe.

Among several musical events of special note is an exciting concert by internationally renowned a cappella group, Penn Masala, on October 1st at 7:30 in SSS 114. Cosponsored by the Association for India�s Development, South Asian Studies Council, the Asian American Cultural Center, and Asian American Student Alliance, this promises to be a night filled with wonderful English, Hindi, and fusion songs! Keep your eyes out for more information coming soon! All proceeds will fund AID projects in Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. There is much more happening across the campus that is inspired by an interest in South Asia across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and contemporary affairs. Many of these events and fora are supported by the South Asian Studies Council in collaboration with other departments and programs or student organizations.

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. Harry Blair, or the Director of South Asian Language Programs, Dr. Blake Wentworth, in their offices in the Council if you want to learn more about this exciting and important field of study.

Have a great start to the fall semester!