Year in Review 2015 - 2016

HARVARD

UNIVERSITY

SOUTH ASIA INSTITUTE Y E A R I N R E V I E W 2 015-2016

COVER PHOTO CREDIT danishkhan Karachi, Pakistan

TABLE OF CONTENTS DIRECTOR’S LETTER

3

ABOUT SAI

4

HIGHLIGHTS

8

COURSE SPOTLIGHT

10

FACULTY

12

STUDENTS

44

IN REGION

54

COMMUNITY

56

PUBLICATIONS

58

IN THE NEWS

60

BUDGET

62

MISSION The Harvard University South Asia Institute (SAI) serves as a platform for faculty, students, and regional partners to work together to advance interdisciplinary research and scholarship on South Asia.

The SAI team, from left: Nora Maginn, Meena Hewett, Tarun Khanna, Meghan Smith, Diana Nguyen

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South Asia Institute

DIRECTOR’S LETTER Dear Friends, This has been a year of firsts for the Harvard South Asia Institute. Since its establishment as an Institute by the University in 2013, SAI’s programs have continued to grow in scale and impact, across Harvard and South Asia, in addition to receiving attention from educational institutions across the United States and Europe.

SAI continues to strengthen partnerships with the other regional studies centers at Harvard. In conjunction with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, we launched a university-wide series of research workshops on ‘Meritocracy’ in China and India. The workshops drew on humanists, social scientists, lawyers, and engineers, among others, to discuss the manner in which the two countries nurtured and allocated talent, and the extent to which these systems were residues from decades, even centuries, past.

It’s hard to think of something more central to a University like Harvard than the idea of meritocracy.

In 2015, SAI’s Arts Initiative was launched to align with Harvard President Drew Faust’s commitment to strengthen the foundational role of the humanities on campus.

The Initiative is supported by a newly formed Arts Advisory Council whose members (from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom) are committed to spreading global awareness of South Asian art. During the recent Fall and Spring semesters, emerging artists from India, Nepal, and Pakistan visited SAI for two weeks each to showcase their work, engage with faculty and students, attend classes relevant to their areas of interest, and visit Harvard and Boston area museums and libraries. This small but promising beginning has already opened up many avenues for scholarship.

As with the Meritocracy project, SAI’s raison d’être continues to center on being a catalyst and connector. A long-standing project on the Partition of British India is now, for example, evolving into a major scholarly initiative. The Partition Project will connect scholars from, and of, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Like our Kumbh Mela project from some years back, it will bring together doctors, human rights academics, social scientists, and urban planners, among others, in a major scholarly effort that promises to shed much light on the forced migration underway in many distressed parts of the world, and on the challenges associated with urbanism amidst tumult.

Also in its first year, the multi-phased project, ‘Livelihood Creation in India through Social Entrepreneurship and Skill Development,’ funded by the Tata Trusts, brought together seven faculty from five schools across Harvard. The focus of the project is to leverage research at Harvard to further livelihood creation in a developing country. In the experimental phase, the Harvard team ran three year-long pilot projects centered on the handicrafts and handloom sectors, empowerment of women, and science and technology-based interventions for poverty alleviation. Given the initial impact of the program, including identifying exciting new sites for faculty research and Harvard student engagement, we now have a roadmap for expansion of this effort over several years. Hopefully, we will also kindle enthusiasm for this work in other countries in the region.

Another in this year of firsts was the establishment of the ‘Seed for Change’ program. With the generous support of two new members of the SAI Advisory Council, SAI will run a universitywide competition annually and award $50,000 to student ideas that best use creative solutions to address intractable problems in India. The program gives students the opportunity to apply classroom insight to community action, as a precursor to further scholarship and refinement. Over time, this program will build a cohort of alumni who inspire and mentor other students to think of South Asia as a source of ideas, and as a setting within which their creativity can be expressed. Thanks to generous support from an alumnus in Karachi, the program will also expand to include Pakistan in the coming year.

The idea of the ‘Seed for Change’ program fits in with the tenor of other university-wide competitions such as the President’s Challenge, Deans Cultural Challenge in Entrepreneurship, Radcliffe Institute’s Public Art Competition, and so on.

We have also advanced our nascent activities in the sciences.

We are prototyping an exciting program to connect the vast pool of young scientists in South Asia and Boston, initially in the life sciences, and eventually in a range of other scientific fields. This will build on our efforts over the past five years across a range of healthcare-related fields and on the intersection of engineering and medicine.

To support these and the many other programs currently underway, SAI has strengthened its administrative infrastructure.

We now have faculty representation on our Steering Committee from schools across Harvard, and additional office space granted to SAI in the Center for Government and International Studies.

We will add another senior Communications staff member to the Cambridge office to support the current team in sharing SAI’s impact within and beyond Harvard.

We are currently working with the University Committee on International Programs and Sites to establish a new office in Delhi to serve the University as a hub for scholarship. SAI will continue to increase its presence in Pakistan thanks to ongoing and important support from alumni and sponsors. A new representative based in Lahore will complement the current SAI presence in Karachi.

In the year ahead, SAI will continue to expand these and other offerings while adding new initiatives to strengthen Harvard’s regional relevance and leadership across South Asia, with plans underway in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

The following pages present the full catalogue of 2015-16 activities and suggest the critical role faculty, students, and regional partners play in guiding the institute to promote and catalyze research and teaching in and about South Asia.

I invite you to connect with us, revel in our dialogue and debate, and help actively shape our intellectual agenda.

Regards,

Tarun Khanna Director, Harvard South Asia Institute Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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A Year in Review 2015 - 2016

ABOUT SAI SAI’s administration of staff and students, based both in Cambridge and in South Asia, supports SAI’s mission and its day-to-day operations.

STAFF

Tarun Khanna

Meena Sonea Hewett

IN REGION STAFF/ CONSULTANTS

FINANCE TEAM SHARED WITH OTHER ASIA RELATED CENTERS

Namrata Arora

Sarah Gordon

Mariam Chughtai

Executive Director

Associate Director, Mumbai Office

Nora Maginn

Diana Nguyen

Usha Gawde

Pukar Malla

Senior Program Manager

Program Coordinator

Program Consultant, Arts Initiative

Program Consultant, Kathmandu

Director; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, HBS

Director, Pakistan Programs

Director of Finance and Administration

Kathryn Maldonis Senior Financial Associate

Karen Christopher Robyn Provost Financial Associate

Financial Associate

INTERFACULTY PROJECTS The 1947 Partition of British India

Zohal Atif EdM Candidate, HGSE

Swati Gupta EdM Candidate, HGSE

Meghan Smith Communications and Outreach Coordinator Harvard University Office 1730 Cambridge Street, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

Fuad H. Mallick SAI Partner, BRAC University, Bangladesh

Zahra Parekh Program Consultant, Karachi

STUDENT COORDINATORS

Zeeshaan Zafar Hashmi LLM Candidate, HLS

Muhammad Sarib Hussain Harvard College ‘15 Planning for Conservation: Looking at Agra

Apoorva Shenvi Master’s Candidate in Urban Planning, GSD

Mumbai Office Piramal Tower, 704, 7th floor, Peninsula Corporate Park, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai - 400013 India

Livelihood Creation in India

Delhi Location

Project Manager

Anisha Gopi

Nischay Education, 201, 2nd Floor, Mercantile House, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001

Pakistan Location The Aman Foundation, Plot # 333, Korangi Township Near Pakistan Refinery Ltd., Karachi Pakistan

Bangladesh Location BRAC Centre, 75 Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh

Kundan Madireddy Project Manager From left:

Soujanya Ganig EdM Candidate, HGSE

Shajia Sarfaz EdM Candidate, HGSE

Suman Barua EdM Candidate, HGSE

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South Asia Institute

Shashank Shah Project Director

VISITING SCHOLARS SAI offers opportunities for scholars and practitioners to come to Harvard to continue their research. The Aman and Babar Ali Fellowships, both half year appointments, support doctoral and advanced professional degree holders working on issues relevant to Pakistan. The Aman Fellowship has a special focus on supporting research related to Pakistan’s development. The South Asian Studies Fellowship, a yearlong appointment, supports recent PhDs in the humanities and social sciences whose research relates to any period of South Asian history or contemporary South Asia.

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS Laila Bushra Babar Ali Fellow, Fall 2015 Bushra’s research investigates the relationship between neoliberalism and the rise of religious fundamentalist movements by undertaking a comparative study of Pakistan and India. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and teaches at Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.

Sana Shahbaz Aman Fellow, Spring 2016 Shahbaz is an emergency medicine physician trained at Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi.

Her special interest is disaster management, and her current project evaluates the quality of disaster response after disaster management training. Shahbaz’s other interests are trauma, injury prevention, and resuscitation. Her long-term goals include improving the quality of emergency and disaster medicine training in Pakistan.

Chitra Venkataramani

SENIOR VISITING FELLOWS SAI’s Visiting Fellows Program supports midcareer, self-funded professionals to continue their research at Harvard.

Dilip Ratha World Bank Research Group on Migration and Remittances Unit and CEO, Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, World Bank Ratha focuses on how migration, remittances, and diaspora investments can be harnessed for the development of nations.

Dr. Paul Salins Medical Director & Vice President, Mazumdar Shaw Cancer Center and Narayana Hrudayalaya Multi Specialty Hospital Salins is interested in the intersection of art and medicine and the delivery of primary health care in India. He is a pioneer in orthomorphic surgery, the surgical art of facial sculpturing.

South Asian Studies Fellow, 2015-16 Venkataramani’s research focuses on the emergence of a visual economy organized around the production and circulation of cartographic images presented through urban planning and ecological governance in India. Before coming to Harvard, Venkataramani completed her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. She also ran an art studio in Mumbai, and has trained as an illustrator and graphic designer.

Javed Younas Aman Fellow, Fall 2015 While at Harvard, Younas focused his research on two areas: (1) The connection between education and political violence, and (2) the perspectives of countries that receive grants and loans from donor countries. He received his PhD in economics from West Virginia University in 2007. He has previously been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and held a faculty position at Central Michigan University. While at Harvard, he was on leave from his posting as an Associate Professor of Economics at the American University of Sharjah, UAE.

IN MEMORY OF SHAHAB AHMED

RESEARCH AFFILIATES Research Affiliates contribute to the academic study of South Asia on campus by bringing their expertise on a wide range of issues.

Fauzia E. Ahmed Assistant Professor, Sociology and Women’s Studies, Miami University of Ohio Ahmed investigates how intersections of gender and globalization impact governance and workers’ well-being in the garment industry throughout various South Asian countries.

Shahab Ahmed, Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard, passed away on September 17, 2015. Shahab was a brilliant scholar and greatly contributed to SAI. “I am indebted to Shahab Ahmed for being a mentor, a teacher, and a friend. He taught me how to strive for excellence and yet make time to enjoy the beautiful things in life. His words of wisdom will carry on through many students who admired him and his work greatly.”

-Mariam Chughtai, Director, SAI Pakistan Programs; EdD, HGSE “My friend Shahab Ahmed was the most brilliant and creative scholar of Islam in his generation... Ahmed showed, with 600 pages of textual and historical proofs too numerous and prominent to be denied, how Islam is and has always been much greater and more capacious than that. He demonstrated, in his work and in his life, that it’s within the power of today’s Muslims to make rich and cosmopolitan meaning within their tradition -- to embrace, not reject. His legacy should extend beyond the world of scholarship to the world of thought and belief and action and love.”

-Noah Feldman, HLS

Hasna Moudud Former Visiting Fellow, Ash Center, HKS Moudud’s forthcoming book, The Silk Road to South Asia: From Mongolia to India through Bangladesh, investigates the unknown history of the Silk Road’s passage through the subcontinent.

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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STEERING COMMITTEE SAI’s Steering Committee provides guidance and advisement to SAI, and represents schools from across the university.

FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

Ali Asani

Homi Bhabha

Tarun Khanna

Akshay Mangla

Nicholas Burns

Martha Chen

Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, FAS; Director, AISP

Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Department of English, FAS; Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University

Director, SAI; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, HBS

Assistant Professor of Business Administration, HBS

Sultan of Oman Professor of the Practice of International Relations, HKS; Director, Future of Diplomacy Project, HKS

Lecturer in Public Policy, HKS; Affiliated Professor, GSD; International Coordinator, WIEGO Network

Diana Eck

Venkatesh Murthy

Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society, FAS; Member of the Faculty of Divinity, HDS

Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, FAS

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

Asim Khwaja Rahul Mehrotra Professor of Urban Planning and Design, GSD

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

Parimal G. Patil

Fernando Reimers

Professor of Religion and Indian Philosophy, Committee on the Study of Religion, FAS; Chair, DSAS

Ford Foundation Professor of International Education; Director, International Education Policy Program, HGSE

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South Asia Institute

HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL

Sumitomo-Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development Professor of International Finance and Development, HKS

HARVARD LAW SCHOOL

Kristen Stilt Professor of Law, HLS; Director, Islamic Legal Studies Program, HLS

ADVISORY COUNCIL The SAI Advisory Council, a team of distinguished volunteer leaders, provides strategic counsel and financial support to SAI.

HARVARD T.H. CHAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

Syed Babar Ali, AMP ’73 KP Balaraj, MBA ’97 Sumir Chadha, MBA ’97 Kuntala and Purandar Das Jo Forman and Mark Fuller, AB ’75, MBA ’78, JD ’79 Meera Gandhi Vikram Gandhi, MBA ’89, ExEd ’00 Mala Haarmann, AB ’91, MBA ’96

Jacqueline Bhabha Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, HSPH; Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Lecturer in Law, HLS; Adjunct Lecturer, HKS; Director of Research, FXB Center

Anuradha and Anand Mahindra, AB ’77, MBA ’81 David Bloom

Karen, AB ’82, and Sanjeev Mehra, AB ’82, MBA ’86

Chair, Department of Global Health and Population; Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography, HSPH

Victor Menezes Arif Naqvi Chandrika and Dalip Pathak Chandni and Mukesh Prasad, AB ’93 Sribala Subramanian and Arvind Raghunathan Rajiv and Anupa Sahney Parul and Gaurav Swarup, MBA ’80 Arshad Zakaria, AB ’85, MBA ’87

ARTS ADVISORY COUNCIL Representing Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the distinguished members of the Arts Advisory Council provide financial support and advisement for SAI’s Arts Program.

Sue Goldie

Jennifer Leaning

Roger Irving Lee Professor of Public Health Department of Health Policy and Management, HSPH; Director, Global Health Education and Learning Incubator

François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, HSPH; Director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights

Aparajita and Gaurav Jain Chandrika Pathak Aparna and Sanjay Reddy Omar Saeed Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani Poonam Bhagat Shroff Osman Khalid Waheed

FRIENDS OF SAI Friends of SAI are individuals who invest in SAI’s interfaculty projects, leveraging the resources and expertise of Harvard faculty to support research that has direct impact in the region.

Syed Hashmi The Resource Group, c/o Nadeem Elahi

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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HIGHLIGHTS

Students and community members gathered for a candlelight vigil at Harvard after the devastating earthquake in Nepal in May 2015.

From left: Shri Akhilesh Yadav, Rahul Mehrotra, Satchit Balsari, Javed Usmani, and Jyoti Malhrotra at the Kumbh Mela book launch in Delhi in August.

Students in the Mobile Technology Summer Program visit Aspiring Minds, which provides online assessment tools for entry level job seekers and employers.

SUMMER 2015

FALL 2015

FACULTY

FACULTY

On August 17, SAI launched the book and exhibition titled Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity in Delhi with Shri Akhilesh Yadav, Honorable Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. (p. 26)

In partnership with the Aman Foundation, SAI hosted a workshop on Mental Health and Disaster Response in Karachi on December 16-18. (p. 22)

In August, the JanaSwasthya Project was launched at the Kumbh Mela in Nashik and Trimbakeshwar. The SAI team developed a unique interactive visual analytic tool that provides critical disease surveillance data to health officials in real time. (p. 19)

SAI’s project with the Tata Trusts on ‘Livelihood Creation in India through Social Entrepreneurship and Skill Development’ formally began with field visits and capacity-building workshops in India. (p. 20)

STUDENTS

STUDENTS SAI’s eight-week ‘Using Mobile Technology to Change Societies Summer Program’ gave Harvard undergraduates the opportunity to travel to India to examine the use of mobile technology to deliver services in the areas of education, health, agriculture, and banking. (p. 47) SAI awarded 27 grants to undergraduate and graduate for summer and research, internship, and language study throughout South Asia. During the summer, 35 students will travel to 6 countries in South Asia. (p. 48)

COMMUNITY SAI launched Harvard for Nepal, a university-wide initiative that united Harvard in response to the earthquake that devastated the country in April 2015 and raised funds for the Nepal Research and Reconstruction Fund. (p. 18)

Over 150 students enrolled in the course ‘Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Social and Economic Problems’ co-taught by SAI Director Tarun Khanna, HBS, and an interdisciplinary team of SAI affiliated faculty. (p. 12)

COMMUNITY SAI launched its Visiting Artist Program, which brought four up-andcoming South Asian artists to Harvard for a week to engage with faculty and students. (p. 16) SAI hosted three webinars on the theme of mobile technology which gave students at over 15 universities in South Asia the opportunity to engage directly with Harvard faculty. (p. 57) Over 200 people attended the book and exhibition launch of Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity at the Asia Society in New York City on November 6. (p. 26)

152,139 1,425 12,200 views have been accumulated on SAI’s YouTube page.

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South Asia Asia Institute Institute South

people attended SAI’s 95 events throughout the year.

people follow SAI on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Basir Mahmood, SAI’s Visiting Artist from Pakistan, speaks in Doris Sommer’s course on Cultural Agents, ‘Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding.’

Dhruv Kazi speaks at the Kumbh Mela event at the Asia Society in New York in November.

Tarun Khanna speaks with the finalists in the Seed For Change competition, which awards a grant prize to a student venture to impact India.

WINTER 2016

SPRING 2016

FACULTY

FACULTY

On January 18, SAI hosted the second launch in a series of five of Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity in Mumbai at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. Over 200 people attended the event, held in partnership with the Asia Society India Centre and the Harvard Club of Mumbai. (p. 26)

Co-curated by Rahul Mehrotra, GSD, ‘The State of Architecture’ exhibition was on display in Mumbai from January to March and presented the state of contemporary architecture in India within a larger historical overview since Independence. (p. 24)

STUDENTS The Harvard College US–India Initiative (HUII) hosted its annual conference in Mumbai, bringing together a wide range of speakers to discuss the future of India. (p. 51)

COMMUNITY SAI released its third annual publication, Technology and South Asia, a collection of essays by leading scholars and practitioners on technology within the context of its cultural, sociological, and political fields of application in South Asia. (p. 61) Meena Hewett, SAI, and Tarun Khanna, SAI and HBS, attended the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh in February, which brought together over 300 artists, curators, writers, and art professionals for exhibitions, lectures, film screenings, and panel discussions about art across South Asia. (p. 17)

In May, SAI’s fifth Annual Symposium addressed the theme ‘Who Speaks for Democracy in South Asia’ and featured discussions on the practice of democracy throughout South Asia. (p. 27)

STUDENTS SAI launched its Seed for Change competition, which awards grant prizes of up to $50,000 to a student venture designed to positively impact India. (p. 27) The annual student-organized Harvard India Conference brought together entrepreneurs, entertainment professionals, government officials, philanthropists, and other leaders at Harvard to engage in a conversation about India’s path to global leadership. (p. 53) The third annual Harvard Pakistan Forum, organized by the Harvard College Pakistan Student Association, focused on the theme ‘Pakistan in the World’ and provided a platform for discussing topics such as the efficacy of Pakistan’s foreign policy and current social issues impacting Pakistan. (p. 53)

COMMUNITY SAI cosponsored a panel discussion in March that brought together artists and academics to examine contemporary Asian megacities including Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Tokyo. The event was part of the “Megacities Asia” exhibition on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from April to June 2016. (p. 29)

7,752 55

people have viewed the digital versions of SAI’s annual publications.

students were funded by SAI for research and internship grants in South Asia during the summer and winter sessions.

4,256 people subscribe to SAI’s weekly email newsletter.

Year in Review 2015 - 2016 9 A Year in Review 2015 - 2016

COURSE SPOTLIGHT SW47: CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: ENTREPRENEURIAL SOLUTIONS TO INTRACTABLE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

Hamna Nazir, Harvard College ‘17

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South Asia Institute

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South Asia Institute

The course provided an interdisciplinary lens for students to think about economic and social problems

MODULE 1: INTRODUCTORY MODULE The introductory module explored several of the most salient challenges facing emerging market economies (including corruption, and political and economic institutional voids). It also discussed in detail solutions to these problems, including unique biometric ids, microfinance, etc.

MODULE 2: THINKING LIKE AN ENGINEER

Students worked in teams to design entrepreneurial solutions to address contemporary challenges

The second module guided students through the design process from the perspective of an engineer.

Professor Gajos engaged students in the methods of entrepreneurial needs assessment—how does an engineer, designer, or entrepreneur identify a need when individuals and communities might not even be aware of their problems? The module also reviewed methods for enhancing creativity and rapid prototyping, and the difference between creating a “product” vs. an “experience” for beneficiaries.

MODULE 3: THINKING LIKE A HUMANIST Led by Professor Sommer, the third module empowered students to think creatively about how arts and culture can be used to change cultural norms, promote social cohesion, and ultimately improve economic development. The module challenged the traditional conception of a “hierarchy of needs” – and discussed the role of pleasure and aesthetics, and how they relate to economic and social development.

ABOUT: For the fifth year, this unique and innovative course was open to all students across Harvard, including undergraduates and graduate students. The course provided an interdisciplinary framework (and multiple lenses) through which to think about the salient economic and social problems affecting five billion people, the majority, of the developing world. Case study discussions covered challenges and solutions in fields as diverse as health, education, technology, urban planning, arts, and the humanities. Students worked in teams to design entrepreneurial solutions to address such problems identified during the course.

FACULTY: Satchit Balsari, Chief, Weill Cornell Global Emergency Medicine Division; Faculty, Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights

Krzysztof Gajos, Associate Professor, SEAS Tarun Khanna, Director, SAI; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, HBS Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, GSD Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams,Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literature,

MODULE 4: THINKING LIKE A PLANNER Emerging economies, particularly those in South Asia, must cautiously balance economic development and simultaneously preserve the cultural heritage that makes each country, city, and community unique. This module, led by Professor Mehrotra, created a lens for thinking about responsible entrepreneurship from the perspective of an urban planner or architect. Key themes included: static vs. kinetic cities, cultural preservation in the context of urban development, and participatory urban planning. In order to identify several central issues in development and urbanism, students looked at case studies on low-income housing, and water and sanitation systems, as well as the development of the arts district in downtown Mumbai and the public-private partnership for the restoration of the Taj Mahal.

MODULE 5: APPLICATIONS TO DIFFERENT PROBLEMS AND

FAS; Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish, FAS

CONTEXTS

“Some of the most successful entrepreneurs studied the humanities.” – Doris Sommer, FAS

The final module, co-led by Professor Khanna and Dr. Balsari, applied the various lenses discussed throughout the course to unique contexts facing health and education challenges in developing countries.

“The problems we are tackling are incredibly complex. Simplistic solutions have not worked… I see a clear need to tackle these problems from many perspectives. Engineers have a very useful toolkit to bring to the table.” - Krzysztof Gajos, SEAS “Most people who take the course are interested in practical solutions that are informed by research to tackle problems faced by billions of people on our planet. It is a fun, exciting, rigorous way to get exposed to relevant issues from around the world.” – Tarun Khanna, SAI and HBS

Year in in Review Review 2015 2015 -- 2016 2016 Year

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FACULTY Over 150 faculty members at Harvard focus their research and teaching on South Asia.

SAI serves as a platform to connect these faculty members with students and regional partners. SAI’s interfaculty research projects include 18 initiatives, which bring faculty from various Harvard schools together to develop South Asian Studies at Harvard. SAI strengthens South Asia–related research in a variety of disciplines through workshops, symposia, webinars, and faculty-led seminars.

Jennifer Leaning, right, discusses the Partition Project with Muhammad Sarib Hussain

12 South Asia Institute

INTERFACULTY INITIATIVES THE 1947 PARTITION OF BRITISH INDIA: THE DEMOGRAPHIC AND HUMANITARIAN CONSEQUENCES The Partition of British India represents the largest recorded migration in human history. Despite abundant historical and political scholarship on Partition, and despite a growing literature of personal reflection and fiction, very little had been done, even after almost 70 years, to search the extensive archival records of British India and the three countries (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) that evolved from Partition to determine what actually happened to the millions who chose to or were forced to relocate within that very short period of time.

FACULTY DIRECTOR: Jennifer Leaning; FXB Center, HSPH CAMBRIDGE TEAM: Zohal Atif, EdM Candidate, HGSE Swati Gupta, EdM Candidate, HGSE Zeeshaan Zafar Hashmi, LLM Candidate, HLS Muhammad Sarib Hussain, Harvard College ‘15 INDIA TEAM: Mihir Bhatt, All India Disaster Mitigation Institute Uma Chakravarti, Project Director, Delhi India Researchers Mandvi Dogra, Haryana Rimple Mehta, Kolkata Jhuma Sen, Kolkata Navsharan Singh, Delhi Srikant Singh, Delhi Uma Chakravarti, second from right, conducting field research at the IndiaBangladesh border

PAKISTAN PARTNERS: Dr. Shahram Azhar, Habib University, Karachi Dr. Yaqoob Bangash, Information Technology University, Lahore Dr. Furrukh Khan, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore Sana Mahmood, Agha Khan University, Karachi The ambition of the Partition Project is to develop a rich and empirically grounded understanding of Partition using the extensive archival records of British India. The project aims to explore these questions: How many people chose to or were forced to move? Where did they depart from and where did they relocate? How many people died and where? How many people suffered and where? What efforts were made by government and civil society to mobilize relief and mitigate these severe consequences?

The project aims to focus not on the violence surrounding Partition, but on the relief efforts and rehabilitation of refugees by local organizations, in part to help prevent such future refugee crises.

The research team based in Cambridge has been working to develop a narrative of the project using resources at Harvard’s Widener Library. In the region, research teams based in Pakistan and India have been partnering with local universities to help widen the scope of the research through document retrieval.

NEXT STEPS Moving forward, the project hopes to expand its academic scope to other issues including business and the impact on cities in a divided country. Research will also offer a comparative perspective to other regions of the world affected by mass migrations.

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ARTS AT SAI This program connects South Asia’s artists with Harvard faculty and students to support research that advances the understanding of social, political, cultural, and economic issues of the world through art.

FACULTY DIRECTORS:

VISITING ARTIST PROGRAM

Jinah Kim, FAS Doris Sommer, FAS

Made possible by the Dean of the Division of Social Science’s Donald T. Regan Lecture Fund and the Arts Advisory Council, SAI’s Visiting Artist Program brings emerging artists from South Asia to Harvard’s campus to engage with Harvard students, faculty, and community members. The program allows the Harvard community to engage with artists of diverse backgrounds, whose work in various mediums address social, economic, and political issues in South Asia. During their time on campus, artists attend courses, meet with student groups, give a lecture, and display their work.

HARVARD RESOURCES Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Harvard Art Museums Harvard Extension School Museum Studies Program Loeb Classical Library Straus Center for Conservation Widener Library

FALL 2015

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Aparajita and Gaurav Jain, Delhi Chandrika Pathak, London Aparna and Sanjay Reddy, Hyderabad Omar Saeed, Lahore Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, Dhaka Poonam Bhagat Shroff, Mumbai Osman Khalid Waheed, Lahore

NEXT STEPS Moving forward, the Visiting Artist Program will expand the artists’ visits to two weeks, which will allow artists to revisit classes and allow more time for collaboration with students and faculty to further discussions and deepen interactions. Next year, artists from two different countries will visit concurrently, allowing artists from diverse contexts to engage with each other and with students and faculty. SAI also plans to launch a three-month residency program for artists to visit campus, which will further provide a more enriching experience for both the Harvard community and the artist.

Kandalgaonkar at the Harvard Art Museums

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, India

Basir Mahmood, Pakistan

Kandalgaonkar’s art practice, based in Mumbai, focuses primarily on unseen or ignored processes of urbanization. In his work, he draws upon contemporary visual arts media, archival documentation, and historical artifacts to document, represent, and critique urban flows.

Using video, film, and photography, Basir Mahmood’s work weaves together myriad threads of thoughts, findings, and insights into poetic sequences, building various forms of narratives.

In order to engage with situations around him, he ponders embedded social and historical terrains of the ordinary, as well as his personal milieu.

During his time on Harvard’s campus, Kandalgaonkar engaged with students in the following courses: “Class and the City in Indian Cinema,” taught by Shankar Ramaswami, FAS; “South Asia: Connected Histories, Interdisciplinary Frames,” taught by Catherine Warner, FAS; “Art of South and Southeast Asia,” led by Jinah Kim, FAS; and “Environmental History of South Asia,” led by Sunil Amrith, FAS. In Professor Amrith’s class, Kandalgaonkar spoke about how his work speculates what might have been if the original seven-island archipelago of Mumbai had never become the reclaimed land form it is today.

“The Harvard experience on campus was extremely gratifying and thrilling to say the least. I think some of the high points of my trip, besides meeting everyone and being immersed in the school activities, would be being shown around Harvard Art Museum by Stephanie Rozman, and seeing Widener Library with Richard Lesage.” - Kandalgaonkar

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Mahmood, right, meets with members of the Harvard Pakistan Student Group

During his time at Harvard, Mahmood visited the course on “Cultural Agents: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding,” taught by Doris Sommer, FAS; as well as “The Art of Noticing,” taught by Gordon Teskey, FAS; and “Video, Performance, Narrative, Text, Actions,” taught

by Jennifer Bornstein, FAS. He participated in an interactive workshop with students from the Harvard Pakistan Student Group.

Mahmood gave a public seminar about his work, “A Memory, a Monument, a Material,” which was chaired by Jennifer Leaning, HSPH. Mahmood offered insights about his works, showing how deeply personal they are.

“My time at Harvard was a combination of learning - both as an artist and as a young teacher who has been engaged in teaching since the beginning of my professional career as an artist in Pakistan. As these roles overlap with each other, my position as a teacher at times is not much different than my practice as an artist.” - Mahmood

SPECIAL EVENTS

VISITING ARTIST PROGRAM, CONT’D SPRING 2016

Tarun Khanna at the Dhaka Art Summit Rai, second from right, with Jinah Kim’s Himalayan Art class

Mohanty at his performance lecture

Paribartana Mohanty, India

Milan Rai, Nepal

Mohanty’s project “Act the Victim” is based on a simple invitation to “act” as victim, consciously positioning people in the discomforts of victimhood and open associations with crisis. “Act the Victim” is an apparatus, a play, which at any given moment responds to the immediate. The process makes visible the sets of heterogeneous forces/structures (institutions, police, philosophical propositions, art and culture, behavior, the social, political, and so on) that intersect uniquely and surface via an individual, a group, or a community.

Rai’s White Butterfly project is a demonstration of how the role of art can take different turns when shared across social media, connecting people and communities to effect social change and awareness. Those connections became an unexpected source of support and real change in rapid response to the earthquake disasters in Nepal in 2015, provoking funding projects for immediate relief to provide sanitation facilities, toilets rebuilding a school and relocating an entire village. During his time at Harvard, Rai gave a public talk about the project and spread his white butterflies around campus.

During his time on campus, Mohanty visited the courses “In and Out of Actions: An Introduction to Performance Art,” taught by Marie Glynn, FAS; “Change, Adversity, and Spiritual Resilience,” taught by Chris Berlin, HDS; and “Global Response to Disaster and Refugee Crises,” taught

by Stephanie Kayden, HMS, HSPH. Mohanty delivered a lecture-performance for community members titled “Great Eternal Return: A Social Media Film,” which looks at the plethora of anonymous and mysterious images circulating on the social media landscape in times of crisis.

He also attended several lectures on campus addressing crisis situations. He visited several of Harvard’s museums, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, as well as several in the Boston area.

“The cosmopolitan nature of Harvard was comforting.

I was amazed by the rare book collection, huge libraries, and the thought-provoking exhibitions which gave me lot of material, thoughts, and direction to think about my work. I wish I could have spent more time in those libraries. Interacting with members of the South Asian diaspora at my performancelecture was very interesting. I learned about identity, belonging, body, and politics.” - Mohanty

Rai visited the courses “Introduction to Social Movements,” taught by Jocelyn Viterna, FAS; “Himalayan Art,” taught by Jinah Kim, FAS; “Landmarks of World Architecture,” taught by Joseph Connors, FAS; “Social Change in the Digital Age,” taught by Jesse Littlewood, HKS; “Muslim Devotional Literatures in South Asia,” taught by Ali Asani, FAS; and “Art, Design, and Learning in Public Spaces,” taught by Steven Seidel, FAS. He also visited Harvard’s museums, and several in the Greater Boston area.

“Through my art installation of white butterflies, I invited people to write their personal wishes. It is humbling to see the white butterflies used as a vehicle to create such a profound opportunity for human connection and exchange. During my short stay at Harvard, I had the honor of meeting some amazing and accomplished personalities.

The valuable time spent at Harvard equipped me with a springboard, from which I will launch toward new directions with excitement and reflective awareness.” - Rai

February 5 – 8, 2016, Dhaka

DHAKA ART SUMMIT The event, held at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, functioned as a platform to bring together over 300 artists, curators, writers, and art professionals for exhibitions, lectures, film screenings, and panel discussions about art in South Asia. Meena Hewett, SAI, and Tarun Khanna, SAI and HBS, attended the event and spoke of how SAI’s mission to serve as a platform for faculty and professionals to discuss issues critical to South Asia was similar to the goal of the Summit. The event was put on by the Samdani Art Foundation, led by Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani, members of SAI’s Arts Advisory Council.

From left: Laura Weinstein, Martha Chen, Theodore C. Bestor, Hu Xiangcheng

March 24, 2016, Cambridge

MEGACITIES ASIA In collaboration with the upcoming “Megacities Asia” exhibition on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in April, this event brought together artists and academics to examine contemporary Asian megacities including Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Over the last 50 years, Asia has become home to more megacities than any other continent in the world. The sheer scale and rapid pace of urbanization is influencing artists tremendously, and they are using their creativity to comment on these changes. The faculty panelists discussed sustainability and how cities can combine contemporary practices with vernacular ones as megacities continue to grow.

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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HARVARD FOR NEPAL Harvard for Nepal is a university-wide initiative uniting Harvard in response to the earthquake that devastated Nepal in April 2015. Throughout the year, SAI raised funds for the Nepal Research and Reconstruction Fund to support long-term reconstruction projects in Nepal developed by Harvard faculty and students in partnership with local organizations. The SAI-supported projects are expected to be conducted over the next two years.

PARTNERS:

SPECIAL EVENTS

Harvard Alumni Group of Nepal Harvard Asia Center Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights Harvard Graduate School of Design Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Harvard Medical School Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies Students for Nepal

May 4, 2015, Cambridge

STUDENT PROJECTS: Funds raised by the Nepal Research and Reconstruction fund allowed three Harvard students to travel to Nepal during Winter Session 2016 to work with local organizations in the reconstruction efforts. Excerpts from the students’ grant reports are below:

NEPAL EARTHQUAKE RELIEF EFFORT DATA USAGE NARRATIVE Austin Wu, Harvard College ’16, and Patrick Xu, Harvard College ’16 “As statistics students, we are naturally drawn to data, numbers, and analysis. Following a devastating earthquake in Nepal in the spring of 2015, we came across an article which revealed the massive inefficiency of the Red Cross in Haiti and warned of similar wastefulness in Nepal.

This led us to begin thinking about how data can potentially be used to optimize the delivery of relief aid. However, once we traveled to Nepal, we learned an important lesson in data analysis: the context behind the data, including the events which generate it, are just as important, if not more important, than the data itself.”

INTERNSHIP WITH DAAYITWA Yoko Okura, Master’s in Public Policy, HKS ‘17 “This winter, I had the privilege of interning with Daayitwa, a local NGO based in Kathmandu, Nepal. The mission of Daayitwa, which means ‘self-responsibility’ in English, is to build a movement of young leaders through leadership/ entrepreneurship programs to collectively transform societal challenges into innovative opportunities. Daayitwa has three goals: (1) Promote inclusive and enterprise-driven economic growth; (2) strengthen governance of public service delivery; and (3) foster resilience in local communities. Following the earthquake in April 2015, Daayitwa was seeking to formulate a strategy to incorporate rebuilding initiatives into their mission and effectively implement leadership/entrepreneurship programs in the affected areas.”

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BUILDING A NEW NEPAL – AFTER THE QUAKE Prashant Jha, Associate Editor, Hindustan Times Chair: Madhav Khosla, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Theory, Department of Government, FAS Jha discussed the current situation on the ground and challenges ahead for the government, as well as several other pressing questions: How did Nepal find itself here? What will be the possible political implications of this disaster—in terms of the quest for a new constitution? Where does the rest of the international community come in?

Yoko Okura, center left, meeting with community members in Ramechhap in January

From left: Anuraj Jha, Jennifer Leaning, Jerold Kayden, Ankit Rauniyar, Pukar Malla at the May panel

May 14, 2015, Cambridge

CONSEQUENCES AND RESPONSES: LESSONS FROM AND FOR NEPAL Panel I: Public Health, Water, and Sanitation and Rebuilding of Places and Heritage Sites Xeno Acharya, Master of Public Health Candidate, HSPH; Students For Nepal Jarrod Goentzel, Director, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab; Lecturer, MIT; Associate Professor of Urban Planning, GSD Daniele Lantagne, Usen Family Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University Atul Pokharel, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies, Brown University Panel II: Equity in Humanitarian Efforts Anuraj Jha, Master in Public Administration Candidate, HKS; Students for Nepal Jerold S. Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, GSD Pukar Malla, Executive Director, Daayitwa Ankit Rauniyar, Master Candidate, GSD Chair and Moderator: Jennifer Leaning, HSPH Using other disasters as case studies, panelists shared lessons for Nepal’s recovery on topics like government coordination, public health, and infrastructure. The panelists agreed that universities can build long-term partnerships to effectively contribute to disaster relief efforts.

According to the panelists, Nepal’s most pressing need was shelter.

Cosponsored with the Harvard Asia Center, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Korea Institute

Students for Nepal at the candlelight vigil on campus in May

May 14, 2015, Cambridge

CANDLELIGHT VIGIL Following the devastating earthquake, a group of 30 students, faculty, and community members gathered in silence at the steps of the Memorial Church in Harvard Yard to remember the victims.

September 5 - October 29, 2015

NEPAL – IN MEMORIAM: EXHIBIT AND FUNDRAISER Sales of photographs by Grzegorz Ekiert, Professor of Government and Director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, FAS, benefitted the Nepal Research and Reconstruction Fund. The photos were taken during Ekiert’s trips to Nepal in 2007 and 2009.

JANASWASTHYA PROJECT: USHERING IN INDIA’S MOBILE HEALTH REVOLUTION The JanaSwasthya Project, launched at the 2015 Kumbh Mela in Nashik, India, is comprised of two components: a largescale digital disease surveillance program, “EMcounter,” and a mass screening program for oral health, hypertension, and diabetes offered to pilgrims, sadhus, security forces, and all visitors attending the festival in the towns of Nashik and Trimbakeshwar.

FACULTY DIRECTORS: Satchit Balsari, Weill Cornell Global Emergency Medicine Division; FXB Center Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS

PARTNERS: Colgate Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health JanaCare State of Maharashtra Department of Public Health UNICEF, India Weill Cornell Global Emergency Medicine Division The project builds upon the team’s research at the 2013 Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, where they initially piloted their disease surveillance tool on iPads. An estimated 100 million people visited the festival over the course of 55 days to bathe in the holy rivers, posing many public health risks, from stampedes to the spread of disease.

Satchit Balsari, center, and his team prepare to deploy their disease surveillance tool at the festival

Pilgrims bathing in the holy Godavari River

The cornerstone of the 2015 JanaSwasthya Project is a unique interactive visual analytic tool (“dashboard”) that provides critical disease surveillance data to health officials in real time. On the first day alone, the dashboard had tracked over 2,000 visits recorded on government-issued tablet devices at over 30 fixed and mobile health clinics serving pilgrims at the Mela. This real-time disease surveillance program is unprecedented in its scale.

Using all of this rich data, planners can see the data of patients organized by age, location, gender, disease, and disease frequency all in real time. This data allowed organizers to respond in real time to health situations. For example, if they noticed a spike in diarrhea cases, a team of water sanitation engineers could be deployed immediately to remedy the cause of the problem.

NEXT STEPS Given the ubiquitous nature of cell phone usage in South Asia, the tool has huge potential for revolutionizing public health and bypassing traditional obstacles like lack of landlines or personal computers. Simple mobile technology could also aid in refugee crisis situations by logging health information while they are on the move. The team is exploring implementing the technology on a large scale throughout South Asia with the help of government and private partnerships.

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LIVELIHOOD CREATION IN INDIA THROUGH SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SKILL DEVELOPMENT This 18-month pilot project began in July 2015 and is a partnership between Tata Trusts and SAI. The focus is on livelihood creation in three different yet interconnected areas: rural livelihood creation in the handicrafts and handloom sectors; educational, social, and economic empowerment of women; and science and technology-based interventions for job creation. The project collaborates with over 150 institutions across 15 states of India, to host five workshops with 125 participating NGOs and social enterprises, and 15 webinars involving Harvard faculty and subject experts from India throughout the year.

HARVARD FACULTY AND AFFILIATES: Rural Livelihoods Creation in the Indian Crafts Sector Mukti Khaire, HBS; Cornell Tech

From left: Tarun Khanna, K. VijayRaghavan, Shashank Shah at the Science and Technology workshop

Women’s Educational, Social, and Economic Empowerment Jacqueline Bhabha, HSPH; HLS; HKS Martha Chen, HKS; GSD Science and Technology-based Social Entrepreneurship Satchit Balsari, Weill Cornell Global Emergency Medicine Division; FXB Center Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS Venkatesh Narayanamurti, HKS; SEAS Ambuj Sagar, IIT Delhi; MIT; SEAS;

The SAI team

PHASE 2: WORKSHOPS

ADMINISTRATION:

January 11 - 14, 2016, Gandhinagar

Gayatri Divecha, Project Consultant Anisha Gopi, Project Manager Meena Hewett, SAI Kundan Madireddy, Project Manager Shashank Shah, Project Director

RURAL LIVELIHOODS CREATION IN THE INDIAN CRAFTS SECTOR

PHASE 1: FIELD VISITS Starting in the fall, the SAI team, under the direction of the faculty leaders, conducted field visits to Indian organizations instrumental in livelihood creation in the handicrafts and handloom sectors, and performed a needs assessment. The team visited over 40 social enterprises in Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh, to learn more about organizations working to empower rural artisans with technical and commercial skills. The team that focused on women’s empowerment interacted with 25 subject experts to understand the best way to impact women’s social and educational empowerment. This research informed the curriculum for workshops hosted in India in January and February led by Harvard faculty, affiliates, and in-region experts, as well as a series of webinars with Harvard faculty.

“The experiences of these seasoned organizations demonstrate that urban centers like Mumbai and Pune represent an endless potential for entrepreneurial ventures to succeed.” - Gayatri Divecha and Shashank Shah, January 2016 “One of history’s gifts to India is the wealth of craftspeople, traditions, and skills represented in Rajasthan alone. Ironically, it is these very artisans, custodians of our cultural heritage, that are today struggling to earn a livelihood and keep their craft alive.” - Gayatri Divecha and Shashank Shah, December 2015

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Mukti Khaire, HBS; Cornell Tech The workshop brought together 65 leaders from 50 social businesses and non-profits working toward improving artisan livelihoods and skills. Over the course of three days, Harvard faculty and subject experts delivered a focused curriculum on topics such as artisans outreach, product design, process innovation and supply chain efficiencies, fundraising, policy, certifications, branding and merchandizing, social media and e-commerce, and scale and growth. The participants were also taken for a field visit to study the trade facilitation center of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad.

January 28 – 30, 2016, Mumbai

WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT Martha Chen, HKS; GSD Jacqueline Bhabha, HSPH; HLS; HKS The workshop brought together 50 organizations from 13 states across India that have been working to address gender-based violence, improve access to secondary education for young girls, and promote gender equitable norms and economic empowerment through home-based industries. Professor Bhabha led the workshop with the overarching theme of “Using Data and Research to Define Program Goals, Measure Impact, and Strengthen Strategic Thinking about Social Change.” Professor Chen’s workshop focused on “Empowering Urban Home-Based Workers through Infrastructure Services, Marketing Support and Appropriate Policies.” The primary objective of both the workshops was to equip the participants with practical skills, tools, and knowledge to maximize and deepen the impact of their organizations and the scale of their activities.

February 2 – 4, 2016, Delhi

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY-BASED SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS Ambuj Sagar, IIT Delhi; MIT; SEAS The workshop, held at the Indian Institute of Technology, brought together 25 social entrepreneurs working to improve access to electricity in rural areas, provide access to education to underprivileged communities, ameliorate sanitation, and develop tech solutions to maximize social impact. Guest speakers included representatives from the Government of India, corporations, industry bodies, and funding agencies, as well as scientists, technologists, and successful social entrepreneurs.

PHASE 4: SOCIAL INNOVATION GRANTS The objective of these grants is to catalyze grassroots innovation in select social enterprises leading to greater social impact. In March 2016, the three tracks awarded social innovation grants totaling INR 5 million to 15 projects across India. The grantees will also receive mentorship and guidance from Harvard faculty and subject experts during the course of implementation between April and September 2016.

Grant recipients: Rural Livelihoods in the Craft Sector Chitrika, Telangana Craftizen Foundation, Telangana Freeset Fabrics, West Bengal Kumaun Grameen Udyog, Uttarakhand Raah Foundation, Maharashtra Women Weave Charitable Trust, Maharashtra

Runa Banerjee interacting with her artisans at SEWA Lucknow

Science and Technology Based Entrepreneurship From left: Jacqueline Bhabha, Martha Chen, Shashank Shah at the Women’s Empowerment Workshop

Project PRANTAE, Odisha Smart Joules, New Delhi Women’s Empowerment Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group, Gujarat Center for Unfolding Learning Potential, Rajasthan Dhaatri, Andhra Pradesh IBTADA, Rajasthan Men Against Violence and Abuse, Mumbai White Lotus Trust, Haryana

PHASE 5: REGIONAL CONFERENCES Kundan Madireddy with the SEWA Team at a field visit in Gujarat

PHASE 3: WEBINARS December 3, 2015

HANDCRAFTED AESTHETIC GOODS AND MARKETS Mukti Khaire, HBS; Cornell Tech Khaire addressed India’s handicrafts and handlooms crisis and shared approaches to regenerate the sector. She also discussed how the gap between the handcrafted paradigm and business paradigm can be bridged.

February 19, 2016

FIELD NOTES: BEST PRACTICES FOR DOCUMENTATION OF HANDICRAFTS IN THE FIELD

In October 2016, the 15 grantee organizations will convene to share their work funded by SAI, as well as the findings and impact of their social innovation ideas. An international convention in December 2016 in New Delhi will feature the top grantee from each of the three tracks and will showcase their work. It will also be an opportunity to release publications related to each track, make policy recommendations, and create a roadmap for implementation.

Vandana Bhandari, Professor and Dean (Academics) at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi Bhandari shared her expertise and experiences documenting culturally and economically significant Indian crafts endangered by modernization and socioeconomic change.

January 7, 2016

MERCHANDISING AND MARKETING OF HANDCRAFTED GOODS

March 29, 2016

Mukti Khaire, HBS; Cornell Tech Kirti Poonia, Okhai Saveen Sharma, FabIndia Shilpa Sharma, Jaypore.com

Ritesh Mehta, Head of Economic Growth Initiatives, India and South Asia, Facebook

The panelists merchandising like innovation audiences and offline.

shared lessons for effectively their crafts, discussing topics in design and capturing larger potential customers online and

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SOCIAL ENTERPRISES: CASE OF FACEBOOK Panelists at the marketing webinar in January

This webinar addressed how to create and maintain a focused Facebook page, and discussed best practices for social enterprises to empower their beneficiaries and sustain their institutions through social media.

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MENTAL HEALTH Disasters, whether natural or manmade, profoundly influence lives. Through a chain of catastrophic sequences, they damage the built environment, cause death and injury, overwhelm psychological coping, and devastate communities.

They are often difficult to predict, prevent, and control. It is this very nature of disasters that requires communities to organize themselves in advance in extremely challenging circumstances to prepare for timely and effective disaster and post-disaster relief work.

FACULTY DIRECTORS: Ruth Barron, HMS Shamila Khan, Cambridge Health Alliance PARTNERS: Aga Khan University Hospital Al Abassi Hospital Aman Foundation, Karachi Health Department, City of Karachi Health Department, Sindh Province Jinnah Post Graduate Medical Center Karachi Civil Hospital Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA)

December 16, 2016, Karachi

LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON MENTAL HEALTH IN DISASTER RESPONSE Sharmeen Khan, Clinical Psychologist Khan is a Karachi-based mental health professional and a human rights activist. She spearheaded the Naya Jeevan initiative providing psychological help to survivors of the Army Public School attack in Peshawar in 2014. Her keynote focused on the need for communities to be prepared to address disaster and post-disaster relief work.

The SAI team on their visit to Pakistan for the conference in December

Cosponsored with the Aman Foundation

December 16-18, 2015, Karachi

MENTAL HEALTH AND DISASTER RESPONSE IN PAKISTAN Ruth Barron, HMS Sharmeen Khan, Clinical Psychologist Jennifer Leaning, HSPH Ayesha Mian, Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Agha Khan University, Karachi Saadia Quraishy, CEO, AMAN Healthcare Services, Karachi The two-day workshop convened local stakeholders, including mental health professionals, first responders, and representatives from the government and media, to understand the current landscape of mental health response in Pakistan.

By bringing together various stakeholders in this discussion, the event identified existing challenges, best practices, and innovations around mental health relief efforts in the wake of natural and manmade disasters. By recognizing the importance of post-disaster support, participants explored the initiatives that can be undertaken to create coping mechanisms for trauma survivors, caregivers, and service providers.

Cosponsored with the Aman Foundation

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From left: Ruth Barron, Saadia Quraishy, Jennifer Leaning

Participants at the roundtable discussion in Karachi

From left: Jennifer Leaning, Ruth Barron, and John Torous at the SAI 2015 Symposium’s panel on Mental Health

WATER AND SANITATION These two projects on water seek to create linkages between existing streams of research to generate new knowledge on issues like access to water, energy, health, agriculture, food security, climate change, water as a human right, and other water related issues across the subcontinent.

The Boston Water Group’s monthly meeting at Harvard in April 2014

BOSTON WATER GROUP PROJECT LEADER: Shafiqul Islam, Director, Water Diplomacy Program; Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professor, Water Diplomacy, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University COLLABORATORS: PUKAR members test water quality in Kaula Bandar

THE RAPID WATER SURVEY PROJECT LEADERS: Sharmila Murthy, Assistant Professor of Law, Suffolk University; Visiting Scholar, Sustainability Science Program, HKS Anita Patil-Deshmukh, Executive Director, PUKAR Ramnath Subbaraman, Associate Physician, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Research Advisor, PUKAR, Mumbai, India COLLABORATORS: Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action & Research (PUKAR) This project focuses on developing a tool for implementing the human right to water in the slums of Mumbai and beyond. The team believes that water access is unlikely to be provided in an expeditious and comprehensive manner without accountability from civil society. The Rapid Water Survey (RWS) has the potential to set a new paradigm for social accountability in the water sector. The project builds upon research conducted by PUKAR in the Kaula Bandar community in 2012.

Boston University Clean Energy Venture Group Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) MIT Suffolk University Tufts University University of Massachusetts The Boston Water Group is made up of interdisciplinary faculty and practitioners from the Boston area who work toward resolving water issues. The group organizes monthly roundtable discussions with scholars from a variety of fields to identify a common language around understanding various water issues. In their meeting at Harvard in March, they discussed the Delhi water crisis and the importance of sociopolitical context in water problems. They identified that a significant problem in this crisis was the social vulnerability of the populations impacted by infrastructure failure.

With support from SAI, the RWS team has launched a project to conduct research and advocacy on water access in the Mandala slum community in India. They have built a 15-person team of barefoot researchers in Mandala to conduct data collection. PUKAR has partnered with the Transparent Cities Network to provide technical support and dissemination of the team’s water infrastructure mapping.

All households in Mandala have been enumerated and coded. The team hopes that the survey can help answer crucial questions relevant to health and human development.

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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OTHER FACULTY INITIATIVES

Tarun Khanna discusses meritocracy in China and India at a Fairbank Center seminar in March

MERITOCRACY In all societies, whole industries—indeed, whole ideologies—are dedicated to the promotion of what is loosely called “talent.” Though its position as a valuable social good is virtually unassailable, what precisely it is that constitutes “talent,” and how best to go about defining it (or any of its associated qualities, such as “skill,” “merit,” “ability,” “virtue”) have long been contended around the globe. This remains as true today as ever, but it is arguably a more pressing problem in very populous societies such as in India and China, where competition for scarce slots creates unimaginable pressures upon the individual to do whatever it takes to “succeed,” and where a great deal of talent remains less than optimally used.

The goal of a roundtable discussion on meritocracy, held on November 25, 2015, at Harvard, was to arrive at a set of topics around which a conference or set of conferences could be organized over the course of the next two academic years to plumb the broad range of issues connected with “talent” and “merit” in India and China, today and in the past.

The exhibition on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai

THE STATE OF ARCHITECTURE: PRACTICES AND PROCESSES IN INDIA

UNSTABLE CONSTITUTIONALISM: LAW AND POLITICS IN SOUTH ASIA

Rahul Mehrotra, GSD

Mark Tushnet, HLS

This exhibition, curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, and Kaiwan Mehta was on display from January 6–March 20, 2016, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai. It presented the state of contemporary architecture in India within a larger historical overview since Independence.

It not only mapped emerging practices but also discussed the aspirations they represent, and stimulated a conversation on architecture among the architectural fraternity, patrons, and public at large. Embodying a spectrum of positions that characterize architectural production in India, the content was intended to be provocative and demonstrate the multiple, and often simultaneously valid, streams of architectural thought and engagement that truly represent the pluralism of India. The exhibition was accompanied by other related and allied events such as smaller exhibitions, symposia, lectures, and award ceremonies.

Madhav Khosla, FAS

The conference ‘Windows and Mirrors: Reflecting on Recent Architecture in South Asia’ on March 19 and 20 was held in partnership with the Tata Trusts and Vinod & Saryu Doshi Foundation.

Renowned architects from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives, and India participated in the deliberations, which were preceded by a keynote lecture by Sunil Khilnani.

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Panelists at the event in Delhi in January

On January 20, 2016, SAI sponsored a seminar on South Asian Constitutionalism in New Delhi.

The event, organized in collaboration with the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, celebrated the publication of Unstable Constitutionalism: Law and Politics in South Asia and featured leading legal scholars and political scientists reflecting upon South Asian Constitutionalism in three ways: First, through methodological discussions on the field of comparative constitutional law and the ways in which South Asia could be integrated into more global discussions; second, on specific legal developments in the different South Asian jurisdictions, from the recent constitutional crisis in Nepal to the post-Chaudhry court experience in Pakistan; and third, through the theme of Unstable Constitutionalism—its meaning and significance— and whether or not South Asian countries do indeed represent a form of constitutional instability.

FACULTY GRANTS SAI offers research and travel grants for Harvard faculty working in fields related to South Asia. The purpose of these grants is to promote South Asian studies across the University, and to stimulate interdisciplinary research.

FACULTY GRANT SPOTLIGHT Could a smartphone app help stop the next polio outbreak in Pakistan?

Originally published in The Conversation US, November 12, 2015

2015-2016 FACULTY GRANTS Anne Becker, HMS Global Mental Health Education in Bangladesh

By Michael Callen, HKS Between 1988 and 2013, the number of cases of polio worldwide plummeted from 350,000 to 406.

The number of countries in which the disease was endemic also went down, from 125 to three.

The world seemed on the verge of eradicating the disease once and for all.

In 2014, polio surged again to 359 cases, with 85% of the new cases appearing in Pakistan. According to the World Health Organization, people with the disease were crossing the border into Afghanistan, and strains of the virus that originated in Pakistan were found in Egyptian sewers.

Neighboring India eliminated the disease in 2011, after switching to a more effective vaccine and ramping up vaccination efforts. Compared to Pakistan, India clearly had greater capacity to respond, and it didn’t face as much political unrest or a border with Afghanistan. Still, many other countries with weak central governments had eliminated the disease. So why not Pakistan?

The reason Pakistan was having so much trouble didn’t come down to having enough doses of the vaccines or health workers to administer them – the country did. A key problem was that information about who was getting vaccinated wasn’t getting collected, and that the incentives health workers got didn’t actually motivate them to perform more vaccinations.

Michael Callen, HKS Dynamic Inconsistency and Government Service Delivery: A Field Study in Pakistan

Ryan Draft, FAS Harvard-Bangalore Science Initiative

Marshall Ganz, HKS Nurturing Youth Leadership in Nepal

Our group of researchers wanted to find a way of making sure that more detailed information about vaccinations was collected and to develop better incentives for health workers. The solution we found (and which we detail in a draft paper) is cheap and portable: smartphones.

What happened in Pakistan?

Because Pakistan lacks data on which citizens needed to be vaccinated, the government aims to achieve complete vaccination coverage by going door-by-door. To do this, the government assigns four or five roving teams of health workers to vaccinate each neighborhood. These drives happen about once a month and usually last for at least two days.

Aditi Hazra, HSPH Understanding cancer etiology, improving risk assessment and prevention of breast cancer in India

Health workers on these vaccination drives don’t face an easy task, especially in a city of six million like Lahore.

Information about who has been vaccinated or where teams have gone isn’t centralized. Rather, teams use paper maps and forms to figure out where to go and to record their efforts. To show what houses have been visited, health workers use chalk to write on the walls of houses. The only information recorded centrally is a team’s daily total number of vaccinations.

The government paid workers for the door-to-door drive with one-size-fits-all incentives – 100 rupees (about US$1) per day regardless of who or how many they vaccinated. The incentives, in other words, weren’t based on performance.

Combine all of these factors, and the result was that some children were immunized several times and others, in small pockets isolated by geography or violence, were not vaccinated at all.

Better incentives can help, but they need the right data to work

David Henderson, HSPH Psychological Impact of ‘Offences Relating to Religion’ on Religious Minority Groups in Pakistan

Asim Khwaja, HKS Rebuilding the Social Compact: Urban Service Delivery and Property Taxes in Pakistan

In rich and poor countries, pay-for-performance systems that use incentives have proven particularly effective in health care.

In a pay-for-perfomance system, a worker’s pay is higher when they perform better. Implementing performance pay necessarily requires high-quality, detailed data on performance, which is hard or impossible to use when it is recorded on paper or chalked on the sides of houses.

Anne Monius, HDS The Study of Medieval Jain Literary Styles

In a pilot project funded by the UK Department for International Development, our group has been working with Lahore’s municipal government to develop a tool to help track information better and to find out what incentives provide the best motivation for health workers.

We distributed cheap smartphones to the health workers so they could send geo-coded information about their activities to a centralized dashboard. After they visited each home, they would send back data about how many children they had vaccinated, the time that the vaccination visit occurred, and the address it occurred at as coded by GPS location.

Jonathan Ripley, FAS Classical Tamil Summer Seminar

Read the full post: https://theconversation.com/could-a-smartphone-app-help-stop-the-next-poliooutbreak-in-pakistan-49487

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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SPECIAL EVENTS KUMBH MELA: MAPPING THE EPHEMERAL MEGACITY Since its inception in early first millennium CE, the Kumbh Mela has become the largest public gathering in the world. Today it draws tens of millions of pilgrims over the course of a few weeks. A team of over fifty people, including Harvard professors, students, administrative staff, and medical practitioners made the pilgrimage to Allahabad, India, to the Kumbh Mela site in 2013, to analyze issues that emerge in any large-scale human gathering. The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity book and traveling exhibition consolidate research findings and serve as an example of interdisciplinary research conducted at Harvard.

Throughout the year, SAI has hosted a series of book launch events, featuring firsthand insights from Harvard scholars and Kumbh administrators who were on the ground during the festival. The book was originally launched at Harvard in April 2015 by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust.

Rahul Mehrotra, right, shows the exhibition to Shri Akhilesh Yadav, center

From left: Meera Gandhi, Rahul Mehrotra, Dhruv Kazi, Tarun Khanna

From left: Diana Eck, Devesh Chaturvedi, Satchit Balsari

August 17, 2015

November 6, 2015

January 18, 2016

DELHI, INDIA

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

MUMBAI, INDIA

Satchit Balsari, Weill Cornell Global Emergency Medicine Division; FXB Center

Dhruv Kazi, University of California San Francisco;Division of Cardiology, San Francisco General Hospital

Welcome by Sabyasachi Mukherjee, CSMVS

Vikram Gandhi, SAI Advisory Council Meena Hewett, SAI

Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS

Jyoti Malhrotra, Sr. Reporter, India Today

Rahul Mehrotra, GSD

Rahul Mehrotra, GSD

Facilitated by Meera Gandhi, CEO and Founder The Giving Back Foundation; Advisory Council Member, SAI

Javed Usmani, Chief Information Commissioner of Uttar Pradesh Shri Akhilesh Yadav, Honorable Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh The first launch event in India was held at the Oberoi Hotel with a crowd of over 250 people.

Panelists explained how the book has produced a set of teaching tools, useful across the disciplines of public health, data science, architecture, urban planning, business, religion, and culture. From an urbanism perspective, Mehrotra explained how his team worked at the festival to geographically map the emergence of the city that is three times as densely populated as Manhattan and two-thirds its size. Mr. Usmani, the Chief Secretary during the 2013 Kumbh Mela, gave a brief summary of the efforts and logistical expertise required to create the event, the largest congregation of humanity in one place in the world. Balsari talked about monitoring public health during the Kumbh, as there was the constant threat of epidemics, water borne diseases, and infection. The event concluded with remarks from the Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, who unveiled the book.

Cosponsored with the Harvard Club of India

Over 200 people attended the launch of the book in New York, held at the Asia Society.

Mehrotra kicked off the faculty presentations with a rapid display of photographs which captured the development of the ephemeral city, as well as the dismantlement of the temporary structures. Kazi discussed the work of his team of medical students, who digitally tracked over 30,000 hospital visit entries. The big data allowed his team to instantly discover the median age of patients, problems to health access, and common ailments. Khanna concluded the presentation by emphasizing that this type of interdisciplinary research presents a ripe opportunity to learn about the beginnings and framework of a megacity, illuminating solutions to natural disasters that require temporary housing.

Cosponsored with the Asia Society

Museum Introductory remarks by Vikram Gandhi, SAI Advisory Council; Asha Impact Satchit Balsari, Weill Cornell Global Emergency Medicine Division; FXB Center Devesh Chaturvedi, Divisional Commissioner, Allahabad, at the 2013 Kumbh Mela Diana Eck, FAS, HDS Facilitated by Rahul Mehrotra, GSD Held at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, and in partnership with the Asia Society India Centre and the Harvard Club of Mumbai, the event drew a crowd of more than 200 people, including Harvard alumni, community members, government officials, students, and members of the public. Mehrotra explained that the project was a “fascinating” experience from an urban planning perspective, as a temporary megacity with an expiration date is not only constructed, but also disassembled.

Eck commented that the festival gathers together millions of people from various castes, classes, regions, and religions of India in one place, so it was an “astounding” experience for her team to study the religious aspects of the Kumbh. From the government’s perspective, Chaturvedi, said that careful planning and meticulous research led to a successful Kumbh. Balsari discussed his project on disease surveillance, designed to create an interactive dashboard available on smart phones, in order to see the distribution of patients organized by age, location, gender, disease, and disease frequency—all in real time.

Cosponsored with the Asia Society India Centre and the Harvard Club of Mumbai

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South Asia Institute

ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM SAI’s fifth Annual Symposium featured discussions on the idea of democracy and practice throughout South Asia. Given the promise and peril democracy has had in various parts of the region, this event brought together scholars and practitioners to discuss this important and timely topic.

WHO SPEAKS FOR DEMOCRACY ACROSS SOUTH ASIA? May 5, 2016

May 6, 2016

May 6, 2016

PANEL 1

PANEL 2

PANEL 3

Deepa Mehta, Screenwriter, Director, and Producer

Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, HLS

Partha Chatterjee, Professor, Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

Adil Najam, Dean, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University Michael Sandel, Anne T and Robert M Bass Professor of Government, Harvard University Facilitator: Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University

May 6, 2015

SEED FOR CHANGE FINAL PITCH The three finalists in SAI’s Seed for Change Competition delivered their final pitch for an interdisciplinary judging panel of faculty members and venture capitalists. Each interdisciplinary team has a creative solution that will positively impact societal, economic, and environmental issues in India. GoMango provides low-cost refrigerated transport to food producers in India. Torr Energy uses a series of technologies and a unique model to produce and sell low-cost waste-derived solid fuel in remote areas. The Craftsmen is a small forest enterprise facilitator that creates new value chains, provides year-round employment, and trains communities in sustainable harvesting practices.

Sonali Samarasinghe, Editor-in-Chief, The Lanka Standard Aqil Shah, Wick Cary Assistant Professor of South Asian Politics in the College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma; Non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Menaka Guruswamy, Visiting Lecturer in Law and Peter and Patricia Gruber Fellow in Global Justice, Yale Law School Hitesh Hathi, Executive Producer, Radio Boston, WBUR

Salil Tripathi, Contributing Editor at Mint and Caravan; Chair, PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee; Author, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy

Mubbashir Rizvi, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Georgetown University

Facilitator: Ashutosh Varshney, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences, Brown University

Facilitator: Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

It is well known in political theory and analysis that democracy is not only about holding free and fair elections, but also about ensuring the basic liberal freedoms between elections: freedom of expression, freedom of religious practice, freedom of association etc. This distinction is known in theory as the distinction between the electoral and liberal aspects of democracy. While we can’t have democracy without elections, democracy is not simply about holding elections.

This panel considered the experiences of the different countries in South Asia in relational terms with regard to two issues. First, what can we learn about the management of religious differences and rights of minorities in the way governance, popular politics, and historical memories impact on these issues. Second, how have these polities responded to the challenges posed by the material conditions in which the poor live with regard to such needs as housing, basic infrastructure, health and aspirations for better futures?

In South Asia, elections might have become a regular feature of most polities, but is it that the provision of liberal freedoms has lagged behind the electoral aspects of democratic functioning?

Why might that be so? Are both aspects of democracy by any chance in danger?

Tunku Varadarajan, Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution

These questions are not posed in terms of comparisons since the processes in one country are deeply influenced by regional politics and transnational processes within the region, The question then is what are the connections between the countries in South Asia and in what ways might we think of new paradigms to address these connections?

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SEMINAR SERIES ARTS As part of SAI’s new Arts Program, this seminar series serves as a resource for students and faculty across all disciplines to explore issues critical to South Asia through the lens of art and design.

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, right, with Chitra Venkataramani

Basir Mahmood, left, with Jennifer Leaning

December 2, 2015

February 2 – March 23, 2016

A MEMORY, A MONUMENT, A MATERIAL

THE CROSS-DRESSING GOD

Basir Mahmood, Visiting Artist, SAI Arts Program

Chair: Jennifer Leaning, François-Xavier Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, right, showing his work to Rahul Mehrotra

November 2, 2015

CITYINFLUX Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Visiting Artist, SAI Arts Program

Devdutt Pattanaik

Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights,, Department of Global Health and Population, HSPH; Director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights Mahmood offered insights into his practice and meaningfully engaged audiences to mutually construct new narratives around his works.

Through video, film, and photography, his work weaves together various threads of thoughts, findings, and insights into poetic sequences, building various forms of narratives.

Devdutt Pattanaik’s exhibit of drawings showed how queer ideas in Indian mythology are present in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist myths. The drawings depict that through shifts in gender, the fluid nature of the world was shared by the sages to help people expand (brah) their mind (mana).

Cosponsored with the Arts Connect International, Asia Center, Carr Center, India GSD, LAMBDA at Harvard Law, Harvard India Student Group, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

Chair: Chitra Venkataramani, South Asian Studies Fellow, SAI Kandalgaonkar discussed his art practice, which focuses primarily on unseen or ignored processes of urbanization. “cityinflux” is an ode to the city’s urban condition that he is continuously invested in unlocking.

‘Altered State’ on display at Harvard

February 4 – 22, 2016

ALTERED STATE: PAINTING MYANMAR IN A TIME OF TRANSITION After years of censorship and oppression, Myanmar is beginning to embrace freedom of expression as evidenced by its recent paintings.

Curated by Ian Holliday, Vice-President and ProVice-Chancellor at the University of Hong Kong, the exhibit featured paintings by artists working currently in Myanmar.

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South Asia Institute

From left: Sai Balakrishnan, Anu Ramaswami, Asim Waqif

Paribartana Mohanty

March 24, 2016

March 30, 2016

MEGACITIES ASIA

GREAT ETERNAL RETURN: A SOCIAL MEDIA FILM

Milan Rai

Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS Al Miner, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paribartana Mohanty, Visiting Artist, SAI Arts

Laura Weinstein, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Program

Modern – Vernacular, City – Nature: Imaginations of the New India

Anu Ramaswami, University of Minnesota Chitra Venkataramani, SAI Asim Waqif, Artist and Architect Chair: Sai Balakrishnan, GSD Inhabiting Asian Cities

Theodore C. Bestor, Reischauer Institute Professor of Social Anthropology, Director, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

Martha Chen, HKS, GSD Hu Xiangcheng, Artist This event brought together artists and academics to examine contemporary Asian megacities including Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Discussions focused on the built environment in these cities, as well as concepts of modern versus vernacular, and formal versus informal, and the impact rapid urbanization has on inhabitants of cities from Mumbai to Shanghai.

Chair: Namita Dharia, Lecturer in Anthropology, FAS The lecture-performance was part of Mohanty’s larger project “Act the Victim” that engages with the images of crisis circulating in social media. It is based on a video excerpt of a TV interview of Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, that went viral on social media just before the 2014 general elections in India. Great Eternal Return addresses the plethora of anonymous and mysterious images circulating on the social media landscape and, traveling across geographical boundaries, contesting meanings and proposing misreadings.

Milan Rai’s white butterflies on display at SAI’s office

April 13, 2016

WHITE BUTTERFLY Milan Rai, Visiting Artist, SAI Art Program Chair: Jinah Kim, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, FAS Rai’s White Butterfly project was a personal art installation that has grown into global outreach for different community causes and concerns.

It is a demonstration of how the role of art can take different turns when shared across social media, connecting people and communities to effect social change and awareness. In this talk, Rai introduced the White Butterfly project to the Harvard community in the form of a retrospective photographic exhibition, including an interactive presentation.

Sponsored by SAI and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Cosponsored by Harvard’s Asia Center, Department of Art and Architecture, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

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BOOK TALKS AND FILM EVENTS SAI’s book talks showcase important issues through literature, and allow the community to engage with celebrated authors. Film screenings offer a myriad of contemporary films, documentaries, and historic works from South Asia.

From left: Beena Sarwar, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Rahul Roy

September 22-25, 2015

RAHUL ROY FILM FESTIVAL Geeta Aiyer, Founder, Direct Action for Women

September 10, 2015

CLOTHES TO DIE FOR Zara Hayes, Director Ruth Barron, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, HMS Chair: Jennifer Leaning, François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, HSPH; Director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights This moving film gave voice to those directly affected by the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, the worst industrial disaster of the twenty-first century, in which over 1,100 people died and thousands more were injured.

November 16, 2015

Now Worldwide (DAWN)

UNSTABLE CONSTITUTIONALISM:

Elora Halim Chowdhury, Associate

LAW AND POLITICS IN SOUTH

Professor and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies, U-Mass Boston

ASIA

Beena Sarwar, Editor, Aman ki Asha, Jang Group Pakistan; former Nieman Fellow and Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, HKS

Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, HLS

Rahul Roy, Director

Rohit De, Associate Research Scholar in Law, Yale

Chair: Parimal G. Patil, FAS

Nick Robinson, Resident Fellow, Center on the

This festival included screenings of Rahul Roy’s films including When Four Friends Meet, Majma, The City Beautiful, Till We Meet Again, and The Factory. Roy’s films draw attention to masculinity and gender violence in South Asia.

The festival concluded with a panel discussion.

Cosponsored with DSAS, Harvard Asia Center, Political Anthropology Working Group, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and the Film Study Center

Legal Profession, HLS Although the field of constitutional law has become increasingly comparative in recent years, its geographic focus has remained limited.

South Asia, despite being the site of the world’s largest democracy and a vibrant if turbulent constitutionalism, is one of the important neglected regions in the field. This book talk discussed this lack of attention by providing a detailed examination of constitutional law and practice in five South Asian countries: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Cosponsored with HLS

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South Asia Institute

Samanth Subramanian, right, with Charles Hallisey, center

Asad Ahmed, left, with Nakul Singh Sawhney

November 18, 2015

March 10, 2016

April 18, 2016

FINAL SOLUTION

MUZAFFARNAGAR BAKI HAI

THIS DIVIDED ISLAND

Rakesh Sharma, Film Director

Nakul Singh Sawhney, Filmmaker

Samanth Subramanian, Author

Chair: Parimal G. Patil, FAS

Chair: Asad Ahmed, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, FAS

Chair: Charles Hallisey, Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures, HDS

In September 2013, Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh witnessed a pogrom against local Muslim residents. More than 100 were killed and over 80,000 displaced. This film explores the social, political, and economic dynamics in a region that has historically seen relative harmony between Hindus and Muslims.

In the summer of 2009, the leader of the Tamil Tigers was killed, bringing a bloody end to the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka.

In his book, Subramanian gives an extraordinary account of this great modern conflict and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, he draws out the story of Sri Lanka today—an exhausted, disturbed society, still caught in the embers.

Final Solution is a study of the politics of hate.

Set in Gujarat during the period February/March 2002–July 2003, the film graphically documents the changing face of right-wing politics in India through a study of the 2002 genocide of Muslims in Gujarat. It specifically examines political tendencies reminiscent of the Nazi Germany of early/mid-1930s. The screening was followed by a Q&A with the director.

March 2, 2016

THE CRIPPLED FRONTIER: SCREENING AND DISCUSSION ON CONFLICTS ON THE PERIPHERY OF INDIA Pankaj Butalia, Documentary Filmmaker Chair: Mircea Raianu, PhD Candidate, FAS; Graduate Student Associate, SAI Butalia screened his film The Textures of Loss, an elegy to the wounded families in the Kashmir valley whose loss of loved ones manifests itself not only in pain, but also in anger, somatic symptoms, paralysis, and deadness. The successive discussion focused on issues in the film trilogy, including the films Manipur Song and Assam: On the Edge of Neglect.

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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GRADUATE STUDENT ASSOCIATES Every year, SAI selects Graduate Student Associates (GSAs) from across the different schools at Harvard to support their research on South Asia. Each GSA gives a seminar, chaired by a faculty member or fellow doctoral student, to showcase their research and receive feedback from their peers.

Rosanna Picascia

Mou Banerjee

Sarika Gupta

September 30, 2015

October 19, 2015

November 19, 2015

THE DISINHERITED: CONVERSION

KNOWING THROUGH OTHERS:

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON

TO CHRISTIANITY AND THE

TESTIMONY AS A SOURCE OF

CITIZEN EMPOWERMENT IN INDIA

ECONOMIES OF LOSS IN COLONIAL

KNOWLEDGE IN CLASSICAL

CALCUTTA

INDIAN PHILOSOPHY OF

Mou Banerjee, Graduate Student Associate, SAI; PhD Candidate, History Department, FAS Chair: Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, FAS Banerjee’s talk explored the dialogues and debates of Indian intellectuals with evangelical Protestant Christians and missionaries in the nineteenth century, especially in the Bengal Presidency in India.

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South Asia Institute

Sarika Gupta, Graduate Student Associate, SAI; PhD candidate, HKS

RELIGION

Discussant: Radhika Jain, PhD Candidate, Harvard University

Rosanna Picascia, Graduate Student

This talk presented an overview of a field project in Delhi aimed at understanding barriers citizens face in successfully taking advantage of government welfare programs. Specifically, it discussed a randomized control trial that provides eligible women with various forms of assistance in applying for the Widow Pension Scheme.

Associate, SAI; PhD candidate in the Study of Religion, FAS Chair: Parimal G. Patil, FAS This talk looked at the debate among Sanskrit philosophers of religion over whether, and the conditions under which, testimony is a source of knowledge. In particular, it focused on the epistemic status of scripture, the example par excellence of testimony.

Mircea Raianu

Priyasha Saksena, right

February 1, 2016

February 29, 2016

CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY

JOUSTING OVER JURISDICTION: SOVEREIGNTY AND INTERNATIONAL

BETWEEN EMPIRE AND NATION:

LAW IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOUTH ASIA

TATA AND THE MAKING OF MODERN INDIA Mircea Raianu, Graduate Student Associate, SAI; PhD Candidate, History Department, FAS Chair: Sunil Amrith, Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies, Professor of History, FAS

Priyasha Saksena, Graduate Student Associate, SAI; SJD Candidate, HLS Chair: Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law, HLS This talk focused on jurisdictional disputes between the Indian princely states and the British Government in late nineteenth-century South Asia to flesh out both the role that international law played in the definition and contestation of the relationship between the princely states and the British Government, as well as the influence of such disputes on the development of international law ideas.

This talk examined the transformation of Tata philanthropy from community-based charity to “constructive” projects on a national scale, and accounted for the expansive transnational set of actors brought together by Tata patronage, including scientists, technocrats, intellectuals, and artists. Raianu showed how the pattern of Tata philanthropic donations was neither the expression of an underlying nationalist vision, nor a purely strategic calculus.

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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JOINT SEMINAR ON SOUTH ASIAN POLITICS This joint seminar, cosponsored with MIT, the Watson Institute at Brown University, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, brings together scholars from different fields to examine the South Asian political landscape. The organizing committee includes professors at Brown, Harvard, and MIT, including Ashutosh Varshney, Patrick Heller, Prerna Singh, Akshay Mangla, and Vipin Narang.

Adam Ziegfeld

February 5, 2016

WHY REGIONAL PARTIES? CLIENTELISM, ELITES, AND THE INDIAN PARTY SYSTEM Adam Ziegfeld, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University

October 9, 2015

November 13, 2015

HOW DOES MNREGA AFFECT

THE OTHER ONE PERCENT:

RURAL LABOR MARKETS AND

INDIANS IN AMERICA

INCOMES? EVIDENCE FROM A LARGE-SCALE EXPERIMENT Sandip Sukhtankar, Assistant Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College Sukhtankar’s research interests are development economics, political economy, and public economics, with a particular focus on corruption, governance, and the delivery of public benefits and services. He is an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), as well as a contributor to Ideas for India.

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South Asia Institute

Devesh Kapur, Director, Center for the Advanced Study of India, Professor of Political Science, and Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India, University of Pennsylvania Professor Kapur’s research focuses on human capital, national and international public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages, especially international migration and international institutions, affect political and economic change in developing countries, especially India.

Ziegfeld challenged the conventional wisdom that regional parties in India are electorally successful because they harness popular grievances and benefit from strong regional identities. Rather, in democracies where patronage, vote buying, and electoral handouts are common, regional parties are successful because they represent expedient options for office-seeking politicians.

Christopher Clary

March 4, 2016

April 22, 2016

VOTERS AND FOREIGN POLICY:

EAST INDIA COMPANY REVISITED

EVIDENCE FROM A SURVEY EXPERIMENT IN PAKISTAN Christopher Clary, Postdoctoral Fellow at the

February 26, 2015, Brown University

NEIGHBORHOOD SANITATION AND INFANT MORTALITY Dean Spears, Executive Director of the Rice Institute

Atul KohIi

Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University In traditional surveys in Pakistan, the vast majority of respondents identify India as an enemy and a serious threat to Pakistan. Clary discussed whether these beliefs affect voter choices.

Atul KohIi, David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University Kohli discussed his research on the areas of comparative political economy with a focus on the developing countries. His current research focuses on the topic of “imperialism and the developing world.”

Spears discussed his research on children’s health and human capital, citing the determinants of success as sanitation, children’s height, and social support in Indian households and villages.

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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MUSLIM SOCIETIES IN SOUTH ASIA The Muslim Societies in South Asia seminar series, led and chaired by Ali Asani, FAS, Director, PABT, is cosponsored by the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program and seeks to address various issues of Muslim societies within South Asia, as well as relationships with other Muslim societies across the globe.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi

October 26, 2015

STORYTELLING, LEARNING AND HUMAN COMMUNICATION Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Author, translator, storyteller Chair: Ali Asani, FAS From left: Sulaiman Merchant, Salim Merchant, Ali Asani

October 2, 2015

REFLECTIONS: A CONVERSATION WITH SALIM AND SULAIMAN MERCHANT Salim and Sulaiman Merchant, Musicians and composers Moderator: Ali Asani, FAS The discussion covered Salim and Sulaiman’s personal lives and influences, the impact of devotional music on young listeners, analysis of the symbols and subtexts running through their work, and the function of music in transcendent experience. The talk also involved an examination of Salim and Sulaiman’s music videos and song lyrics in “Allahu Akbar” and “Khalipan,” as well as other compositions.

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South Asia Institute

Farooqi offered his view of storytelling as a core function of human communication, discussed the special place of stories in the Indian subcontinent, and talked about his own work as a storyteller, writer, and translator. He also spoke about the ‘Leading through Teaching’ storytelling workshop for Pakistan parliamentarians, which seeks to put education at the front and center of public discourse in Pakistan.

Anand V. Taneja

From left: Ali Asani, Ali Aftab Saeed, Saad Sultan

February 26, 2016

April 25, 2016

MUSLIM SAINTS AND HINDU

MUSIC AND SATIRE IN PAKISTAN

DAUGHTERS: KINSHIP, ETHICAL SELF-FASHIONING, AND INTERRELIGIOUS RELATIONS AT FIROZ SHAH KOTLA DARGAH, DELHI Anand V. Taneja, Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Department of Anthropology, Asian Studies Program, Graduate Department of Religion, Vanderbilt University

Ali Aftab Saeed with Saad Sultan, Musicians Chair: Ali Asani, FAS Satire is one of the most prominent forms of expression in Pakistani art. Most of the television hits that have surfaced in Pakistan’s rich art industry have been predicated on satire and have received great plaudits from critics and viewers alike. Saeed and Sultan discussed the role of musical satire in Pakistan, as well as the creation of their band, Beygairat Brigade, whose hits like “Dhinak Dhinak” and “Aalu Anday” have spread awareness and also entertained audiences.

Chair: Ali Asani, FAS Turning to the interactions between Muslims and Hindus at the popular Muslim saint-shrine of Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi, Taneja offered his model on how religions are opening up new potentialities of ethical life and self-fashioning for the others they interact with, without either “conversion” or the dilution of doctrinal specificity.

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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SOUTH ASIA WITHOUT BORDERS Focusing on the humanities and culture, broadly, the South Asia Without Borders seminar series seeks to break down traditional borders, whether they be disciplinary, geographical, or temporal. The series is led by Parimal Patil, Professor of Religion and Indian Philosophy, Chair of the Department of South Asian Studies, FAS, and is cosponsored by the Department of South Asian Studies.

Laila Bushra, right, with Sugata Bose, center left

Javed Younas

Suraj Yengde, left, with Abha Sur

November 5, 2015

December 3, 2015

February 3, 2016

BEYOND THE MADRASSA: INVESTIGATING THE CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE OF ISLAMIST

AID AND POVERTY: ARE GRANTS AND LOANS

ROHITH VEMULA, DEATH OF A

GROUPS IN AN URBAN SETTING

DIFFERENT? Javed Younas, Aman Fellow, SAI

Laila Bushra, Babar Ali Fellow, SAI

Chair: Asim Khwaja, HKS

Chair: Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, FAS

The aid allocation literature reveals a negative association between recipients’ income and aid inflows, implying that, all else being equal, poorer nations receive more aid. This discussion revolved around the implications of the findings for aid effectiveness debates.

Bushra discussed how and why the number of madrassas have increased in Pakistan since the 1980s, whether this growth can be tracked with any degree of accuracy, whether there is a need to go beyond the traditional understanding of madrassas, and what various Islamic institutions in Pakistan have in common.

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South Asia Institute

DALIT SCHOLAR IN HYDERABAD Banu Subramaniam, Professor, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, UMass Amherst Abha Sur, Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, MIT Suraj Yengde, Associate, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University Chair: Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, FAS Rohith Chakravarti Vemula’s suicide on January 17, 2016, sparked protests and outrage across India and gained widespread media attention as an alleged case of discrimination against Dalits and scheduled castes in India. Panelists discussed issues surrounding Rohith Vemula’s death and expressed solidarity with student and faculty protesters at Hyderabad University.

March 29, 2016

WATER AND SACRED SPACES: A CASE STUDY OF THE ELLORAKHULDABAD- DAULATABAD REGION Yaaminey Mubayi, Culture and Community Development Chair: Jinah Kim, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, FAS This seminar offered a different perspective to the study of water and human history. It focused on a historically settled and culturally active region of South Asia, Ellora-Khuldabad-Daulatabad in the Marathwada region of the Indian Deccan Plateau.

Mubayi examined the ecological features of the region as underpinning the historical and cultural development of the political, socioeconomic, and cultural systems intrinsic to the area.

Umar Saif

March 31, 2016

HOW $100 SMARTPHONES ARE TRANSFORMING THE GOVERNMENT IN PAKISTAN April 29, 2016

Umar Saif, Chairman, Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB); Vice Chancellor, ITU

NEW URBANISM AND POSTNATIONAL MODERNITY: CAPITAL, PEOPLE AND THE STATE IN

Chair: Karim R. Lakhani, Associate Professor of Business Administration, HBS

GURGAON, INDIA

Saif presented a number of smartphone-based systems his team has developed to monitor government work, improve civic services, and collect citizen feedback in Pakistan. He explained how they used smartphones to track and contain a dengue epidemic, identify crime hotspots, measure teacher presence, and monitor visits of rural doctors. Saif talked about an innovative vaccinator tracking application that has totally transformed the vaccination program in Pakistan to eradicate polio.

Sanjay Srivastava, Professor of Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi Chair: Parimal G. Patil, FAS This talk focused on new urban developments in India and suggested that an ethnographic account of this context provides fruitful insights into contemporary relationships between the state, the people, and capital. The seminar was centered on historical and ethnographic accounts of the privately developed DLF City in the North Indian state of Haryana. The discussion introduced the concepts of “post-national modernity” and “moral consumption.”

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URBANIZATION Postcolonial urbanization in South Asia has seen some of the largest and fastest-growing urban centers in the world. Rapid growth brings new challenges and opportunities for small, medium, and mega cities. The Urbanization seminar series is curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, GSD, and is cosponsored by the GSD.

October 27, 2015

November 9, 2015

DEVELOPMENT, DISSENT

THE CAPITALS OF

AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE

POSTCOLONIAL PAKISTAN:

BUILDING OF MODERN INDIA

URBANISM AS A DISCOURSE OF

Peter Scriver, Centre for Asian and Middle-Eastern Architecture (CAMEA), University of Adelaide Chair: Rahul Mehrotra, GSD The seminar examined how architecture, with its potential to both project change and recruit resistance to it, has entered in and out of political consciousness over the course of India’s long march from colonialism to global modernity.

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TERRITORIAL SELFHOOD Farhan Karim, Assistant Professor, University of Kansas, School of Architecture, Design, and Planning Chair: Rahul Mehrotra, GSD This seminar discussed how urban design was deployed as a metaphor, if not as a means, to display and exercise the new Pakistani government’s authoritative power to symbolize the aspiration of postcolonial identity and selfhood in a complex way.

March 9, 2016

CASTE IN THE TIME OF GLOBALIZATION Narendar Pani, Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India Chair: Sai Balakrishnan, GSD This talk proposed that political reality has lent its weight, for better or for worse, to the idea of the resilience of caste. If we look at three important dimensions of caste—identity, power, and discrimination—there is evidence of change but not necessarily a decline in importance. The discussion explored the nature of this resilience in the face of global influences, using evidence from Bangalore, one of the Indian cities most impacted by globalization.

Ranjani Mazumdar, left, with Rahul Mehrotra, near right

April 5, 2016 March 28, 2016

INDIA: THE URBAN TRANSITION Henrik Valeur, Architect-Urbanist, Founder and Creative Director of UiD Chair: Rahul Mehrotra, GSD Can India use urbanization as a vehicle for economic, human, and social development as China has done? How can Indian cities be made more inclusive, productive, and livable? This lecture discussed some of these problems and proposed possible solutions, using the cities of Bangalore in southern India and Chandigarh in northern India as its primary cases. The concept of smart cities was discussed, and coevolution and development urbanism were introduced as alternative strategies.

TECHNO-NETWORKS AND URBAN SPACE IN BOMBAY CINEMA Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University Chair: Rahul Mehrotra, GSD Mazumdar discussed the role of media and communication technologies in the imagination of urban spaces in contemporary Bombay cinema. Through film, the themes of violence, love, tragedy, and comedy are dramatized through new media technologies. Taken together such films offer a new geography of the experiential changes unraveling in contemporary India.

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COSPONSORED EVENTS SAI partners with interfaculty centers, institutes, and student organizations across Harvard on programs that bring multiple global viewpoints on issues relevant to South Asia.

Panelists at the Harvard-Brown Pakistani Film Festival

October 16, 2015

LOVE, WAR, AND OTHER LONGINGS: HARVARD-BROWN PAKISTANI FILM FESTIVAL

October 2, 2015

CHALLENGES TO PAKISTAN’S TORTUOUS PATH TO DEMOCRACY AND GOOD GOVERNANCE

The recent revival of cinema in Pakistan has generated excitement and captured the imagination. This festival explored the possibilities of reimagining family, friendship, love, and the nation, as well as retelling ways of injustice and cruelty in Pakistan and to examine their implications.

Cosponsored by the Harvard Asia Center, Brown University DSAS, Harvard Arts and Humanities Division, and the Harvard Pakistan Student Group

Ajmal Qureshi, Senior Fellow, Harvard University Asia Center

October 15, 2015

October 19, 2015

M-HEALTH-A STUDENT

THINKING IN ENGLISH, SPEAKING IN HINDI: THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN ‘BOLLYWOOD’

SURVEILLANCE: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

Tejaswini Ganti, Associate Professor of Anthropology, NYU

Omar Rahman, Vice Chancellor, Independent University, Bangladesh Cosponsored with the Department of Global Health and Population Brown Bag Seminar Series, HSPH

GALACTIC POLITY: STUDYING INDIAN RELIGIONS IN MODERN THAILAND

Cosponsored by the Thai Studies Program at Harvard University Asia Center

Cosponsored with the Harvard Asia Center

LONG TERM COMMUNITY

ON THE BACK STREETS OF THE

Justin McDaniel, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant: Laila Bushra, Babar Ali Fellow, SAI

CENTERED APPROACH TO

October 22, 2015

Cosponsored with the Harvard Social Anthropology Program Seminar Series

October 28, 2015

BENGALI POETRY IN AUSTRALIAN DESERTS: PLACING HISTORIES OF SOUTH ASIAN TRAVELERS Samia Khatun, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Melbourne Discussant: Vivek Bald, Associate Professor, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, MIT The discussion centered on the role of poetry of colonized people in crafting new histories of South Asian travelers, the historiographical practices deployed by aboriginal people to memorialize South Asians traveling through Australian deserts, and the alternative grounds on which we can place histories of South Asian travelers.

Cosponsored with MIT India

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South Asia Institute

Panelists at the National ID Conference

Charles Shao

November 19-21, 2015

November 23, 2015

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

FOOD SAFETY IN CHINA AND

IDENTIFICATION SYSTEMS:

INDIA

DATA, POLITICS, PROTECTION Keynote speaker: Nandan Nilekani, Former Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India

‘Nepal – In Memoriam’ on display at Harvard

October 29, 2015

NEPAL – IN MEMORIAM: CLOSING

This conference brought together experts from academia, government, business, and civil society to examine the scientific, technical, social, and political aspects of national ID systems. It provided a forum for intellectual exploration and discussion, complementary to but separate from meetings of government or industry representatives on the issue.

Charles Shao, Founder and Executive Chairman of Huaxia Dairy Farm Ltd Discussant: Ateya Khorakiwala, PhD Candidate, GSD Chair: Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS Shao spoke about food safety issues in China, and the role of business and entrepreneurship in addressing such safety issues. Khorakiwala, whose PhD focuses on food-supply systems in India, compared these Chinese issues to the India context.

Cosponsored with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Cosponsored with Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, HSPH

RECEPTION AND FUNDRAISER This exhibit was designed to raise funds for SAI’s Nepal Research and Reconstruction Fund. It supported long-term Nepal reconstruction projects developed in partnership with local organizations.

Sponsored with the Harvard Asia Center, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Korea Institute

December 4, 2015

OF SYMPATHY AND SOLIDARITY: JAPANESE BURAKU, SOUTH ASIAN DALIT, AND GRASSROOTS POLITICS ACROSS NATIONAL BOUNDARIES Joseph Hankins, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego Moderator: Mary C. Brinton, Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology and Chair, Department of Sociology, FAS

February 11 - 12, 2016

IS DECENTRALIZATION GOOD FOR DEVELOPMENT? PERSPECTIVES FROM ACADEMICS & POLICY MAKERS Jean-Paul Faguet, Professor of the Political Economy of Development, London School of Economics Feb. 11 event cosponsored with the Department of Global Health and Population, HSPH; Feb. 12 event cosponsored with the Center for International Development, HKS

Cosponsored with the Reischauer Institute Japan Forum presentation and the Weatherhead Center Program on U.S.-Japan Relations

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COSPONSORED EVENTS, CONT’D

Tarun Khanna, far right

Ian Holliday

March 22, 2016

DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE MARKET FOR TALENT: THE CASES OF CHINA AND INDIA Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS Discussant:

Meg

Rithmire,

Assistant Professor of

Business Administration, HBS

March 4 – March 6, 2016

CONFERENCE ON THE MUSIC OF SOUTH, CENTRAL AND WEST The exhibit ‘Freedom and Fear in Myanmar’ on display at Harvard

February 19, 2016

FREEDOM AND FEAR IN MYANMAR Ian Holliday, Vice-President and Pro-ViceChancellor (Teaching and Learning), The University of Hong Kong After years of censorship and oppression, Myanmar is beginning to embrace freedom of expression, as evidenced by its paintings.

Holliday discussed the exhibit on display, which featured paintings by artists working currently in Myanmar.

Cosponsored with the Harvard Asia Center

ASIA This conference, organized by Richard Wolf, FAS, was a response to rapidly expanding interests in the musical traditions of South Asia within the Society for Ethnomusicology and a recognition that South Asia has always been part of a larger historical network involving Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.

Cosponsored with the Department of Music, DSAS, the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Islam in Asia Series, the Asia Center, and the Provostial Fund for Arts and Humanities

By looking at the post-educational employment matching, Khanna has found that measuring talent in new ways can help disrupt the talent market that puts a high value on education from elite institutions.

Organizations like Aspiring Minds have created new digital tools to measure talent and help companies find suitable employees based on specific qualifications that are better indicators of good employees. In developing countries, these tools can help companies recruit ‘untapped talent.’

Cosponsored with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

February 18, 2016

THE SCOPE OF SPATIAL DATA AND TECHNOLOGY FOR BUILDING RESILIENCE OF VULNERABLE GROUPS: A CASE OF 2015 NEPAL EARTHQUAKE AND INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS IN KATHMANDU Dev Raj Paudyal, Lecturer in the School of Civil Engineering and Surveying, University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Australia This presentation explored the role of spatial data infrastructure (SDI) and technology for disaster risk reduction and community resilience.

The 2015 Nepal earthquake was used as a case study.

Cosponsored with the GSD Master of Design Risk and Resilience Lecture

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South Asia Institute

Meleeha Lodhi, right, with Cathryn Cluver

April 8 – 9, 2016

April 25-29, 2016

ANOTHER HARMONY REVISITED:

SOUTH ASIA WEEK AT HARVARD

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SOUTH

KENNEDY SCHOOL

ASIAN FOLKLORE

April 25: Ambassador Meleeha Lodhi, Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations

Cosponsored with the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology; the Office of the Provost; DSAS; the Mahindra Humanities Center; the Committee on Degrees in Theater, Dance, and Media; and the Office for the Arts at Harvard

April 26: Ambassador Mohammad Ziauddin of Bangladesh

April 29, 2016

WHAT IS ISLAM? A SYMPOSIUM IN MEMORY OF SHAHAB AHMED April 20, 2016

Michael Cook, FAS

A HIMALAYAN CONSENSUS: WHAT

Noah Feldman, HLS

INDIA AND CHINA COULD DO

Cemal Kafadar, FAS

April 26: Cameron Munter, Former US Ambassador to Pakistan April 28: Richard Olson, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan April 28: Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations Cosponsored with the Future of Diplomacy Project, HKS

Gülru Necipoglu, FAS Nirupama Rao, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Brown University; former Ambassador of India to China and the United States

Parimal Patil, FAS

Cosponsored with the Harvard Asia Center and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Cosponsored by the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies, the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, the Committee on the Study of Religion, with support of the Rabbi Joseph S. Shubow Memorial Fund, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, and the Islamic Legal Studies Program

Nicholas Watson, FAS

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43

STUDENTS SAI is the administrative unit for three student groups: the Harvard India Student Group, the Harvard Pakistan Student Group, and Harvard Students for Myanmar. SAI also supports students by awarding grants for internships, research, and the study of South Asian languages during the summer and winter sessions. SAI sponsors student events organized by the over twenty South Asia–related student groups at Harvard.

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Students in the Mobile Technology Summer Program South Asia Institute visit a village in Maharashtra with VNL, a microtelecom enabler that is bringing wi-fi to rural parts of India

SUMMER PROGRAM: USING MOBILE TECHNOLOGY TO CHANGE SOCIETIES With support from Harvard’s President’s Innovation Fund for International Experiences, Using Mobile Technology to Change Societies enabled Harvard College students to explore the potential of mobile technology to enable economic and social mobility in India through a summer program coordinated by SAI.

FACULTY: Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS JP Onnela, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, HSPH Satchit Balsari, Weill Cornell Global Emergency Medicine Division; FXB Center Malavika Jayaram, Executive Director, Digital Asia Hub; Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Arvind Sahay, Professor at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad Rekha Jain, Executive Chairperson, IIMA-Idea Telecom Center of Excellence

INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS: EkStep, Bangalore Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad JanaCare, Bangalore

Students learn about FINO in Central Delhi. These customer service points allow depositing and remitting cash with a cell phone

Students visit Operation Asha, which uses biometric identification to track TB patients in rural areas and urban slums

The eight-week program brought the students to Ahmedabad, Delhi, and Bangalore, and combined academic coursework, experiential learning, and immersive experiences in India’s varied contexts.

Students followed a reading syllabus, wrote weekly reflections and observations in the program blog, and participated in weekly discussions with the program faculty. The program culminated in final presentations both in Bangalore and back on campus in Cambridge where the students shared their summer insights.

STUDENT PARTICIPANT REFLECTIONS:

Students present their final projects to faculty at Harvard in the fall

“These experiences repeatedly immersed me in the nuances and complexity of how some innovation or abstraction lends itself and succeeds in the Indian (or developing country) market rife with institutional voids, trust deficits, disparity, and contradictions.”

“Although I am not particularly set on pursuing the mobile technology field as a career option, the program still very much influenced my thoughts on my future trajectory.”

“I believe my summer experience helped me craft … new ways of thinking to understand and figure out how mobile phones may impact development.”

“I do not think I could have spent my sophomore summer in a more ideal way: studying and working in international development, surrounded by an interdisciplinary faculty all of which have some sort of connection to and confidence in technology, gaining professional experience at a ‘hot startup’ and, lastly, doing all this in India—a place which, despite my Indian origin, I have never previously traveled.”

Students visit Aspiring Minds, which provides online assessment tools for entry level job seekers and employers

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STUDENT GRANTS Through its grant program, SAI offers a variety of learning opportunities in South Asia for Harvard students.

Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to apply for research grants that support independent research and thesis fieldwork. SAI has partnered with over 50 organizations in South Asia to offer internships to Harvard students.

SAI has awarded 55 grants this year for summer and winter research, internships, and language study.

WINTER SESSION GRADUATE INTERNSHIP GRANTS Hira Baig, MTS, HDS Internship at Women’s Advocacy at Shirkat Gah in Karachi, Pakistan Yoko Okura, MPP, HKS Internship with Daayitwa in Kathmandu, Nepal

GRADUATE RESEARCH GRANTS Syeda Farwa Fatima, EdM, HGSE Understanding Special Education System in Pakistan Rohit Kumar, MPA-ID, HKS Reducing Inefficiencies in Agricultural Markets in India Muhammad Zia Mehmood, MPP, HKS Resolving Refusals: Polio vaccinations in Pakistan Soledad Prillaman, PhD ’17 Disconnected and Uninformed: Dissecting and Dismantling India’s Gender Gap in Political Participation Vyasan Radhakrishnan, MPA-ID, HKS Understanding inefficiencies in India’s agricultural markets with a view to suggest robust policy options to remove them Anne Shrestha, MPA-ID, HKS Research work for Second Year Policy Analysis: Electricity Crisis in Nepal Hannah Yoo, DDM, HSDS Analysis of Indian Mothers’ Protective Factors on Child’s Oral and Nutritional Health

UNDERGRADUATE INTERNSHIP GRANTS Javier Aranzales, 2016 Internship with Evaldesign to research impact assessments of education interventions for development in India Anjali Chandra, 2019 WHO India’s 100% Vaccination and Polio Eradication Monitoring Campaign Shaiba Rather, 2017 Internship with NDTV in India Sarah Rahman, 2018 Internship at St. Jude ChildCare Centres in India Zuneera Shah, 2019 Internship at the History Project in Pakistan Bharath Venkatesh, 2017 Nonprofit internship in economic consulting in Nepal

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South Asia Institute

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH GRANTS Neil Davey, 2018 Harvard Development Initiative project with the goal of empowering local change-makers to spur development in India Pranay Nadella, 2018 Harvard Development Initiative project with the goal of empowering local change-makers to spur development in India Raj Vatsa, 2018 Harvard Development Initiative project with the goal of empowering local change-makers to spur development in India Austin Wu, 2016 Nepal Earthquake Relief Effort Data Usage Narrative Patrick Xu, 2016 Nepal Earthquake Relief Effort Data Usage Narrative

SUMMER SESSION GRADUATE INTERNSHIP GRANTS

Hardeep Dhillon, PhD, GSAS Traversing the Pacific Ocean: The Journeys of South Asians to the Americas Joshua Ehrlich, PhD, GSAS The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, 1772-1835 Shireen Hamza, PhD, GSAS Arabic Medical Manuscripts at Khuda Baksh and Raza Libraries Justin Henceroth, Master in Design Studies, GSD Innovation in Disasters: Building Local-Level Resilience through the Implementation of Remote Monitoring Neelam Khoja, PhD, GSAS The Politics of Power in 18th century Punjab: Space, Culture, and Identity Muhammad Liaqat, PhD, FAS When do Citizens Expect Better Service from the Government?

Sophie Maguire, Master Landscape Architecture I, GSD Hidden Landscapes: Visualizing the Functional Presence of India’s Stepwells Aaron Mendonca, Master in Design Studies, Energy & Environments, GSD Forest Practice in India

Yoko Okura, MPP, HKS Enhancing community capacity in resilience in the recovery process of Nepal

Maung Nyeu, EdD, HGSE Vocabulary Development through Discussion and Debate for Cultural and Linguistic Minority Students

GRADUATE LANGUAGE STUDY GRANTS

Haibei Peng, Master in Architecture I, GSD The Nested Scale of Time: to protect and display biodiversity in South Asia through research on agriculture and seed bank

Lee Ling Ting, PhD, FAS AIIS Summer Language Program (Sanskrit) Iris Yellum, PhD, FAS Tamil Language Study at American Institute of Indian Studies in Madurai, Tamil Nadu

Priyasha Saksena, SJD, HLS Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Colonial South Asia, c. 18581947

Sonali Dhingra, PhD, FAS Funding for Odia (Oriya) Language Program at AIIS Summer Program 2016

Justin Stern, PhD, GSAS A Geography of the Toll-Free: Business Process Outsourcing and Urban Transformation in India and the Philippines

GRADUATE RESEARCH GRANTS

David Zielnicki, Master of Landscape Architecture I, GSD Hidden Landscapes: Visualizing the Functional Presence of Indias Stepwells

Rohit Chandra, PhD, FAS Adaptive State Capitalism: The Indian Coal Industry Gregory Clines, PhD, FAS Fourth Braj Bhasha and Early Hindi Workshop: Trest, Czech Republic Fletcher Coleman, PhD, GSAS Ascetic Aesthetics: The Brahman Ascetic in the Visual Lexicon of Early Buddhism

Continues on next page

UNDERGRADUATE INTERNSHIP GRANTS

Patrick Xu, left, and Austin Wu in Nepal during winter session

Divya Arya, 2019 India Research Center Internship Layla Kousari, 2019 Jana Care Internship Angela Leocata, 2018 Sangath Internship to Research Community-based Intervention for Maternal Depression Shreya Mathur, 2018 Adharshila Internship in Healthcare Ryan Song, 2017 Jana Care Summer Technical Internship

UNDERGRADUATE LANGUAGE STUDY GRANTS Ajay Singh, 2018 American Institute of Indian Studies – Punjabi program in Chandigarh

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH GRANTS Jasmine Chia, 2018 Thesis research in Myanmar Katherine Hoffman, 2017 The Politics of Contemporary Women’s Rights in Myanmar: The Paradoxical Case of Aung San Suu Kyi Marisa Houlahan, 2017 Shipbreaking Lives and Labor in Chittagong, Bangladesh

Hannah Yoo, right, with children at an oral health camp in Powai

Neil Davey, center, researches health at an urban slum in Delhi

Sarani Jayawardena, 2018 Examines why multi-ethnic states (Sri Lanka/ Singapore) narrate identities differently in curriculum Shahrukh Khan, 2017 Language Ideology and Education in Pakistan Madhavi Narayanan, 2017 Senior thesis on Tamil war widows’ access to transitional justice in Sri Lanka post-2015 election Shaiba Rather, 2017 Senior thesis research on beef bans in India

Visit our site to read reports by each student: http://southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/studentgrant-reports/.

Syeda Farwa Fatima, right, interviews a government official on the status of state run special education institutes in Pakistan

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STUDENT EVENTS SAI provides administrative and financial support to undergraduate and graduate student organizations at Harvard for programming pertaining to South Asia, both at Harvard and in the region.

September 17, 2015

WELCOME BACK CHAAT PARTY The party, attended by over 100 students, welcomed incoming and returning students to meet SAI’s visiting fellows and faculty, and learn about student opportunities at SAI and across campus, all while enjoying some delicious South Asian snacks.

September 20, 2016

FALL MELA The event, attended by over 300 students, featured captivating performances by the trainers of BollyX, a Bollywood dance fitness club. Sharanya Chandran, a classical dancer from India’s Natya Vriksha Academy, also performed a beautiful Bharatanatyam routine.

The student group Harvard College for Bangladesh at SAI’s Chaat Party in September

Cosponsored with the Harvard India Student Group (HISG)

October 3, 2015

EID CELEBRATION Cosponsored with the Harvard College Pakistan Student Association

October 6, 2015

GRANT OPPORTUNITIES OPEN HOUSE SAI staff shared grant opportunities with interested students, and past grant recipients offered their experiences in the region.

October 16, 2015

UNDERSTANDING BIHAR’S ELECTION Milan Vaishnav, Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jeffrey Witsoe, Associate Professor, Union College Discussants: Rohit Chandra, PhD Candidate, HKS Sharan Mamidipudi, PhD Candidate, HKS The panel elicited opinions from both speakers on a variety of issues: the current reconfiguration of regional political parties, the plausibility that this election is an election of survival for regional parties, the relative importance of identity politics vs. growth performance, the organization of political campaigns around individual images, and panelists’ election outcome predictions.

Cosponsored with the HKS India Caucus

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South Asia Institute

Students at SAI’s Chaat Party in September

BollyX performs at HISG’s Fall Mela

November 2, 2015

INTERNSHIPS IN ASIA PANEL Tamara Fernando, Harvard College 2016; Chunkikuli Ladies College, Internship, Sri Lanka Jeshurun Gnanasegaram, Harvard College 2017; Harvard Bangalore Science Initiative This student panel discussed their diverse internship experiences in Asia, and shared their strategies for finding and funding an internship.

Cosponsored with the Harvard College Office of Career Services

November 13, 2015

DIWALI CELEBRATION The Harvard India Student Group hosted their largest event of the year, attended by over 400 students across Harvard and various other Cambridge and Boston schools including MIT and Tufts. It was a fun-filled evening of traditional and contemporary performances, Bollywood dancing, and Indian food.

Emil Kuruvilla of the American India Foundation speaks to students at SAI’s Grants Open House in October

Cosponsored with the Harvard India Student Group, IndiaGSD, South Asia Business Association Student Group, HBS, South Asia Law Student Association, HLS, and South Asia Student Association, HSPH

December 2, 2015

REFLECTIONS ON MIGRATION AND INDENTURED SERVITUDE: A TALK BY GAIUTRA BAHADUR Gaiutra Bahadur, Author Chair: Sunil Amrith, Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies, Professor of History, FAS Bahadur is an award-winning American journalist who writes frequently about migration, literature, and gender. In this talk, Bahadur offered her reflections on migration and indentured servitude.

Cosponsored with the South Asia Across Disciplines GSAS Workshop Student performers at HISG’s Diwali celebration in November

January 8 – 9, 2016, Mumbai

HARVARD US-INDIA INITIATIVE CONFERENCE The conference featured speakers ranging from industrialists to politicians, entrepreneurs to actors, activists to artists, all discussing the future of India. Participants were encouraged to think critically about how to tackle the many issues facing the country. The conference also offered students the opportunity to participate in various entrepreneurship and social impact competitions.

Cosponsored with the Harvard College US-India Initiative

Students at HISG’s Diwali celebration in November

Student performers at HISG’s Diwali celebration in November

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STUDENT EVENTS, CONT’D January 16 – 24, 2016

EQUALITY, TOLERANCE AND FREEDOM: THE EFFECT OF CULTURE AND POLICY IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD The annual Harvard College in Asia conference tackled issues ranging from education, to global health, to racial inequality. Beyond comprehending the complex societal values and relationships in various parts of the globe, the conference challenged delegates to understand the difference between equality and justice. The aim of the conference was not limited to shedding greater light on these issues, but to inspiring attendees to challenge the status quo.

Cosponsored with the Harvard College in Asia Program, and the Harvard Korea Institute, Institute of Politics, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Asia Center, and Global Health Institute

Tanvi Madan, left, with Nirupama Rao at the Harvard India Conference in February

January 25, 2016

VASUBANDHU’S RELATIVISM ABOUT THE BUDDHA’S CAUSAL CONCEPTS

Ashan Iqbal

Jonathan Gold, Associate Professor of Religion, Princeton University The great Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu (fourth/fifth century) critiqued his contemporaries for their profuse ontologies, which he felt they had developed out of a naively reificationist reading of Buddhist scripture. Gold discussed the Treasury of Abhidharma, through which he explained, and argued against, Vaibhasika realism about the four conditions: birth, stability, aging, and impermanence.

Cosponsored with the Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum

February 1, 2016

Student audience at the Harvard India Conference in February

THE BUDDHA’S MOTHER’S DEATH: PAST AND PRESENT Kim Gutschow, Lecturer, Williams College; Professor, Institute of Ethnology; and Chair, Anthropology of Public Health, Center for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen University Cosponsored with the Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum

February 4, 2016

EXPLORE CAREERS IN SOUTH ASIA: PANEL AND MIXER Sidhant Jena, HBS ’11, Founder of Jana Care Joanna Jolly, Shorenstein Fellow & BBC South Asia Editor Karima Ladhani, ScD Candidate HSPH ’18, Founder & CEO of Barakat Bundle Panelists who have worked in a variety of sectors in South Asia including global health, technology, start-ups, and media/journalism discussed their experience and networked with students.

Cosponsored with the Harvard College Office of Career Services

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South Asia Institute

Students learn from Sidhant Jena, center (facing away), and Joanna Jolly, left, at the Office of Career Services in February

Holi celebration in March

March 26, 2016

HOLI CELEBRATION Students at the Holi celebration in March

February 6 - 7, 2016

March 8, 2016

INDIA IN TRANSITION – OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

RADICAL PRACTICE: ASSERTING

The annual Harvard India Conference brought together business leaders, entertainment professionals, government officials, philanthropists, and many other leaders to engage in a conversation about India’s path to global leadership.

Hosted by graduate students of Harvard University

February 22 - 23, 2016

RE-THINKING LOCAL: A CROSSREGIONAL DIALOGUE ABOUT STRATEGIES FOR LOCAL PRACTICE IN CITIES

POWER AND AGENCY Diana Al-Hadid, Designer Julia King, Architectural designer and urban researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science Dr. Atyia Martin, Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Boston; Adjunct faculty in the Master of Homeland Security at Northeastern University Moderator: Susan Surface, Program Director at Design in Public

Michael Murphy, Executive Director of MASS Design Group

Dedicated to empowering women designers, this event featured dialogue on what it means to be a creative woman developing, challenging, and innovating her craft in the twenty-first century.

In exploring conventional and potential modes of practice, the talk aimed to cultivate radical alternatives to the dominant roles and methods of our fields.

Vo Trong Nghia, Contemporary architect in Vietnam

Cosponsored with Women in Design, GSD

Rahul Mehrotra, GSD

Marina Tabassum, Architect in Bangladesh This public discussion program thematically explored how architects are responding to new patterns of urbanization, creating models for construction and fabrication that support sustainable development, and catalyzing local institutions to promote dialogue about the role of design in improving cities.

Cosponsored with Women in Design, GSD, the Boston Society of Architects Foundation, Harvard Asia Center, and Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative

March 1, 2016

CIVIL SERVICE REFORMS IN PAKISTAN Ashan Iqbal, Minister of Planning, Development, and Reform Asim Khwaja, HKS Michael Callen, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, HKS Cosponsored with the Harvard Pakistan Student Group and the Pakistan Caucus at HKS

March 10-11, 2016

GLOBAL AND INTERNATIONAL HISTORY: THE ECONOMIC DIMENSION The Harvard Graduate Student Conference on International History (Con-IH) provided a forum to discuss cutting-edge studies that take up the dimensions of economics in international, regional, and global historical study, for any era from antiquity to the present, and in any world region.

Cosponsored with the Center for African Studies, the Center for European Studies, the Center for History and Economics, the Center for Middle East Studies, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Department of History, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History

Over 200 people attended the event, which began with a lunch in Quincy House and a tournament of kabbadi, a traditional Indian game that involves running and tackling. Guests were split into teams (freshmen, sophomores, seniors, juniors, and graduate students), and eventually the freshman team was crowned as the winners. Then, students went to the MAC Quad, where packets of colored powder were placed in the center of the field.

Cosponsored with Harvard Dharma and the Harvard India Student Group

March 29, 2016

THE POWER OF POLITICAL CONNECTIONS IN LOCAL ELECTIONS – EVIDENCE FROM PAKISTAN Asad Liaquat, PhD Candidates, HKS Cosponsored with the Harvard Pakistan Student Group and the Pakistan Caucus at HKS

April 2, 2016

BETWEEN STATE AND FAITH: ASPECTS OF PERSONAL LAWS IN COLONIAL INDIA Tanika Sarkar, Professor of Modern History, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University Chair: Hardeep Dhillon, PhD candidate in History, FAS Cosponsored with the South Asia Across Disciplines GSAS Workshop and the Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University

April 16 – 17, 2016

HARVARD PAKISTAN FORUM The third annual event focused on the theme “Pakistan in the World” and provided a platform for topics such as the efficacy of Pakistan’s foreign policy and the intractability of certain social issues through which Pakistan suffers.

Cosponsored with the Harvard College Pakistan Association

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GRADUATE STUDENT ASSOCIATES Each year, SAI supports Graduate Student Associates (GSAs) from across the different schools at Harvard on research pertaining to South Asia. The goal of the program is to support original and independent research on South Asia and to establish a community of peers studying some aspect of the region.

Mou Banerjee PhD Candidate, Department of History, FAS Mou is a fifth-year graduate student specializing in Modern South Asian history.

Her research explores the dialogues and debates of Indian intellectuals with evangelical Protestant Christians and missionaries in the nineteenth century, especially in the Bengal Presidency in India. In her analysis of these debates, Banerjee charts the development of a complex relationship of overt repudiation and covert fascination, where Christianity was perceived as a religion and a philosophy, a discursive and dialectical category, a denominator of racial and social difference, and a repository of Enlightenment ethos and modernity. Banerjee investigates the way in which this examination of Christianity represents a philosophical engagement, leading to contestation over the nature of faith’s sociopolitical implications, and of the political responsibility of the colonized subjects.

Rosanna Picascia PhD Candidate, FAS Rosanna’s dissertation examines interreligious debates between Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophers on the epistemology of testimony, and in particular, the epistemic status of scripture. Rosanna’s research examines these debates through the lens of a 9th century Kashmiri Nyaya intellectual, Jayanta Bhatta. Not only is Jayanta a strong proponent of the authority of scripture, but also, he provides a lucid and comprehensive account of the multiplicity of views on the subject. In doing so, Jayanta provides a vivid picture of the key players and issues in the debate surrounding testimony as a source of knowledge as it occurred in India during the 6th-9th centuries. Although taking place over a thousand years ago, this conversation has important insights to share concerning the relationship between reason and tradition. Rosanna holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a BA from The George Washington University. She has served as a Teaching Fellow in both FAS and the Extension School for courses on world religions (particularly South Asian religions), philosophy of religion, and the Sanskrit language. She also co-taught a J-term course in January 2014 on conceptions of the soul in Indian religious and philosophical traditions.

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Mircea Raianu PhD Candidate, Department of History, FAS Mircea is completing a dissertation charting the historical trajectory of the Tata Group, India’s largest business firm since the early twentieth century, in a global and comparative context. Born into one of many colonial merchant families involved in the opium and cotton trades in the 1860s, Tata expanded and diversified into key sectors of the emergent Indian national economy (with interests in steel, hydroelectricity, chemicals, and civil aviation) by Independence in 1947. Raianu’s dissertation explores the unique modes of corporate governance made possible by the Tatas’ philanthropic bequests, educational initiatives, welfare programs, and expertise in urban planning and scientific research. His aim is to present Tata as a foundational case study for addressing the contemporary ethical challenges for business within and beyond South Asia. Supported by a Fulbright–Nehru Fellowship and a Frederick Sheldon Travelling Fellowship, Raianu conducted archival research in India for ten months over the 2013–2014 academic year.

Sarika Gupta Ringwala PhD Candidate, Public Policy, HKS Sarika’s general areas of interest are development economics and political economy. Specifically, her research focuses on public service delivery, citizen empowerment, and gender issues in South Asia. With her current research in India, she hopes to identify barriers citizens face in opting into social benefit programs, as well as highlight the welfare impact of social pensions (i.e., cash transfers), particularly on women and their extended families. Prior to joining Harvard, she worked for the Jameel Poverty Action Lab in India. She has also worked for Plan USA and the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C.

Priyasha Saksena SJD Candidate, HLS Priyasha’s dissertation is a historical examination of how sovereignty was constructed in colonial South Asia, primarily in the princely states. The international status of the princely states was deeply nebulous; the result was that the very idea of sovereignty was highly contested, and became a point of conflict among British officials, indigenous lawyers, nationalists, and princes using the language of international law to articulate alternative visions. Since current histories of international law focus primarily on legal texts, Priyasha proposes the use of archival research in colonial-era juridical disputes between the princely states and the colonial authorities to expand the historical frame. Her dissertation explores both intellectual arguments as well as legal practice to trace the evolution of alternative visions of sovereignty and develop insights into the relationship between international law and colonialism.

STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS Twenty-three student organizations across Harvard bring together diverse interests from the various schools and host cultural, social, and educational events on South Asia.

DHARMA, HARVARD COLLEGE

INDIA GSD, GSD

Dharma, Harvard’s Hindu Students Association, provides Harvard students with the opportunity to learn about and participate in Hindu festivals and traditions on campus within a close-knit community of fellow students.

India GSD looks at design issues pertinent to the country and is an agency for understanding, provocation, and debates about the past, present, and future of design in India.

HARVARD BHANGRA, HARVARD COLLEGE Harvard Bhangra exposes the Harvard community to the art form of Bhangra through campus performances, represents Harvard at competitions, and teaches Bhangra to interested individuals.

HARVARD COLLEGE FOR BANGLADESH This is Harvard College’s official organization dedicated to celebrating the Bengali culture and organizing outreach and fundraising events devoted to Bangladesh.

HARVARD DEEPAM, HARVARD COLLEGE Deepam seeks to inspire enthusiasm for the vibrant, energetic and graceful tradition of Indian classical dance on campus and in the greater Boston area.

HARVARD INDIA STUDENT GROUP* HISG is a university-wide student group that provides a platform for communication and collaboration among students and faculty on Indiarelated topics.

HARVARD MIRCH, HARVARD COLLEGE Harvard Mirch is a coed South Asian a capella group aiming to bring together the best of South Asian and Western pop music.

HARVARD PAKISTAN STUDENT GROUP* HPSG is a Harvard University–wide group that mobilizes intellectual, activist, and entrepreneurial interest in Pakistan across thirteen schools.

HARVARD STUDENTS FOR MYANMAR, HARVARD COLLEGE Harvard Students for Myanmar is an organization that serves to raise awareness about the country of Myanmar (Burma).

HARVARD US INDIA INITIATIVE, HARVARD COLLEGE The Harvard US India Initiative is a student run organization that aims to empower the youth and promote awareness about India’s most pressing issues.

INDIA CAUCUS, HKS The group’s mission is to bring India-centric events, opportunities, and resources to the students and faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

PAKISTAN CAUCUS, HKS The Pakistan Caucus at the Harvard Kennedy School seeks to present Pakistan’s culture and diversity, research and innovation, as well as Pakistan’s role within the international community. The Caucus facilitates the transition of Pakistanis at the Kennedy School into global citizens. Lastly, the group promotes the notion of learning through experience—the best way to learn about Pakistan is to visit Pakistan.

PAKISTAN STUDENT ASSOCIATION, HARVARD COLLEGE The Harvard College Pakistan Student Association aims to cultivate a vibrant community of Harvard students with a deep interest in Pakistan.

PAKISTAN STUDENT GROUP, HGSE The HGSE Harvard Pakistan Student Group creates opportunities for HGSE students to connect on activities and topics of interest related to Pakistan.

SANGEET, HARVARD COLLEGE Harvard Sangeet serves to usher South Asian music to its deserved place among the other cultural and artistic establishments at Harvard, and to establish Harvard as a premier seat of South Asian musical leadership.

SOUTH ASIA ASSOCIATION, HARVARD COLLEGE The Harvard South Asian Association brings the Harvard community closer to South Asia and its diaspora through academic, political, social, outreach, and cultural initiatives.

SOUTH ASIA LAW STUDENTS ASSOCIATION, HLS The Harvard South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA) provides a forum for those in the Harvard Law School community interested in South Asian American and South Asian legal issues.

SOUTH ASIA MEN’S COLLECTIVE, HARVARD COLLEGE The South Asian Men’s Collective (SAMC) works to strengthen a sense of brotherhood between members and create a supportive arena for dialogue and discussion.

SOUTH ASIAN DANCE COMPANY, HARVARD COLLEGE The Harvard South Asian Dance Company (SADC) aims to encourage creative expression through fusion of classical, folk, and Bollywood South Asian dance styles with Western styles such as hip-hop and modern dance.

SOUTH ASIAN DANCE TROUPE, HGSE The mission of the South Asian Dance Troupe is to preserve and draw upon Bollywood and Bhangra classics and choreography while adding a contemporary spin to South Asian dance on the Harvard campus. Its purpose is also to gather Harvard students who want to learn dance, practice, and potentially perform at local events.

SOUTH ASIAN STUDENT ASSOCIATION, HSPH The HSPH South Asian Student Organization focuses on health issues affecting people of South Asian origin; collaborates with faculty, staff, alumni, and other student groups; and launches independent initiatives.

SOUTH ASIA BUSINESS ASSOCIATION, HBS The South Asian Business Association (SABA) provides a forum for business students who want to participate in and lead initiatives related to South Asia. Objectives include community unification, education, representation of South Asia on campus, and inclusion.

SOUTH ASIA CAUCUS, HKS

*The Harvard India Student Group and the Harvard Pakistan Student Group are recognized by Harvard as university-wide initiatives.

The HKS South Asia Caucus serves as a forum for all HKS students interested in South Asia to exchange political, economic, social, and cultural ideas impacting the region in general, as well as specific countries in the region.

For links to these student group webpages, please visit our website: http://southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/studentorganizations/

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IN REGION With representatives in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, SAI supports Harvard faculty and student research, teaching, and field experiences. SAI sponsors numerous events throughout the region, including student and alumni-focused events, faculty-led symposia, and other academic events.

January 12, 2016, Islamabad Harvard Global Networking Night (p. 59)

July 22, 2015, Delhi One Harvard Young Harvard (p. 59) August 17, 2015, Delhi Kumbh Mela: Mapping the

December 10, 2016, Karachi

Ephemeral Megacity (p. 26)

Harvard Alumni Dinner (p. 59)

September 2015 - May 2016, Kathmandu Monthly meetings of the Harvard Alumni Group in Nepal (p. 59)

January 20, 2016, Delhi

December 16-18, 2015, Karachi Workshop on Mental Health and Disaster Response in Pakistan (p. 22)

January 11 - 14, 2016,

Unstable Constitutionalism: Law and Politics in South Asia (p. 24)

February 5- 8, 2016, Dhaka

February 2 – 4, 2016, Delhi

Dhaka Art Summit (p. 17)

Science and Technology-based

February 6, 2016, Dhaka

Social Entrepreneurship (p. 20)

Roundtable Discussion with BRAC on Entrepreneurship and

Gandhinagar

Livelihood Creation (p. 59)

Rural Livelihoods Creation in the Indian Crafts Sector Workshop (p. 20) January 6 – March 20, 2016, Mumbai The State of Architecture (p. 24) January 8 – 9, 2016, Mumbai Harvard US-India Initiative Conference (p. 51) January 18, 2016, Mumbai Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity (p. 26) January 28 – 30, 2016, Mumbai Women’s Empowerment Workshop (p. 20) March 19 – 20, Mumbai Windows and Mirrors: Reflecting on Recent Architecture In South Asia (p. 24)

June 22, 2015, Bangalore, Delhi Harvard Global Networking Night (p. 59) January 12, 2016, Bangalore, Delhi Harvard Global Networking Night (p. 59)

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January 12, 2016, Yangon Harvard Global Networking Night (p. 59)

WEBINARS: USING MOBILE TECHNOLOGY TO CHANGE SOCIETIES SAI hosts three webinars throughout the year, which give faculty the chance to interact in real time with students and academic leaders at over 15 universities across South Asia. Through webinar software provided by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC), the interactive sessions allow students in the region to engage on issues critical to the region, and submit questions on social media.

Mobile phone use has become ubiquitous in South Asia—mobiles serve not only as a tool to close the information gap, but also as a powerful device to promote economic growth in emerging markets. These webinars explored the potential of the technology to improve livelihoods by connecting Harvard faculty to universities in South Asia in real time.

For full recordings of the webinars, please visit: http://southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/sai-webinars/

JP Onnela

Malavika Jayaram

Satchit Balsari

September 15, 2015

October 13, 2015

November 17, 2015

USING CELL PHONES TO STUDY BEHAVIOR: FROM INDIVIDUALS TO ENTIRE NATIONS

WHO OWNS BIG DATA?

MOBILE HEALTH AT THE

JP Onnela, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, Department of Biostatistics, HSPH Cell phones are no longer just a tool of communication—they improve the lives of billions of people. As the technology continues to improve, collecting behavioral data is becoming easier and less intrusive. Data from cell phones can reveal everything from an individual’s mental health, to ways pathogens spread, to social network functions at the societal level. In this session, Onnela discussed his work on using digital phenotyping to study the behavior of social networks with big data.

Malavika Jayaram, Executive Director, Digital Asia Hub; Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; Visiting Scholar with the Surveillance and Every Day Life Group FARS Research Group, the Centre for International Security Studies and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, The University of Sydney While technologies advance at a rapid pace, the legal and regulatory framework often lags behind, or poses compliance issues across multiple jurisdictions. This session focused on the major factors impacting data, including access and collection, the privacy and security of personally identifiable information, and transparency about the use and dissemination of data.

NASHIK KUMBH MELA Satchit Balsari, Weill Cornell Global Emergency Medicine Division; FXB Center The world’s largest gathering of humanity happens every 12 years on the banks of the Godavari in Nashik, and reached its peak in August and September 2015, when over ten million people from across the globe converged on the tier 2 city. In this session, Balsari shared his experience at the 2015 Nashik Kumbh, where he worked with a medical team to train local doctors on how to use technology to track health information of festival-goers in real time. Balsari discussed how information from the technology can be used to provide early warnings of threatening infectious diseases, and to suggest the potential impact of digitized disease surveillance at future events.

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COMMUNITY SAI forges connections with communities outside of Harvard interested in South Asian culture and studies, including alumni groups, K–12 schools, peer institutions, and community organizations. These partnerships inform current areas of interest and help identify the need for further scholarship on issues relevant to the region.

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Osman Khalid Waheed at the Harvard Alumni Dinner in Karachi in December

COMMUNITY AND OUTREACH EVENTS May 10, 2015, Harvard

SOUTH ASIAN POETS MEETING

South Asian Poets Meeting

The South Asian Poets of New England hosted the nineteenth India Poetry Reading session, where thirty poets explored the theme of “identity” in a wide variety of South Asian languages. The groups began with the topic of cosmic connections exploring origins, followed by the terrestrial functionality of relationship and experiences, and finally individual perception of one’s personal characteristics.

Harvard alumni gather in Yangon

Cosponsored with DSAS

December 10, 2016, Karachi June 5 – 6, 2015, Harvard

HARVARD ALUMNI DINNER

TRANSFORMATION CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE BANGLADESH GARMENT INDUSTRY

SAI staff met with Harvard alumni and the HBS Club of Pakistan to inform the community in Pakistan about’s SAI’s growing presence in the region and discover new opportunities for collaboration.

This conference sought to identify and explore solutions to the challenges in the transformation of the Bangladesh Garment Industry, by analyzing the tools and metrics to measure progress and recommend the best practices for sustainable development.

Cosponsored with the Harvard University Center for the Environment and International Sustainable Development Institute, Inc.

June 22, 2015, Delhi and Bangalore

HARVARD GLOBAL NETWORKING NIGHT Hosted by the Harvard Alumni Association, this evening function gives alumni an opportunity to explore and expand their Harvard Network.

July 22, 2015, Delhi

ONE HARVARD YOUNG HARVARD Incoming students, current students, alumni, and affiliates gathered for a night of socializing and networking.

Cosponsored with the Harvard India Student Group and the Harvard Club of India

October 23, 2015 and November 30, 2015, Harvard

SOUTH ASIA DIASPORA MEETINGS These meetings brought together Harvard and other local university scholars interested in diaspora studies. They discussed how to fill the gaps in understanding relevant to the South Asia diaspora, especially in fields like science and public health. The group aims to provide a platform for future events, workshops, and publications around topics such as remittances, health, and temporary migration.

December 4-5, 2015, Harvard

SOUTH ASIA HEALTHCARE LEADERSHIP FORUM With an emphasis on building leadership skills, fostering a sense of community, and mobilizing resources toward distinct initiatives, the South Asia Healthcare Leadership Forum (SAHLF) is a group of medical practitioners and academics in the US interested in the issue of health in South Asia. SAHLF’s goal is to bring together and organize the growing South Asian health care leadership community, and develop a collective agenda for what the community can execute together. They believe the inter-generational connections and strong community fostered by the SAHLF 2015 event will be beneficial for future global impact efforts in South Asia. The forum is an annual event that attracts over 70 participants, including CEOs, venture capitalists, clinicians, academics, and policy makers.

January 12, 2016, Bangalore, Islamabad, Delhi, and Yangon

HARVARD GLOBAL NETWORKING NIGHT Hosted by the Harvard Alumni Association, this evening function gives alumni an opportunity to explore and expand their Harvard Network.

February 6, 2016, Dhaka

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION WITH BRAC ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND LIVELIHOOD CREATION SAI Director Tarun Khanna, HBS, and Richard Cash, HSPH, met with senior officials from BRAC University, a SAI partner organization in Bangladesh. BRAC is working to develop social enterprise programs in health, education, and livelihood creation that are affordable and that deliver high-quality services. Khanna provided lessons from his experience working in the field in India at organizations such as Aspiring Minds, which helps organizations, governments, and institutions measure and identify talent to create a level playing field in education and employment.

May 13, 2016, Harvard

DEVELOPMENT IN ASIA Keynote Speaker: Benjamin Siegel, Professor of History, Boston University

November 5, 2015

ONLINE BOOK GROUP: SEA OF POPPIES Sunil Amrith, Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies, Professor of History, FAS Amrith led an online discussion of Sea of Poppies

by Amitav Ghosh as part of the Global Studies Outreach program at Harvard. Amrith explained some of the major themes in the book, including migration and colonialism. The novel sheds light on how even the “smallest players” in history were affected.

Cosponsored with the Asia Center

Assistant

The conference featured workshops for those teaching high school and middle school courses on South Asia.

Cosponsored with Educators for Teaching South Asia, in conjunction with The Winsor School, Phillips Academy, and the Groton School

September 2015 - May 2016, Kathmandu

HARVARD ALUMNI GROUP IN NEPAL MONTHLY MEETING The Harvard Alumni Group in Nepal group’s goal is to serve as an interactive platform for proactive discussions on topical issues of national and global importance, as well as to promote professional networking among the alumni community in Nepal.

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PUBLICATIONS SAI’s publications series showcases the work of scholars across many disciplines on issues critical to South Asia. The publication incorporates research by faculty, students, and professionals from Harvard and around the region, and serves to initiate thinking in new ways about intractable problems and opportunities in South Asia.

Ranganathan Street, Chennai

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TECHNOLOGY AND SOUTH ASIA SAI’s third annual publication, Technology and South Asia, is a collection of essays from diverse disciplines about the evolution of technology in the region. Readers are invited to think of technology within the context of its cultural, sociological, and political fields of application in South Asia. The series is overseen by Sharmila Sen, Executive Editor-at-Large of Harvard University Press.

Visit our site to view full versions of the publications: http://southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/sai-annual-publications/

Released in January 2016, Technology and South Asia contains the following chapters and contributors: “Everyday Technology in South Asia” David Arnold, Emeritus Professor of South Asian history, University of Warwick “Soldiers of Lead, Denizens of Pixels” Vaibhav Singh, Type designer and Felix scholar at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK “The Piquant Taste of Technology” Vikas Khanna, Award-winning Michelinstarred chef and restaurateur “The Evolution of Mobile Technology in Bangladesh” Kamal Quadir, CEO, bKash; Founder, CellBazaar “Disease Control and Mobile Technology in South Asia” Caroline Buckee, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology; Associate Director, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, HSPH “The Art of Medicine and the Science of Technology” Paul Salins, Medical Director, Narayana Cancer Hospital and Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Research Center “mHealth in Pakistan” Ali Habib, CEO, Interactive Health Solutions “Watching, Streaming, and Other Things to Do with TV” Nalin Mehta, Writer and social historian; Founding coeditor, South Asian History and Culture journal and Routledge South Asian History and Culture book series

“From Technological India to Technological Indian” Ross Bassett, Associate Professor of History, North Carolina State University “Engineering for Non-Engineers” Nitin Nohria, Dean and George F. Baker Professor of Administration, HBS “From Carbon to Silicon” Rohan Narayana Murty, Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard; Founder, Murty Classical Library of India “The Renaissance Engineer” Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology and Public Policy and Professor of Physics, SEAS; Director Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, HKS “Trouble in the World’s Back Office” Sudhir Chella Rajan, Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology–Madras “Merit and Caste in Indian Engineering” Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, FAS “Technology for the Poor” Tarun Khanna, SAI; HBS

KUMBH MELA: MAPPING THE EPHEMERAL MEGACITY Released April 2015 The book consolidates research findings from the 2013 festival and serves as an example of interdisciplinary research conducted at Harvard.

TECHNOLOGY AND SOUTH ASIA Released January 2016

Readers are invited to think of technology within the context of its cultural, sociological, and political fields of application in South Asia.

THE CITY AND SOUTH ASIA Released January 2015

Experts from a variety of fields came together to hold up a cross-disciplinary lens to the paradoxes endemic to urban centers in South Asia.

The digital publication is available at http:// southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/sai-annual-publications/.

HEALTH AND SOUTH ASIA Released January 2014 This publication presents a rich array of solutions to health challenges and the important, and occasionally surprising, ways in which people find solutions to public health problems in South Asia.

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IN THE NEWS SAI activities are covered by the media, both at Harvard and globally. Some examples of recent news coverage are profiled here. For more information on SAI news, visit our website: http://southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/category/news/.

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Satchit Balsari conducts the training session for doctors who will be using the EMcouter tablets during the Kumbh festival Photo courtesy of PBS NOVA Next

May 26, 2015

INNOVATION AND IMMERSION OVERSEAS

By Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer Harvard Gazette Harvard summer students will have the option of classes on three continents through six new summer abroad programs being developed and implemented

by Harvard faculty, thanks to grants from a fund designed to expand study abroad opportunities and encourage innovation in those experiences.

“They’ll get immersion in a completely different context, exposure to a different society,” said Tarun Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, director of Harvard’s South Asia Institute, and the architect of a summer study abroad class that places students in Indian nonprofits that are leveraging the promise of mobile phone technology.

“I believe the immersion into a combination of library readings and real world settings will be very instructive.”

The grants were awarded from the President’s Innovation Fund for International Experiences (PIFIE), which was created to provide seed funding to faculty members to develop academic experiences abroad for Harvard undergraduates. The fund was created as part of David Rockefeller’s donation to support student international experiences, and seeks to encourage participation by faculty members at the graduate schools as well as Harvard College.

Read the full article: http://news. harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/05/

December 18, 2015

EXPERTS URGE IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL HEALTH IN DISASTER SITUATIONS The Express Tribune KARACHI: Gun shots, explosions and terrorist attacks break you or make you. On December 16, 2014, 147 innocent people lost their lives but the ones lucky enough to survive are haunted by the trauma they faced that day.

To remember the deceased and to save the ones who survived an event was organized by the Aman Foundation, in collaboration with Harvard South Asia Initiative on ‘Mental Health in Disaster Response’.

Various speakers, including Harvard University faculty members, shared their experiences and knowledge about the importance of mental health in disaster response situations. Some prominent speakers at the event were Dr. Ruth Barron, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Jennifer Leaning, a professor of the practice of health and human rights, T. H. Chan, from the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Ayesha Mian, an associate professor at the department of psychiatry at Aga Khan University, and Dr. Sharmeen Khan, a psychologist.

Read the full article: http://tribune.com.pk/ story/1011882/talking-about-it-experts-urgeimportance-of-mental-health-in-disaster-situations/

October 28, 2015

TRACKING INDIA’S DEADLY FLU OUTBREAK IN REAL TIME

By Ankur Paliwal, NOVA Next PBS EMcounter is the brainchild of Satchit Balsari, a 37-year-old faculty member at Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights who also leads the global emergency medicine program at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. He grew up in Mumbai and attended medical school there, and he came to the U.S. to attend a Master’s program in public health at Harvard. On his first day of class, the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 would forever change how Dr. Balsari viewed his career.

“That in some sense shaped my interest in disaster and humanitarian medicine,” Dr. Balsari tells me in the lobby of his hotel in Nashik. He’s wearing a blue kurta—a loose, collarless, knee-length shirt—and grey cargo pants that hang neatly on his lean frame. After completing his Master’s, Dr. Balsari enrolled in New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s emergency medicine program in 2004. He then returned to India briefly, eager to understand how the country’s fledgling emergency medicine specialty was developing. His experiences in the country’s casualty wards sparked the idea that would become EMcounter.

Around the same time, India launched its Integrated Disease Surveillance Program with the help of the World Bank. Under the program, the paper records of most village-level health visits are gathered district-wide and transcribed on computers a week later. It’s a disjointed system that can delay the response to infectious disease outbreaks. A recent analysis showed that, although the reporting of the number of outbreaks in India has increased three-fold from 2008 to 2013, there is “an urgent need of improving the quality of reporting and investigations.” Communicable diseases account for nearly half of India’s disease burden.

Dr. Balsari collaborated with a few friends to develop a simple computer program that would allow them to transfer paper records from the ER wards to computers on a daily basis. They called the interface EMcounter—”EM” for emergency medicine, and the rest because “it rhymed with encounter that doctors have with their patients,” Dr. Balsari says. In 2006, they piloted the EMcounter in the Sundaram Medical Foundation in Chennai. Since then, the team has been revising and improving the tool, eventually moving it to a tablet interface that was first tested in 2012 at Akobo County Hospital in South Sudan.

The same year, Harvard University’s South Asia Institute began a multi-disciplinary project, “Mapping the Kumbh Mela,” and reached out to experts in the U.S. and India to study various facets of the festival, including public health. Dr. Balsari immediately saw an opportunity to digitize disease surveillance using EMcounter.

Read the full article: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/kumbh-mela-flu/.

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BUDGET

FISCAL YEAR 2016

FISCAL YEAR 2017

INCOME

INCOME

Current Use

$1,377,315

Endowment One-Time Project Funds TOTAL

45,904 134,797 1,558,016

EXPENSE Operations

Current Use

$1,231,846

Endowment

47,281 One-Time Project Funds TOTAL

1,279,127

EXPENSE $517,541

Operations $529,339

Faculty Support

512,101

Faculty Support

348,000

Student Support

242,598

Student Support

143,000

FAS Gift tax

106,006

FAS Gift tax

108,126

Outreach/Community Programs

57,958

Outreach/Community Programs

72,075

In-Region Programs

29,500

In-Region Programs

29,500

TOTAL

62

1,465,704

South Asia Institute

TOTAL

1,230,040

Year in Review 2015 - 2016

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South Asia Institute

ABBREVIATION KEY AISP Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Program for Islamic Studies CMES Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies DRCLAS David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard DSAS Department of South Asian Studies FAS Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences FXB Franรงois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights GSAS Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences GSD Harvard Graduate School of Design HBS Harvard Business School HDS Harvard Divinity School HEC Higher Education Commission of Pakistan HGHI Harvard Global Health Institute HGSE Harvard Graduate School of Education HHI Harvard Humanitarian Initiative HISG Harvard India Student Group HKS Harvard Kennedy School of Government HLS Harvard Law School HMS Harvard Medical School HPSG Harvard Pakistan Student Group HSPH Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology SAI Harvard South Asia Institute SEAS Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences WCFIA Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138 USA http://southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/