Rabindranath Tagore Professor of
Indian Cultures and Civilizations,
and Director, India Studies Program,
Indiana University, Bloomington
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Indiana Network for Development of India Awareness (INDIA) is a consortium of institutions in Indiana seeking to develop new courses and programs in our area having to do with India Studies and South Asian studies. Consortium activities have been funded by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI-A grant from June of 1997 through December of 2000 with matching cost-sharing from the participating institutions, namely, Indiana University, Bloomington, Depauw University, Greencastle, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, and the University of Indianapolis. Beginning with the 2000-2001 academic year, the consortium will be expanded to include Butler University (Indianapolis), Hanover College (Hanover), IUPUI (Indianapolis), Purdue University (Lafayette) and Wabash College (Crawfordsville).
One important consortium activity has involved the development of an introductory core course on India Studies, using CD-ROM technology, entitled "Passage to India: Emperors, Gurus and God." This has been an experimental course that has been taught on a trial basis at IU, Bloomington, for the past three years. It is a nonprofit educational venture to provide teaching materials to member institutions in the consortium so that each campus will have resources for developing new courses or portions of new courses related to India and South Asia. The teaching materials are also available to member institutions of the consortium on the web site of the India Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington, with availability limited to consortium members through a special password. Eventually it is hoped that the CD-ROM can be published for general distribution, but at this time it is only an experimental teaching tool for institutions in our region.
I wish to acknowledge the various institutions and persons who have helped in developing this educational venture. First and foremost, thanks to the staff of the Teaching & Learning Technologies Laboratory (TLTL) at Indiana University, Bloomington, including director David Goodrum and technical assistants Gail Rathbun and Thomas Harris, who provided the technical expertise for developing and burning the CD-ROM. Thanks also to the Graphics Services department of Instructional Support Services at IU, Bloomington, and especially to Susie Hull, for assistance in map construction and graphics. Thanks as well to Justin Stephenson and Pragati Jain, graduate research assistants in the India Studies Program, who spent countless hours in scanning, digitizing and structuring the various modules in the CD-ROM and assisting me in the classroom use of the teaching materials. Timothy Callahan, executive assistant in the India Studies Program, also deserves thanks for spending countless hours in designing, redesigning and coordinating the various components of the CD-ROM.
I also want to acknowledge and express my thanks to those who helped by providing images for our CD-ROM, including
The Art Institute of Chicago, and especially
Alan Newman and his staff at the Imaging Laboratory of The Art Institute of
Chicago, for providing digitized images from The Art Institute's collection;
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Department of
Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, for selected images from his web
site entitled "Harappa";
J. F. Staal, Professor Emeritus, South and
Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and photographer,
Addie de Menil, for some images from Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, 2 volumes (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983);
Barbara Ramusack, Professor and Chair,
Department of History, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, for some images from her
personal slide collection;
Rebecca Manring, Assistant Professor of India
Studies and Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, for some images
from her personal slide collections.
G.J. Larson, P. Pal and H. Daniel Smith, and
the India Studies Program in association with the Indiana University Art Museum,
for images from Changing Myths and Images: Twentieth-Century Popular Art in
India (Bloomington: India Studies Program, 1997)--derived from the H. Daniel
Smith Poster Archive, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York, and from
the Ainslie T. Embree Collection, The Asia Society, New York City;
Marilynn Alsdorf, The James and Marilynn
Alsdorf Collection, for images from A Collecting Odyssey: Indian Himalayan
and Southeast Asian Art (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago in
association with Thames and Hudson, 1997);
Government of India, Ministry of External
Affairs, New Delhi for images from its periodical, India Perspectives;
Philadelphia Museum of Art for three images of the Shiva Nataraj, and Princeton University Press for two images of the Garbha-Griha from the Shiva temple at Elephanta--the former images from Stella Kramrisch's Manifestations of Shiva, Exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1981), the latter from Stella Kramrisch's The Presence of Shiva (Princeton University Press), 1981).
Finally, a special word of thanks to Professor Stephen Slawek, Department of Ethnomusicology, University of Texas, Austin, for providing classical sitar music as audio background for portions of the CD-ROM, and Professor Guy L. Beck, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Music, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, for providing classical and modern vocal music for the CD-ROM.
The text for the CD-ROM for the most part is an adaptation and reworking of some portions of my book India's Agony over Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995; and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Gerald James Larson
Rabindranath Tagore Professor of
Indian Cultures and Civilizations,
and Director, India Studies Program,
Indiana University, Bloomington