When I took over the directorship of this program last year, I was more than a bit apprehensive about the magnitude of the tasks ahead. Building up from the foundations laid by my predecessor, Professor Gerald Larson, has been an exciting yet demanding enterprise. When every copy of Shashi Tharoor’s new book, Nehru: The Invention of India, sold out following his talk in March at the Whittenberger Auditorium in the Indiana Memorial Union, I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

Fortunately, I have benefited greatly from the unstinting financial, organizational, and intellectual support of not only the faculty involved in the study of India, but others keenly interested in the development of India Studies on this campus. Members of the Indian-American communities in Bloomington, Indianapolis, and Terra Haute as well as in other parts of the state and points beyond have continued to rally around the program and its activities. Their support has been pivotal. Alongside these immediate supporters of India Studies, several departments within the College of Arts and Sciences, especially its dean, Kumble Subbaswamy, and the dean of international programs, Patrick O’Meara, have supported and collaborated with the India Studies Program. By co-sponsoring our programs with other departments at the university, we have been able to fill our calendar with a panoply of events that otherwise would not have been affordable. And without the administrative talent and institutional memory of my assistant, Tim Callahan, I would long since have disappeared under piles of paperwork and logistical arrangements.

Rather than enumerate all the events that have taken place in 2003-2004 in Indian Studies (which our website details and some of which are featured in this newsletter), I would like to highlight in more general terms what we accomplished this year and what we have planned for the year ahead. My primary goal this year was to bolster the presence of India Studies in the social sciences, particularly India’s connections to the worlds of policy and international affairs. The visit to Bloomington by Ambassador Vijay Nambiar, the Indian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, who spoke to a large audience about India’s claim to a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council seat, illustrates the high quality and broad appeal of our programs this year. I was gratified to see that Ambassador Nambiar’s presentation received considerable publicity in the local media. Our other speakers focused on subjects ranging from an ethnographic account of Balthazar Solvyns, a Dutch painter, who lived and worked in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century, to questions of India’s self-identity in the new millennium.

Apart from these public lectures, we have also initiated a handful of programs designed to create an sense of intellectual community for those interested in the study of India on the Bloomington campus. Once a month, over tea and samosas, faculty and graduate students gather to hear a designated faculty member present a component of his or her ongoing research. I am happy to report that most of my colleagues have enthusiastically participated in this new intellectual endeavor.
As many programs dealing with India and South Asia across the United States are shrinking (mostly from lack of imagination and leadership, certainly not from a lack of interest among students and the public), we are determined to expand. Thanks to the foresight and sagacity of the College of Arts and Sciences, we have just hired a historian of modern India. Dr. Michael Dodson, from Cambridge University, a former student of the eminent historian Professor Christopher Bayly, will be joining us as an Assistant Professor this fall. His work and teaching will be an invaluable addition to the India Studies faculty.

With this satisfying year behind us, be assured that we do not intend to rest on our laurels. India Studies has an exciting and diverse program planned for the coming fall. A four-part festival of the films of Satyajit Ray, the eminent Indian director, will be launched with an introduction by Professor Dilip Basu of the University of California at Santa Cruz, a noted curator of Ray’s films. Music fans can anticipate a sitar concert featuring Professor Stephen Slawek, a former student of Pandit Ravi Shankar, and now a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Continuing our look at the worlds of public and international affairs, we will welcome Steve Coll, the Managing Editor of The Washington Post and that newspaper’s former bureau chief in South Asia.

The principal task that lies before us is to acquire the status of a National Resource Center, which will bring federal funding for our language and outreach programs. To achieve this, we must strengthen and expand our existing language offerings. As budgetary circumstances permit, we intend to expand the teaching of Hindi and to offer Urdu on a regular basis. The successful teaching of these languages will greatly enhance our prospects for obtaining National Resource Center status. If the success of this year’s programs and the enthusiasm of our faculty and financial supporters are any indicators, we have taken the first step toward that important goal.