College Record 2013

students and Fellows – vital for information but quite difficult to construct –
and the monthly lunches, which are vital for all kinds of academic interchange.
Kate Sullivan has been responsible for talks by students and Fellows on work in
progress, Sneha Krishnan for a reading group. These activities have also attracted
scholars from outside College and South Asia, and have suggested another idea
which has proved a success.
There are many scholars in and around College who come from South Asia while
not working on it professionally, or who simply have an interest in the region, its
science, history, culture, literature, politics and economy. The Cluster has drawn
them in deliberately, with a series of lecture on ‘Big Themes: Public Intellectuals’.
We have learned about corruption from the lawyer Raj Kumar, Vice-Chancellor of
the new Jindal Global University; about South Asia’s own great political thinkers
from the essayist Pankaj Mishra; and about the controversial critique of the ‘Indian
Ideology’ from UCLA historian Perry Anderson.
Workshops and conferences have linked the Cluster with other research groups in
College and beyond. The centenary of Leonard Woolf ’s important novel of Ceylon,
The Village in the Jungle, was celebrated with the Life-Writing cluster. Two doctoral
students then organized a conference with help from Wolfson and Oriental Studies,
‘Juxtapose’, on the problems of comparing China and India, which brought twenty
participants to the Buttery and was supplemented by skyped presentations from
Los Angeles, Pretoria, New Delhi and Beijing, and watched by some 200 other
participants worldwide on the Internet. We hope it will be the crucible of a book, a
journal, and another conference. A Bangladesh Day was hosted in College, attended
by the High Commissioner. Academic links are also being forged with Pakistan,
and contacts fostered with alumni in South Asia. Thanks to our close ties with the
Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme in Area Studies led by Matthew
McCartney, Wolfson scholars played major roles in the ‘India at Oxford’ Day on
14 June, which was addressed by the Chancellor, Lord Patten of Barnes, and by
the Indian Opposition leader Arun Jaitley, and the Indian Minister for External
Affairs, Salman Kurshid. In September we will be examining more than 250 years of
evidence for a sex-ratio unfavourable to girls and women. We welcome suggestions
of future South Asia events at Wolfson.
Barbara Harriss-White (EF 2010–), Co-ordinator
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