On Thursday 2 February 2012, 13.15–15.00, Ishtiaq Ahmed, Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, holds a SASNET lecture about the 1947 Partition of Punjab. Ishtiaq’s speech is entitled ”The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First Person Accounts”.
The seminar is organised in collaboration with the Lund university Master in International Development and Management programme (LUMID). Venue: Lund University, Geocentrum, Hall ”Världen”, Sölvegatan 12.
The lecture is based on Ishtiaq Ahmed’s recent book on the tragic events during and after Partition in the two Punjabs – more information. He will shed light on how and why the Punjab, a Muslim majority province of British India with large Hindu and Sikh minorities, was partitioned in 1947. Had India not been partitioned the Punjab would not be partitioned either. Once power was transferred to the provincial governments in the Indian and Pakistani Punjab, violence escalated dramatically. The end result was ethnic cleansing on both sides.
Associate Professor Catarina Kinnvall, Dept. of Political Science, Lund University, will be discussant during the seminar.
More information about the seminar.
• SASNET social evening with film show in Lund
SASNET network members in or nearby Lund are invited to participate in a social gathering with food (knytkalas) and film show on Wednesday 18th January 2012, at 6 P.M. The event is jointly organised by SASNET and the Division of External Relations, Lund University, and aims primarily at the South Asian Erasmus Mundus scholarship holders – students and researchers – currently staying at Lund University, but other interested people within or outside the university are most welcome to join if space permits.
The film to be screened is Girish Kasaravalli’s 2002 Kannada movie "Dweepa" (The Island), a film that has been shown at several international film festivals, including in Gothenburg a few years back. The film will be introduced by Professor Gopal Karanth, the honorary guest for the evening, and distinguished ICCR Professor at Lund University during the academic year 2011-12. More information about the film.
Participation is free but pre-registration is necessary, and everybody are supposed to bring some food items to share with others, in the form of a typical Swedish ”knytkalas”.
More information about the social evening.
• Spring 2012 SASNET Brown Bag seminars to be held at Konsthallen
In 2011, SASNET introduced Brown Bag lunch seminars, aimed at presenting and disseminating eminent South Asia related research at Lund University. The Brown Bag seminars were successful, and they will be continued during 2012. The format will however be slightly changed, due to the fact that SASNET now organise the seminars in collaboration with Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund (ABF) Lund, and Lunds Konsthall.
Lectures will be given by eminent Lund University researchers as a lectures series, and be held once a month on Thursdays at 12.30. The new venue for the seminars will be Konsthallen, the public art gallery at Mårtenstorget 3 in central Lund.
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Neelambar Hatti, Kristina Myrvold, Magnus Larson and Mariam Meynert will present their research in the spring 2012 SASNET Brown Bag seminars.
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– The first seminar for 2012 will take place on
– The second seminar will be held on 15 March when Assistant Professor
– The third lunch seminar during the spring 2012 will take place on 19 April when Professor Magnus Larson from the Department of Water Resources Engineering will come and speak on ”Sri Lanka's vanishing beaches”. In this seminar, Prof. Larson will present to a broad audience the different projects that his department does that focus on various problems in the coastal region of Sri Lanka. The audience does not need any preliminary knowledge in the field.
– The fourth and final seminar will be given on 10 May when PhD candidate Mariam Meynert, Division of Education, Dept. of Sociology, will speak on ”Children without Childhood”. Mariam is working on a doctoral thesis entitled ”Conceptualizing Childhood, Knowledge, Pedagogy and Research into the Postmodern”.
See the Brownbag seminar 2012 poster.
More about previous SASNET Brown Bag seminars.
• SASNET visit to Malmö University departments
On Tuesday 10 January 2012, a SASNET team consisting of Julia Velkova and Lars Eklund visited Malmö University to meet some of the researchers and administrators involved in South Asian collaboration projects. They first visited the School of Arts and Communication (generally known as K3) at the Faculty of Culture and Society, located in an old factory building in Malmö’s Western Harbour, close to the Turning Torso. There they had a fruitful meeting with Oscar Hemer and Katherine Winkelhorn, strongly involved in collaboration with institutes in Bangalore, India. For eight years K3 has had a successful Linnaeus Palme exchange programme running with the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), and recently a brand new project between K3 and Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore – involving both academics and artists – has been funded by the Swedish Arts Council. This project, entitled
At K3, Lars and Julia also met Micke Svedemar, who was a guest teacher at IIITB in December 2011. He informed about new contacts he established with the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) in Chennai, a premier Indian journalism school under the aegis of the Media Development Foundation.
More information about the South Asia activities at K3.
SASNET’s Lars Eklund and Julia Velkova then proceeded to another department within Malmö University’s Faculty of Culture and Society, namely the Department of Urban Studies, located in ”ubåtshallen”, a neighbouring building that used to be part of Kockums’ submarine production. From 2011/12, this department is involved in a Linnaeus Palme exchange programme with Moratuwa University in Sri Lanka. Associate Professor Karin Grundström is coordinating the project, and she informed about the developments going on.
More information about the South Asia activities at the Dept. of Urban Studies.
• SASNET celebrated Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary 2011
2011 was the 150th birth anniversary year of the great myriad-minded Indian/Bengali poet, philosopher and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Celebrations were frequent in India and Bangladesh but also all over the world, including Scandinavia.
In Sweden, SASNET played a great role in organising a week-long Tagore celebration week in Lund already in March 2011, in collaboration with other organisations. Celebrations were then held in Gothenburg and Uppsala in May, and finally a week-long celebration tour with academic seminars and concerts, again efforts being coordinated by SASNET, were held in Copenhagen, Lund, Stockholm and Uppsala in September.
More information about the Scandinavian Tagore celebrations.
Professor William Radice, who participated both in the March and September events in Sweden, also took part in a large number of other grand Tagore celebration events held all over the world in 2011. 
”Kolkata, Santiniketan, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad; Marbach, Copenhagen, Lund, Zagreb and Rijeka; London, Dartington, Cambridge, Birmingham and Hull; Stockholm, Leiden, Salamanca, Barcelona and Valladolid; Washington and Chicago; Kuala Lumpur and Singapore….Who would have thought when I started learning Bengali in 1972 that Bengali and Rabindranath Tagore would take me all over the world? The 150th anniversary of his birth has kept me and other Tagore specialists exceptionally busy in 2011, and the celebrations seem likely to continue, culminating with the centenary in 2013 of his Nobel Prize.”
In an article entitled ”Timeless Tagore”, published in the Indian magazine Frontline, 13 January 2012, he gives a broad overview of the exciting and fascinating events, and a hope that they will contribute to a new appreciation of Tagore as a thinker, and in the long run enhance the understanding of his creative achievements.
Go for William Radice’s article.
• Staffan Lindberg lectured at Indian conferences
Staffan Lindberg, Professor Emeritus at the Dept. of Sociology, Lund University, and SASNET’s former director, participated in the Indian Sociological Society’s Diamond Jubilee Celebrations, held 10–13 December 2011 at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. The theme for the conference, gathering 2,000 participants, was ”Sociology and the Crisis of Social Transformation in India” and Staffan gave a short speech in the first session focusing on an international perspective.
Staffan also lectured at the Young Sociologists Workshop on Doing Ethnography, held in conjunction with the Indian Sociological Society conference, at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. From Delhi he then proceeded to Udaipur in Rajasthan, where he lectured at the Indian Society of Labour Economics 53rd Annual Conference, held 17-19 December 2011.
More information about Staffan’s India lectures.
• Lawyer working on Indian biodiversity standards visited SASNET
On Tuesday 3 January 2012, Maya Thomas, a lawyer from the UK now recently settled in Lund visited SASNET's office to meet the SASNET team, Anna Lindberg, Lars Eklund and Julia Velkova, in order to brainstorm ideas about how to bring Swedish expertise, knowledge and experience in a project about creating a biodiversity standard in India.
Anna Lindberg provided tips about research funding in Sweden, while Lars Eklund promised to link up Maya Thomas with Swedish scholars working in similar fields. They also discussed the possibility of organising seminars on the topic.
Since 2009, SASNET has maintained and catalogued a large books donation from the private library collection of the renowned Swedish historian Karl Reinhold Haellquist, who passed away in 2000 (after working for many years at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, NIAS, in Copenhagen). A large part of the collection, more than 6,000 South Asia related books, journals, videotapes and pamphlets on various aspects of South Asian studies, was later donated to SASNET/Lund University by his wife, Inger Sondén-Haellquist. The collection includes Haellquist’s unique collection of books on Mahatma Gandhi. These Gandhi books, and other works from the collection, are now on display in Lund University’s Asia Library (adjacent to the SASNET root node office in Lund. The remaining part of Karl Reinhold Haellquist Memorial Collection is still kept at SASNET’s office. 
Mattias von Brömssen, 
In late December 2011, the European Commission (EC) announced a new round of the 
In October 2011, the Indo-German Society awarded its Rabindranath Tagore Culture Prize 2011 to Professor Dietmar Rothermund, the nestor of South Asian Studies in Europe and the initiator of the biannual 
The 
Bangladeshi students at Lund University made a public demonstration against what they call the Titas River Destruction, on Friday 30 December 2011. The manifestation was held in front of the Lund University Vice Chancellor's building and Lund Tourist Office at Stortorget. It was broadcast by some of the national media of Bangladesh. Titas is a trans-boundary river of south-eastern Bangladesh. As part of an agreement on transit rights between the governments of India and Bangladesh, a road has recently been built over the river by dividing the same, though there are already one rail and road bridge over Titas river. The students demand that Bangladeshi authorities should see to it that the new built road is removed. Their goal is to sustain the destructive attitude to international organizations and remove the road from Titas by saving the ecology.
The Faculty of Theology at University of Copenhagen organised an academic seminar inspired by Allama Iqbal, the national poet philosopher of Pakistan, on 12 November 2011. It was the first seminar of its kind ever held in Copenhagen. It was arranged by Dr. Jørgen S. Nielsen, Professor and director of the university’s Centre for European Islamic Thought (CEIT); Dr. Lissi Rasmussen, director for the Islamic-Christian Study Centre (IKS); and Dr. Safet Bektovic, in collaboration with Ghulam Sabir, Chairman, Iqbal Academy Scandinavia (IAS).
The current economic crisis have brought attention to look closer at the case of the East India Company – the largest at its time trully international state-backed company. SASNET recommends two excellent articles that explore this topic and analyse the company's successes and failure in a contemporary context. The first article is published in the 2011 Christmas special edition of the Economist and is entitled ”The East India Company – The Company that ruled the waves”.
The book, entitled "Yoga Powers – Extraordinary Capacities Attained Through Meditation and Concentration" is published by BRILL, and was released in the end of 2011. It is edited by Professor Knut A. Jacobsen, Dept. of History of Religion, University of Bergen. His present book focuses on the extraordinary capacities called yoga powers that are at the core of the religious imagination in the history of religions in South Asia – a topic neglected in the research on yoga and meditation traditions. Yoga powers explained the divine, the highest gods were thought of as great yogins, and since major religious traditions considered their attainment as an inevitable part of the salvific process the textual traditions had to provide rational analyses of the powers. The essays of the book provide a number of new insights in the yoga powers and their history, position and function in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions, in classical Yoga, Haṭha Yoga, Tantra and Śaiva textual traditions, in South Asian medieval and modern hagographies, and in some contemporary yoga traditions. Brill. 
For the tenth year, the Nordic Centre in India (NCI) consortium offers a 7.5 ECTS summer course on 'Contemporary India' at University of Hyderabad during the period 1–28 July 2012. The course is tailor-made for 50 Nordic students and introduces issues of politics, culture and economy. It consists of the following five parts:
For the sixth year, the Nordic Centre in India (NCI) consortium offers a 7.5 ECTS summer course on demography and gender in India, in collaboration with the 
For the sixth year, the Nordic Centre in India (NCI) consortium offers a 7.5 ECTS summer course on environmental issues in India, in Bangalore during the period 24 June – 21 July 2012. The course titled “Approaching the Environment in India. New theories and methods in the study of the nature-society interface”, is being organised in collaboration with the 
Since 2008, the South Asia Institute at University of Heidelberg, Germany, runs an interdisciplinary Master's programme entitled ”
Professor Gopal Karanth from the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) in Bangalore, India, and ICCR India Visiting Chair Professor at Lund University during the academic year 2011-2012 (
The Swedish Development Research Network on Nature, Poverty and Power (DevNet), and the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University, organise a symposium entitled ”Emergent cities. Conflicting claims and the politics of informality” on 9th March 2012. The symposium will address the various processes through which people are creating space in the city; sometimes manifesting an emergent insurgence that challenges existing hierarchies and whereby people claim new forms for urban and national membership. 
The 24th Kerala Science Congress is scheduled from 29th to 31st January 2012 at the Rubber Research Institute in Kottayam. It will be jointly organisd by the Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment (KSCSTE) – the umbrella organization of the research establishments in the State – and the Rubber Board.
The Annual Institute of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (ICPS), University of Leeds and Postcolonial Studies Association (PSA) Postgraduate Conference will take place 2–3 February 2012 at University of Leeds, UK. The theme for the 2012 conference will be ‘Re-evaluating the Postcolonial City: Production, Reconstruction, Representation’, and is likely to have a strong Asian Studies strand running through it.
The 
Yale University Center for British Art organises a conference on ”Art, Agency, Empire: India in Global Contexts” to be held on 11 February 2012 in Connecticut, United States.
The Gujarat Studies Association (GSA) invites to its 4th Biennial Conference to be held 15–16 February 2012 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The theme for the conference will be ”The Gujarati Community: Globalisation, Mobility and Belonging”. Keynote speakers are Dr. Farouk Topan from Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (
The 40th World Congress of International Institute of Sociology (IIS) will be held at New Delhi, India 16–19 February 2012. The theme of the conference is ”After Western Hegemony: Social Science and its Publics”. It is jointly sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (
The 
The seminar seeks to define a more nuanced and sensitive critical framework that actively reclaims marginalized voices and draws upon recent studies in migration and the diaspora to reconfigure the Sri Lankan critical terrain.
A two-day Indian National Seminar on ”Civil Society in the Era of Globalization” will be held at Allahabad, India, 24–25 February 2012. It is organised by the Rajiv Gandhi Chair in Contemporary Studies at University of Allahabad (the Chair being established by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.
A conference on ”India and the European Union in a Changing World: Perceptions and Perspectives” is being organised by the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)'s Jean Monnet Chair and Centre for European Studies and will be held at JNU, Delhi on 1-2 March 2012. 
The 
An International Conference on ”Population Dynamics and Sustainable Resource Development” will be held in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India, 25–27 March 2012. It is being organized by 
The 
The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) organizes its second Summer Programme at Leiden 27 August – 1 September 2012. The theme will be ”World Wide Asia: Asian Flows, Global Impacts”. IIAS runs the programme in partnership with the Leiden Global Interactions Group (LGIG) at Leiden University.
The 3rd Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network, with the theme ”Connections, Corridors, and Communities” will be held in Kunming, China, 12–15 October 2012. The conference is organised by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in the Netherlands, but is hosted by the Centre for Southwest Borderland Ethnic Minority Studies, Yunnan University (YU) in Kunming. Conveners include Prof. Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam (UvA), and Dr. Erik de Maaker, Leiden University. 
The 35th Göteborg International Film Festival, from 27 January till 6 February 2012, has a rather limited stock of South Asian movies. The only feature to be screened is ”Runaway” by the Bengali-American film maker Amit Ashraf, previously working with a number of documentaries, short films, commercials and animations. ”Runaway” is his first feature film that took him back to Bangladesh to work with producer Sumon Arefin. It is a film about three men who run from their homes, searching for something better. Perhaps a better wife. Perhaps a better life. Then there is one man who is hired to find these runaways. He locks them up and brings them back home. He is constantly on the prowl for his big catch.
The director Amit Ashraf will be present at the festival in Gothenburg. The film is scheduled for 4 and 5 February.
