The South Asia Program uses the funds awarded by the U.S. Department of Education to support a variety of research and outreach activities related to South Asia. In particular, it supports graduate students wishing to work on and in South Asia, supports active collaboration between researchers on South Asia in the Central New York area, and disseminates information on South Asia to the schools and local community at a time when intercultural understanding needs fresh impetus. Educators in the area receive inputs from the program—often as direct participation by our staff and faculty in outreach activities for children in the schools. The program also supports research and outreach through academic seminars and conferences that are open to the academic and lay community. Pedagogical materials for the teaching of South Asian languages—Sinhala in particular—are being developed by the program, for use in several other institutions besides Cornell.

My own research background and my origins in South Asia prompted me to accept the directorship of Cornell’s South Asia Program in 2002. Since then I have successfully attempted to retain the program’s designation as a National Resource Center (NRC) on South Asia as well as to increase its visibility and usefulness in the larger Ithaca and New York state community, among scholars of South Asia and in the countries that comprise South Asia, namely India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Our NRC status is accorded to a consortium consisting of the South Asia Program at Cornell and the South Asia Center at Syracuse University. This consortium has also allowed us to expand our offerings to the benefit of both universities. For example, besides organizing a joint conference every year, we also now offer long-distance language teaching of Bengali and Tamil to students on the two campuses.
Finally, we have set up the Northeastern South Asianists’ Association (NESSA), which allows college and university researchers in a much larger geographical area to interact with one another, to explore possibilities for collaborative research, and to feel less isolated on their individual campuses.
On a personal note, running the South Asia Program enriches my research in the Department of Development Sociology, because it gives me a vibrant satellite interdisciplinary environment off of which I can bounce my ideas.

The once-a-semester meetings of NESSA have been very well attended and received. We have now established a listserv and web links for the group. The South Asia Program seminar series, one of a few truly interdisciplinary intellectual communities on the Cornell campus, regularly draws enthusiastic participants including undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members, and community members. Highlights of the past half year include lectures by distinguished senior scholars, policy makers, and diplomatic representatives from the South Asian countries. In the last year, we also organized and co-sponsored important events in the various performing arts and media, including several dance concerts and musical events, which were attended by the Cornell community and by the larger Ithaca community. In addition, we sponsored performances and talks in local schools and were amazed at the enthusiastic reception.

While it is difficult to quantify the impact of these activities, there is no doubt that these extension and outreach efforts have generated not only much interest in the larger community, but have helped dispel many common popular misconceptions about the South Asian region—misconceptions that are frequently alarmist and lead to unfounded fears and prejudices derived from a lack of interaction rather than any larger negative motives. This promotion of international and intercultural goodwill has been a major reward of the activities we have undertaken.

Expand research base on South Asia and disseminate knowledge of South Asia in the larger community

US Department of Education