Fall 2000 - South Asia Program - Cornell University

C O R N E L L
U N I V E R S I T Y
The
South Asia
Newsletter
A Publication of Cornell’s South Asia Program Fall 2000
Anantha Murthy Speaks on Globalization and Literature by Sheetal Majithia
Students, faculty, and members of the community affiliated with
the Cornell South Asia Program had the unique opportunity this fall of
attending a series of lectures and informal talks with the noted Indian
author, U.R. Anantha Murthy. One of the leading writers of Kannada
fiction, Anantha Murthy received the
Jnanpith, India’s highest literary award,
in 1995. He is also a distinguished scholar
and has often taught at universities in
Europe and the United States. Most recently
he was a visiting lecturer at the
University of Pennsylvania where he
taught classes on South Asian literature
and film. He has served as Vice Chancellor
of Mahatma Gandhi University in
Kottayam as well as President of the
Sahitya Akademi and the chair of the In-
dia Book Trust.
Sponsored by the South Asia
program as well as the departments of
English and Comparative Literature, the Einaudi Center, and the Society
for the Humanities, the lecture series which ran from September 8-11,
was entitled, “Tradition and Modernity in the Indian Novel” and was
attended by members of various departments. The event was organized
by Satya Mohanty and members of the South Asia program and emerged
from discussions of South Asian literature initiated during “Cartographies
of the Vernacular: Directions in Contemporary South Asian Literature”,
a conference sponsored by the South Asia Program from February
18-19, 2000. Speaking about his own literary contributions as well as
modern Indian literature in general, Anantha Murthy gave two informal
lectures and led two round-table discussions during his visit to Cornell.
He ended the series with a public lecture.
In his first lecture Anantha Murthy spoke of his own background
and development as an Indian writer and offered the audience a
history of the reception of his very controversial novel, Samskara.
Born in Meliga, a small village in Karnataka, Anantha Murthy said he is
the product of a rare mixed education because he was born into a traditional
Brahmin family and was educated in Sanskrit and Kannada as well
as in English. He went on to study in Birmingham where he worked with
Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, and Raymond Williams. Anantha
Murthy contextualized the writing and reception of Samskara, his
highly-acclaimed Kannada novel that has been widely translated
and made into a film by Girish Karnad. The novel, published in
1965, was criticized for assailing traditional village life. Anantha
Murthy said that the narrative is
based on the story of a village
that was very much like the village
of his childhood where tensions
between tradition and modernity
emerged daily in people’s
experiences with age-old stories
and myths on the one hand and
colonial education on the other.
In an attempt to reconcile the
contradictions of these sometimes
opposing modes of existence,
Anantha Murthy spoke of
how, with his traditional upbringing
and Western education, he came to occupy the position of
“critical insider” negotiating between the two.
In the second round-table discussion which was organized
around readings of O.V. Vijayan’s Legends of Khasak,
Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, Gopinath Mohanty’s novel High Tide,
Ebb Tide, and Mohan Senapati’s novel Six Acres and a Third,
Anantha Murthy focused on the narrative modes of socialist realism
and allegory that have dominated Indian literature. He argued
that a focus on caste, religion, and spirituality has deeply politicized
much of modern Indian literature and as a result, the genres
of realism, including the magical realism of Vijayan and Salman
Rushdie has a unique relationship to the social in the Indian context.
In his public lecture entitled, “On Being an Indian Writer,”
Anantha Murthy re-introduced the notion of the writer as critical
insider by conceptualizing the tensions between tradition and
modernity within the framework of globalization. He argued that
the homogenization of culture that accompanies modernization puts
local culture into crisis. The conflict of some new contradictory
identities with some older stable ones makes the theme of continuity
in change an important one for modern authors to consider. The
very consideration of this point, however, is made at times difficult
Continued on page 2

A Publication of Cornell’s South Asia Program
NOTES FROM THE DIRECTOR
Dear Colleagues and Friends of the South Asia Program:
I am happy to report that Cornell’s South Asia Program once again won Title VI funding
from the Department of Education in the National Resource Center competition, as part of the
Cornell-Syracuse consortium. The funding enables us to continue many of our ongoing activities
and start up new ones on campus and in outreach beyond campus. The NRC will enable us
to co-sponsor two new courses by Dede Ruggles on “Islamic Architecture: Form and Context”
(Arch 399), and “Landscape and Architecture in Moghul South Asia” (Asian 494 ), both of which
will be taught in the upcoming spring semester. NRC funds enable us to search for a visiting
Environmental Historian of South Asia, who will come for one semester in each of the next two
academic years.
With the beginning of a new year we welcome the arrival to campus of new colleagues with
research and/or teaching interests in South Asia. First and foremost we welcome Dr. Mehr
Farooqi, who joins us as our Lecturer in Hindi-Urdu (See Faculty page). Mehr has already
contributed significantly to our Program’s activities, and we look forward to working with her to
build up Hindi and Urdu instruction in the coming year. We also welcome Andrew Willford,
Anthropology, who works on Tamil-speaking groups in South Asia and in Southeast Asia,
Shawkat Toorawa, Near Eastern Studies (see Faculty Page), and Madhav Ghimire, Joint Secretary,
Ministry of the Environment, Nepal, who comes to Cornell as a Humphrey Fellow for the
academic year 2000/2001.
We have already had U.R. Anantha Murthy come to campus for a two-week visit (see front
page). As always we continue to bring artists and performers to campus (see Fine Arts page). In
addition, the SAP offices have recently been redecorated with photographs by Barry Perlus. The
Directors office, in particular, is now a showroom for a series of Sawai Jaisingh’s Jantar Mantar.
I recently spent a month in the Palace Museum in Jaipur as part of a team cataloging Jaisingh’s
collection of astronomy manuscripts, so these striking photographs have a special meaning for
me. I invite you all to come by and see them when you are next in Uris Hall.
Sincerely,
Christopher Minkowski
Director, South Asia Program
Ananta Murthy con’t.
by the threat that English poses to the other Indian vernacular languages. Anantha Murthy
argued that though many Indian vernacular languages face the possibility of being replaced
by English, historically they have always produced new literature in opposition to the high
literary tradition of Sanskrit and will continue to do the same in the face of the rapid spread
of English. Using the spatial metaphor of language as a house, he argued that whereas
vernacular languages once served as a backyard to Sanskrit, the front yard, they might now
serve as the backyard to English. He was hopeful about the continuity of Indian vernacular
literary traditions arguing that they will persist because languages are places where one can
hide from the nightmares of globalization.
Student Organizations
and Presidents
ASHA
Venkatasubramanian Narayanan
vn23@cornell.edu
254-6329
Bangladesh Association
Itrat Sayeed
is38@cornell.edu
253-6116
Bhakti (Hindu Organization)
Krishna Maheswari
kkm9@cornell.edu
253-2815
Cornell India Association (CIA)
Swaroop Kommera
swar@ee.cornell.edu
277-3292
Muslim Educational/Cultural
Association (MECA)
Omar Bajwa
osb4@cornell.edu
253-5497
Nepal Student Association
Leah Mayor
lem15@cornell.edu
Pakistani Student Association
(AWAAZ)
Reza Samad
rs229@cornell.edu
227-5156
Mehreen Yousaf
my36@cornell.edu
272-4523
Sitara (Dance Troupe)
Lavanya Kilaru
lk46@cornell.edu
253-0933
Apra Bhandari
ab115@cornell.edu
253-0876
Society for India at Cornell (SICU)
Sandeep Rao
spr9@cornell.edu
253-7048
Society for the Promotion of
Indian Classical Music andCulture
Among Youths
(SPICMACAY)
Sowmya Varadharajan
sv49@cornell.edu
254-6369
2

outreach
Fall 2000
New Resources for Teaching about South Asia
Gandhi: Apostle of Peace and Nonviolence A multimedia CD-ROM that depicts the life and message of Mahatma Gandhi. Includes 45 minutes
of movie clips, 200 photos, letters and an interactive time line.
INDIA 2000 This CD-ROM Reference Annual contains information on diverse aspects of the country, from the geographic and demographic
features to polity, economy and culture. Produced by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.
Fact Sheets produced by the Indian Government on US-Indian relations
Visit of the US President to India chronicles the historic visit of President Clinton to India, March 19 - 25, 2000 and includes speeches and
interviews in their entirety.
Other Outreach Materials for K-12 and Post-secondary Educators
Come with Me to India
Elementary Social/Global Studies
A Wondrous voyage through time, as presented by author, Sudha Koul. Gives an elementary overview of India on subjects including cuisine,
religion, educational system and environment.
Global Studies Series: India and South Asia, First and Third Editions
Secondary: Social/Global Studies
Collected articles from various scholars of the area. Provides a foundation of information–geographic, cultural, economic, political, historical,
artistic and religious–which allows for better understanding of the current and future problems associated with the countries of the region.
Elementary School Teachers Guide
Elementary, Compiled by the South Asia Program, Cornell University
General information on South Asia. Specific activities for elementary school age children, including games, food and other activities to
coordinate with the Aditi box and Nepali basket.
From South to Southeast: An Asian Journey of the Epic Mahabharata
K-12 Global/Social studies teachers, compiled by the South and Southeast Asia Programs, Cornell University
Provides for a comparative study of these world areas focusing on the Hindu i epic, Mahabharata and how each country interprets the story.
Other activities include making shadow puppets (wayang) and an introduction to the Javanese music Gamelan as well as how dharma
(roughly: duty) governs characters of the story.
Flexible Borders: Nationalism, Citizenship and Migration
High School Global/Social studies teachers, compiled by the Area Studies Programs, Cornell University
Provides articles and references for curriculum development on the following topics: “Ethnic Conflict and National Identity in Sri Lanka”,
“Criss-Crossing the U.S. Mexican Border”, “Violence in the Construction and Identity of Community: The Case of Bosnia”, and “Long-Distance
Nationalism of East and Southeast Asia”
Mahabharata
Dreamland Publications Comic books. 12 parts.
This series uses comics to tell the story of two sets of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, who fight over succession to the throne.
Ramayana
Dreamland Publications Comic books. 12 parts.
This series tells the story of Rama and his wife Sita.
Continued on back page
3

Prelude to Political Economy, A Study of
the Social and Political Foundations of Economics
(Oxford University Press, October, 2000), by
Cornell’s Department of Economics Professor,
Kaushik Basu, is a critique of economics as social
science. This is unusual because it uses many of
the same techniques that contemporary economics
and positive political economy use. It relies
on game theory, and more importantly, on
game-theoretic reasoning; but the technical demands
are small. The book cautions that perhaps
we are trying to move too fast; that we are, mistakenly,
dismissive of ideas that cannot be fully formalized, and too glib with
our elegant tools of analysis. It must be recognized that markets and the
economy are embedded in society, politics, and the law; and an immense
amount of research has to go into understanding the nature of this embedding
before we can come out with reliable answers. Prelude to Political Economy
suggests a new approach to law and economics and to the state, and addresses
important questions such as whether the state should guarantee
freedom of speech and whether the free market can lead to coercion.
Modern Economics recognizes that individuals’ pursuit of their
own selfish ends can result in socially suboptimal outcomes–the Prisoner’s
Dilemma being the stark example. It has been suggested that what we need
in such an eventuality is ‘third party’ intervention, which can take the form
of imposing punishment on players. Kaushik Basu objects to this method of
wishing third parties out of thin air. He argues that if a third party that could
impose its will on others were available, then it should have been modeled as
a player to start with.
The adoption of such an inclusive approach has implications for
our conception of the state and the law. It means that the law cannot be
construed as a factor that changes the game that citizens play. It is instead
simply a set of beliefs of citizens; and as such, it is similar to social norms.
What the law does for an economy, so can social norms. The book discusses
how the nature of policy advice and our conception of state power are
affected by this altered view of the state and the law.
4
Prelude to Political Economy
The walls of the South Asia Program Offices
are currently graced with a collection of framed
photographs of architectural subjects from India
and Nepal. The photographs, made by Associate
Professor of Art Barry Perlus, are selected from
his exhibition Made of Light: Photographs from
India and Nepal, which was shown in 1991 and
1992 at the MIT Museum and several other
college museums and galleries. The exhibition
included photographs of temples and sculpture
from Ellora and Mamallapuram, India, the
masonry observatories, “Jantar Mantar” built in
the early 1700’s in New Delhi and Jaipur by Jai
Singh II, and a mixture of sacred and secular
architecture in Nepal. Photographs of the
observatory at Delhi were published as a portfolio
in Parabola No. 15 Time and Presence.
More recently, Perlus traveled to Delhi and
Bombay with colleagues from the College of
Faculty
SAP Displays Photographs by Barry Perlus
God-Apes and Fossil Men:
Paleoanthropology of South Asia
This book provides the first comprehensive
study of the ancient peoples of South
Asia. Until recently the scientific study of the
prehistoric peoples of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,
and the South Asian borderlands has been neglected,
beyond some cursory comments in the
popular literature about archaeological discoveries.
Here is a book that offers much more: a broad
survey of all prehistoric cultures of the Indian
subcontinent from Paleolithic to Iron Age times.
Written in a style accessible to the general
reader, the book pioneers a new approach
involving the integration of data from archaeological, paleontological, ecological,
and anthropological investigations to offer a comprehensive picture of the
origins, diversity, and lifeways of southern Asian populations. Complex scientific
ideas are clearly and carefully explained in early chapters as the author
considers the theories of human origins in Asia and the significance of the
fossils of anthropoid apes recovered from the Siwalik hills (the "God-Apes").
Thereafter the text carries the story of human life on the subcontinent through
distinct cultural periods from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age.
Over the course of the book Kenneth A. R. Kennedy demonstrates
that South Asian paleoanthropology has been formed by two intellectual
forces: Western scientific traditions and native Vedic traditions. The interactions
of Western and South Asian scholars have produced a unique approach
to the study of ancient populations in this part of the world.
No other book exists today on this subject, and God-Apes and
Fossil Men: Paleoanthro-pology of South Asia serves as a model for future
studies of ancient peoples and places.
Kenneth A. R. Kennedy is Professor of Ecology, Anthropology, and
Asian Studies in the Division of Biological Sciences, Cornell University. He
has over thirty-five years of field and laboratory research in India, Pakistan,
Sri Lanka, and the borderlands. (Taken from http://www.press.umich.edu/titles/
11013.html)
Column detail with seated figure,
Cave 29, Ellora, India,
by Barry Perlus
Architecture, Art
and Planning as
part of an interdisciplinary
effort to
develop working
relationships with
academics and
professionals in
the field of historic
architectural
interpretation of
these sites.
Catalogs of
the Made of Light
exhibition and further
information
about the observatories
are available at the South Asia Program
office.
SAP Seminar Introduces
Shawkat Toorawa
In July of this year, Shawkat M. Toorawa
joined the Department of Near Eastern
Studies as Assistant Professor of Arabic
Literature and Islamic Studies. In 1999/2000
he was a Rockefeller African Humanities
Institute Fellow at the W. E. du Bois Institute,
Harvard University. From 1996 to 2000 he
was Lecturer in History in the Department of
Humanities at the University of Mauritius.
In September, Shawkat gave a talk,
Where women grow on trees: Fabulous
Indian Ocean Islands, in the South Asia
Program seminar series on one of his Indian
Ocean interests, the islands of Waqwaq. His
article, “Waq al-waq: Fabulous, Fabular
Continued on oppostie page, column one

Faculty Briefs
Kaushik Basu, Department of Economics, had two major works published
recently, Prelude to Political Economy, Oxford University Press, October, 200
(see page 4), and “Whither India The Prospect of Prosperity,” in India,
Another Millennium, edited by Romila Thapar, Viking, July, 2000.
Durga Bor attended an Odissi dance workshop given by Padmabhushan
Kelucharan Mohapatra in Washington, D.C., followed by a three-day conference
and festival of Odissi. She performed for Hamilton College’s annual Diwali
Festival in October as well as in Tina Croll’s and Jamie Cunningham’s “From
the Horses Mouth,” at the Clemens Center, Elmira, November 4.
Ron Herring, Department of Government and Director, Einaudi Center for
International Studies, attended the conference on “Institutional Reform and
Poverty Reduction” at the London School of Economics and the “International
Conference on Biotechnology and Globalization” at the Kennedy School
of Government, Harvard University. Carrots, Sticks and Ethnic Conflict: Rethinking
Development Assistance, edited by Milton Esman and Herring, will be
available this Winter from the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. This
also includes a chapter by Cornell’s Norman Uphoff, on the “Gal Oya Project
in Sri Lanka,” in which a foreign aid project (and Cornell University) helped in
producing not only more grain but an island of ethnic peaces in escalating war.
Ron contributed a darker companion chapter on the contributions of foreign
aid to ethnic war in Sri Lanka.
Mary Katzenstein gave a paper, “The Mother and the State in India:
Reproductive Health in India,” at a symposium in memory of the late Professor
Myron Weiner which will be published in November’s Asian Survey, a special
issue which is a tribute to the Professor Weiner. Mary’s term with the Executive
and Selection Committees of the American Institute of Indian studies has recently
come to an end.
Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, Departments of Ecology, Anthropology, and Asian
Studies in the Division of Biological Sciences, has published God-Apes and
Fossil Men: Palaeoanthropology of South Asia, University of Michigan Press,
2000, (see page 4). He has recently published the following articles: “Activity,
Climate and Postgranial Robusticity: Implications for Modern Human Origins,”
in Osbojorn M. Pearson’s Current Anthropology; “Preparing a History of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists,” in Abstracts of the Annual
Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists; “Forensic
Anthropology in the United States,” in Encyclopedia of Forensic Sciences;
“Porotic Hyperostosis in Prehistoric Skeletons from South Asia,” in Man-
Environment Relationships; Review of Stehpanie Moser’s “Ancestral Images,”
Isis. Kenneth attended the annual meeting of the Society for Harappan Studies
held in Manchester, Vermont in August, and has given lectures in several of the
SAP faculty’s classes. In November he gave a paper, “Biological Anthropology
in South Asia in the 21st Century,” which was for the American Anthropological
Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco.
Michael Latham, Professor of International Nutrition was in Bangladesh
from July 20-28 where he serves on Advisory Committee of BRAC. The
Research and Evaluation Division of BRAC is launching a new project based on
work that Dr. Latham undertook in Tanzania. The BRAC project aims to
improve the nutritional status of adolescent girls in poor communities.
David Lelyveld presented a paper “The Tables Turned: Colonial Knowledge
and Muslim Consciousness in Nineteenth Century India” for Panel on Institutional
Histories, Colonial Knowledges: the Scholarly vision of Bernard S.
Cohn, (American Ethnological Society, Society for Cultural Anthropology),
American Anthropological Association, Annual Meeting, November 17, 2000,
San Francisco.
Norman Uphoff, CIIFAD, participated in a conference sponsored by The
Food Systems for Improved Health Program November 25 in Dhaka on “Improving
Health and Economic Development: Approaches to Preventing Diet-
Related Rickets”. He contributed a chapter to Carrots, Sticks and Ethnic
Conflict: Rethinking Development Assistance (see above).
Toorawa con’t.
Indian Ocean ()... Islands”, in Emergences, vol. 10, no. 2 (December
2000), pp. 387-402, has just appeared. His article on “Waqwaq” in
vol. 11 of the Encyclopedia of Islam is in press.
SAP Welcomes Mehr Farooqi as
Hindi/Urdu Lecturer
The South Asia Program would like to extend a warm welcome
to Dr. Mehr Farooqi, who was appointed by the Department of Asian
Studies this Fall as Lecturer for Hindi-Urdu language. Dr. Farooqi
comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught
Hindi-Urdu since 1998. She also taught Urdu and Persian language
and literature and South Asia medieval history there from 1995-1996.
She has done both undergraduate and graduate studies at Allahabad
University in India and has numerous publication translations to her
credit. She is currently working on an analytical introduction, edition
and translation of the Candayan of Maulana Da’ud in Awadhi. This
research is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Cornell Graduate Joins University
of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty
Congratulations to Aseema Sinha, a Cornell University
Ph.D. graduate (class of 2000), who has recently joined the faculty of
the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. Her education began in India, where she received a
Bachelor of Arts degree from Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi, and
a Masters degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, both
in political science. Her masters thesis was on “Antonio Gramsci’s
Concept of National-Popular Will.” She went on to receive a second
masters degree in 1997 at Cornell, and subsequently became a Ph.D.
candidate in the Department of Government, with a dissertation titled,
“Divided Leviathan: Comparing Sub-national States in India,” which
re-examines India’s developmental state and suggests that a
national-level characterization of India as a “failed state” masks very
significant regional divergence in developmental patterns across
Indian states. The dissertation insists that this mis-specification of
the level of analysis leads to an inaccurate reading of India. Her
analysis of three provinces within India -- Gujarat, West Bengal and
Tamil Nadu -- shows that some provinces developed “strategic
capacities” which were instrumental in reorienting market processes
towards development. She also emphasized that states operate
within a two-tiered federal system and the type and the extent of
competition in a federal system affects the developmental output of
nation-states.
In the Spring of 2000 Aseema taught two courses at
Madison entitled Introduction to Comparative Politics and a seminar
class on the Politics of South Asia. This Fall she is teaching a course
titled The Third World and International Development and another
on Comparative Social Movements; both courses having material on
South Asia. In the near future she hopes to develop a new course on
South Asia and International Relations, as well as teach the graduate
seminar on Politics of Developing Areas. She also plans on being
involved with a re-activated seminar series at the Center of South
Asia at Madison, as well as a conference on Democratization in South
Asia.
Continued on back page
5

Fine arts
A Different Kind of Globalization
Instead of focusing exclusively on South Asian music or dance this semester, SAP
decided to ask other area-studies programs and departments for their support and collaboration
in order to present Global Rhythms and the World Music Ensemble on October 21, 2000, in the
Statler Auditorium. This resulted in a three-hour long celebration of featured artists from around
the world who were backed by a student orchestra provided by Miami University (Ohio). The
evening opened with nine-year-old prodigy, Kiran Pathakota, whose spellbinding performance
on the mridangam made him a hard act to follow. Other featured artists included Kiran’s father,
Sathish Pathakota, who was introduced as a “mathematical genius” with tal, playing mridangam
as well as Kanjira. Additional representatives of South Asia were Anupama Sharma, who presented
a sitar solo, Narasimha Kikkerji on violin, and Pat Hernly on ghatam.
Grammy-winning frame drum expert, Glen Velez, produced complex sounds from his
Irish bodhran, as well as his vocal chords, as he sang overtones, winning him a standing
ovation. Eguie Castrillo, conga maestro and Professor at Berklee College of Music, entertained
the audience with his rhythms and his keen sense of humor. John Santos played on a variety of
percussion instruments, with an emphasis on Afro-Latin Rhythms. Min Xiao-Fen changed the
Nine-year-old Kiran Pathakota
mood with the delicate sounds of the Chinese pipa, an ancient lute, which she played with great
mastery. Representing the Middle East were Yunus Ashraf on the Afghani rabab, producing haunting melodies in the classical tradition,
followed by Klezmer music performed by Michele Gingras on clarinet and Josh Moss on piano. Michele’s energy and virtuosity were truly
astounding. Carrie Marchner both sang and played Bosnian folk songs on the flute with soulful skill and beauty.
The evening ended with an upbeat orchestration of Latin rhythms and melodies which had the audience dancing in the aisles, with
featured artists Ariel Kahn and Raphael Flores representing Brazil, and Jaime Morales-Matos playing Latin Jazz Trombone.
This evening would not have been possible if it weren’t for Srinivas Krishnan, director of Global Rhythms and the World Music
Ensemble, and a master tabla player in his own right, who performed as both soloist and accompanist throughout the evening. Srini’s great
enthusiasm and networking skills helped to bring this diverse and talented group of artists to the attention of the South Asia Program. At the
age of 21 Srini was featured in the USA at the University of North Texas. Srini has performed on the tabla with some of India’s great artists such
as Dr. L. Subramaniam and Ustad Bismillah Khan. He has been a featured percussionist (tabla, bodhran and snare drum) at Interlochen, CCM,
Indiana University, UCLA, Oberlin Conservatory, University of Washington, MIT, Dartmouth, and West Virginia University. He has been a
featured artist and recorded on projects with members of the Berlin Philharmonic, Sting, Remo Inc, and on Grammy-winning Label, Water Lily
Acoustics. He has recently performed with artists of Real World and has scored background music for several films. Srini has been trained in
different styles of music from various scholars and has spearheaded efforts for Miami University in receiving several grants for major projects.
He has served as Director of America Direct Academic Foundation in India.
SPICMACAY Sponsors the Priya Sisters by Sowmya Varadharajan
November 3 rd gave the Cornell community an opportunity to listen to one
of the greatest Carnatic concerts ever performed. The Priya sisters,
Shanmukhapriya and Haripriya were accompanied by Sri B. V. Raghavendra
Rao (on the violin) and Sri J. Vaidynathan (on the mridangam). The three-hour
concert commenced with a speedy varnam, that set the mood for the night. The
main song for their performance was Meenakshi in Raag Poorvikalyani in which
they demonstrated their creativity through their elaborate swara kalpanas. Sri
B. V. Raghavendra Rao’s nimble fingers delivered melodious notes on the violin.
Sri J. Vaidynathan proved to be an apt percussionist in his superb delivery
of thaalam. He proved his prowess in the thani aavarthanam. The concert
came to a close with several thukadaas, which showed their versatility in singing
songs.
This concert was sponsored by SPICMACAY, The Society for the
Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture among Youth, and was held at
the Film Forum at Cornell’s Center for Theatre Arts.
6

Saadia Toor is a Ph.D. candidate in the field of developmental
sociology, Dept. of Rural Sociology. She is currently in
Pakistan on an Einaudi dissertation grant and a Woodrow Wilson
Women’s Studies Fellowship. She is doing research on the relationship
between the state and national culture in Pakistan during the
1960s and 70s.
Fieldwork is severely over-rated. Any disgruntled graduate
student will agree with this, especially during/after the first few
months of it.
I think the biggest challenge I have faced since arriving in
Lahore last December is something that has little to do with the
actual nitty-gritty of research work. It is my family. Lovely as they
are (and they aren’t all, always) it is still impossible to have any kind
of routine when I am almost always within telephonic reach of aunts,
uncles, grandmothers and the occasional second cousin twice removed.
So my first piece of advice to grad students still in the
process of deciding on a research topic is: avoid the old home country
as a site.
The bright side of returning to work in a city where one has
grown up, is the possibility of rediscovering that with which you
have the best of childhood associations as well as, occasionally, the
thrill of discovering something entirely new and unexpected. Lahore
has been called the cultural heart of Pakistan often enough for it to be
cliché - but it happens to be true. The onward rush of life and traffic,
the mushrooming of consumer culture which characterize third world
cities in the contemporary period, make it appear as if the old Lahore
–of roadside intellectual debate at designated tea stalls in Old Anarkali
Bazaar, impromptu literary expositions, study circles on topics ranging
from philosophy to communism – is dead and buried. After a few
months of hobnobbing with ‘the usual suspects’ of the local cultural
scene – such are the occupational hazards of doing one’s research
on the political economy of culture – I have come to realize that old
litterateurs – and revolutionaries, for that matter – don’t die, they just
debate away. The circle may get smaller and smaller – and unfortunately
it has, given the dumbing down of culture which has occurred
at the state and general level in Pakistan over the last 25 years or so.
Since my work is historical – I am trying to explore the relationship
between culture and the state in Pakistan over the 1958 –
1977 period – and no-one in Pakistan seems to believe in textual
documentation. Historical research has also suffered greatly at the
hands of an authoritarian and ideological state. I have to rely on oral
historical sources rather more than I would like. This means talking
to people who have been in the forefront of various struggles on the
left – who have made and lived through history, as it were – which is
always a thrilling and uplifting experience, especially for a generation
of Pakistanis like me who have been deprived of any but the official
version of their history. Until I joined the Mazdoor-Kissan Party –
Mazdoor Kissan translates as ‘labourers and peasants’ - earlier this
year (how many people get to casually mention joining a Maoist
revolutionary party in their field notes), I had no idea of the extent of
the Left’s influence in Pakistani social and cultural history. The only
Students
Notes from the Field by Saadia Toor
Fall 2000
problem with trying to conduct research on the intelligentsia through
oral-historical methods is that by definition intellectuals will not follow
your agenda. Although this is an occupational hazard of all qualitative
research, intellectuals (and I use the term very broadly) are
harder to manage than your usual subjects because they know better
than you what your research project is or should be. Which can get
you into a war of nerves more often than you may like.
But that is a small price to pay for the wealth of information
they do occasionally choose to share (did I mention they were moody
as well). And this is saying something in a country where the knowledge/power
nexus is an integral part of life, from the smallest clerk in
any government office all the way up to the National Archives. If it
had not been for people who took the time to educate me, I would
have remained ignorant of many issues and events in the period of
Pakistani history I wished to study. For instance, up until the counterrevolution/coup
of General Zia ul Haq in 1977, documented to have
been orchestrated largely by the American Foreign office and particularly
the CIA in response to the growing strength of the working class
movement in Pakistan, the Left and particularly the Mazdoor Kissan
Party and the Communist Party’s cultural front the Progressive Writers’
Association were major players in all debates over the national
question. In fact, the Mazdoor Kissan Party was in the forefront of
the Punjabi maa-boli, or mother-tongue, movement since its cadres in
Punjab (Pakistan’s most populous province) were drawn largely from
the peasantry whose language was Punjabi.
The need to launch a movement for a language in its own
province may seem counter-intuitive or even redundant, especially in
a nation-state where Punjabi hegemony is held responsible for the
separatist movement in East Pakistan which led to the creation of
Bangladesh in 1971. But the issue of Punjabi is an extremely interesting
one, and one which I have chosen to focus on as the specific lens
through which to understand the relationship of the state to culture in
Pakistan. To illustrate this fact we need only observe that Punjab
remains the only province in Pakistan – and this includes what used
to be East Pakistan – to not have its mother tongue as the medium of
education in its schools. This is because the language issue in
Punjab is a highly classed one. Punjabi has never been considered
the language of culture and/or prestige by its elite classes which have
preferred Urdu or English. Punjabi becomes reviled because of its
association with the soil and thus with manual labour, and also with
the working classes and peasantry. Urduisation is a distinct marker of
social mobility or at least the desire for it; members of the Punjabi elite
classes (or their wannabes) will often speak Punjabi among themselves
but not with their children, who go to English (note, not Urdu)
medium schools. If this sounds confusing to you, imagine what a tall
order I have in terms of sorting this mess out, particularly as a product
of this peculiarly deracinated generation of urban Punjabis who can
function best in English, are reasonably well-versed in Urdu but can
only speak abysmal Punjabi. And I do not use the term ‘deracinated’
lightly. It is only recently, since I finally narrowed my unmanageable
dissertation down to the issue of Punjab and Punjabi in post-inde-
Continued on back page
7

Outreach, continued from page 3
Puja: Expressions of Hindu Devotion
From the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution: A
guide for Educations. Contains posters of Hindu deities, an instructional
video on Puja ceremonies, and an over-all guide on Hinduism.
Please Contact the South Asia Program or visit us on the web
www.einaudi.cornell.edu/southasia/outreach for a detailed list of
over 200 videos for use in the classroom.
To Borrow any of our materials or for further information, please
contact:
Anne Stengle, Director of Outreach
170 Uris Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-255-8493
Notes from the Field con’t.
pendence Pakistan which, in turn, happened after I joined the MKP,
that I realized how much language can set one apart even as it has
proved to be one of the more stable bases of human community.
But enough of my existential angst. I’m told that it doesn’t
get any better for graduate students who are not studying ‘their own
people’. I guess that’s what fieldwork basically boils down to as a
rite of passage – learning to live with yourself, learning to figure out
your priorities at the personal, professional and political levels. For
instance, I have come to realize that for any politically conscious
academic – or at least for me - praxis needs to mean a little more than
simply the choice of research methodology, the political implications
of Participatory Action Research notwithstanding. It has to mean
activism at some level, or else one cannot justify one’s work or philosophy
of life. Many of my graduate student friends have been
going through similar crises recently in terms of finding a way to bridge
their work and their activism. In my case, working with the Mazdoor
Kissan Party has provided both a political focus as well as an academic
one. In addition, since most of the activity for the party is done on
motorcycles, it has given me – literally - a new perspective on the city
of my childhood.
Sinha, con’t.
Aseema thinks it is an exciting time to be studying South
Asia and feels extremely fortunate to have graduated from Cornell
where South Asian studies enjoy a strong disciplinary presence. She
also feels fortunate to be able to teach at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, where there has been a long tradition of South Asian
studies.
South Asia Program Staff
Christopher Minkowski, Director 255-8493
Anne Stengle, Administrative Manager 255-8493
Durga Bor, Newsletter Editor 255-8493
Work Study Office Assistants:
Reshma Singh
Mai Truong
255-8910
Website: http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/southasia
South Asia Program
Cornell University
170 Uris Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-7601