Newsletter 82 - 27 February 2008
Last updated: 8 November 2011
SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK
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Contents:
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SASNET News
• Time to apply for SASNET grants
Applications are now invited for the 2008 round of SASNET grants. Closing date for applications is 15 June 2008. There are three kinds of grants offered by SASNET:
– 1. Networking grants for planning new research and/or education programmes or projects in collaboration between Swedish and South Asian partners;
– 2. Guest lecture programme grants (for inviting a guest lecturer from South Asia to visit Swedish universities), and
– 3. Grants for organising South Asia related interdisciplinary research workshops either in Sweden or in South Asia.
Please note that the main applicant must always be a researcher or teacher based at a Swedish university. All previously distributed SASNET grants are presented on our web page (go for the complete list).
Decisions will be taken in late August 2008. More information.
• Soumyajit Samantha lectures about Indian literature
Dr. Soumyajit Samantha from North Bengal University in Siliguri, India, holds a SASNET lecture in Lund on Monday 10 March 2008, 18.30–20.00. He will lecture on ”From Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy – Modern Indian Novels as Analysis of Changing India and as World Literature”. The seminar is organised in collaboration with the Association of Foreign Affairs (UPF) and the Dept. of Comparative Literature, Lund University. Dr. Samantha has been invited to Sweden with the help of a SASNET guest lecture tour grant, to hold lectures at Lund University and Växjö University. Venue: Atriumgården, Stadsbiblioteket, Lund. More information.
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| Hans Blomkvist and Katrin Uba. | |
• Venkatesh Athreya lectures about Wealth and Poverty in India
Professor Venkatesh B. Athreya, Economics Department at Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirapalli, India, holds a SASNET lecture at Lund University, on Monday 12 May 2008, 19.00–21.00. The lecture, jointly organised by SASNET and the Association of Foreign Affairs at Lund University (UPF), is titled ”Wealth and Poverty in Rapidly Globalising India”. Among Prof. Athreya’s most well-known publications are ”Literacy and Empowerment” (with Sheela Rani Chunk, Sage Publications, 1996) and ”Barriers Broken” (with G. Djurfeldt and S. Lindberg, Sage Publications, 1990). Currently he is co-operating with the sociologists Göran Djurfeldt and Staffan Lindberg at Lund University in a restudy of 300 agricultural households in Tiruchirapalli District, Tamil Nadu, people who were originally interviewed in 1979/80. Venue: Athen, AF-Borgen, Sandgatan 2, Lund. More information (as a pdf-file)
• Uppsala research conference on Nature, Knowledge, Power
A research conference titled ”Nature, Knowledge, Power”, aiming at bringing together researchers from different academic fields, concerned with questions of environment and society under present and historical conditions, will be held in Uppsala 15–17 August 2008. The conference is co-organised by SASNET, the Dept. for Rural and Urban Development at the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development (CSD). The themes for the sessions are: – Energy: renewable and sustainable?; Competing rights, codifying law; – Community rights under neoliberal rule; – Who needs conservation? Nature, people, survival ; – Contested urban environments; and – Ideologies of environmental change: from imperial modernization to postcolonial social equality? Deadline for applications to the conference is 31 March 2008. More information.
Research Community News
In April 2008, Professor James Manor, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, UK, will visit the Indian Prime Minister's Office in New Delhi, partly to convey concerns among India specialists (historians and social scientists) in Britain about the difficulties that non-Indian students and more senior academics face in obtaining research visas. Prof. James Manor has had a distinguished career in the academic & policy worlds. His recent work has focused on civil society and governance, the politics of poverty reduction, democratic decentralization in a diversity of systems and conflict in South Asia. He has previously taught at Yale, Harvard, and Sussex Universities. In India, he is connected to the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) in Bangalore, where he is the VKRV Rao Chair Professor.
He will be speaking with the Indian Prime Minister on behalf of the British Academy's South Asia Panel, but he has asked for comments from researchers and students in North America, Europe and Australia if they have have encountered similar problems with visas, and whether they perceive the situation to be deteriorating. British colleagues speak of two main problems: delays and refusals. The delays appear to be the result of complex processes which require more than one ministry in the Government of India to approve visa applications. The refusals are thought to result from excessive sensitivity, and some believe that these difficulties have actually become more serious in very recent times. They find this surprising because they expected the change of government in 2004 to improve things. Any comments should be communicated to Prof. James Manor.
• Mob ransacked the history department at University of Delhi
On Monday 25 February 2008, an organised mob led by activists belonging to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party) ransacked the Dept. of History at Delhi University (DU). The ABVP mob clashed with students and faculty at the department in protest against a recommended text for study by second year BA Honours students. ABVP refers to the ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas. Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, an essay written by the late Dr. A K Ramanujan (a widely acclaimed scholar with impeccable academic credentials, and with an expertise in a range of languages including Sanskrit, Tamil and Kannada), in which he stressed how there are and all along have been many versions of the famous Ramayana epic. No less than two dozen compositions exist in Sanskrit alone. It is recited and written in 25 languages in south-east and south Asia. The ABVP and other right wing groups claim that the essay is derogatory towards Hindu gods and goddesses. Part of the fury from the ABVP’s side also stems from a false allegation that Dr. Ramanujan’s text and other papers have been compiled into a book by Prof. Upinder Singh, a historian at DU and daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Upinder Singh was on campus when the vandalism occurred, and had to be escorted out by the Special Protection Group. The day after, on Tuesday 26 February, more than 2 000 students and teachers participated in a demonstration against the vandalism. The marchers made it clear no change in the syllabus would be made under intimidation. At the same time, the Dept. of History has been given paramilitary protection.
Frank F. Conlon, Professor Emeritus of History, South Asian Studies & Comparative Religion, University of Washington, USA, has written a summary of the controversy on the H-ASIA, a discussion forum on Asian History and Studies, part of the Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine network (H-Net). Prof. Conlon is the Co-editor for H-ASIA. Read Prof. Conlon’s contribution (as a pdf-file).
In December 2007, Dr. Prosun Bhattacharya, Dept. of Land and Water Resources Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, received SEK 9.4 million as a major grant from the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment within the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), for a four-years project (2007-10) titled ”Sustainable Arsenic Mitigation (SASMIT). Community driven initiatives to target arsenic safe groundwater as sustainable mitigation strategy”. The project will be carried out in collaboration with the University of Dhaka, the NGO Forum for Drinking Water Supply & Sanitation (based in Dhaka, Bangladesh), other partners at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, and the private company Ramboll Natura AB. The main objectives of the project are to i) increase global awareness of the problems associated with high arsenic groundwater of geogenic origin, ii) exchange experiences regarding feasibility of mitigation options and iii) develop a sustainable option for safe drinking water for rural and disadvantaged communities, through targeting safe aquifers in regions with high arsenic groundwater of geogenic origin for installation of community hand tube wells. Action research will be conducted in Matlab Upazila, Bangladesh. More information.
Earlier the same year, in June 2007, Dr. Bhattacharya also received a so-called Joint Formas–SAREC grant for research on sustainable development in developing countries for a three-years project (2007-09) titled ”Groundwater arsenic in Chhattisgarh, Central India and options for sustainable arsenic-safe drinking water supplies”. The project will be carried out in collaboration between the KTH-International Groundwater Research Group (GARG), and Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla University (PRSU) in Raipur, Chattisgarh state, India. More information, with a project summary.
• Formas funding for projects on ecology and epidemiology
In November 2007, the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas), decided upon the 2007 grants applications. A couple of South Asia related research projects were given funding. Prof. Alf Hornborg (photo), Human Ecology Division, Lund University, received a grant for a project titled ”Power, Land, and Materiality: Global Studies in Historical-Political Ecology as a Framework for Assessing Policies for "Sustainable Development"”, involving 10 researchers from universities in Lund, Göteborg, Stockholm, and Uppsala. Sub-studies will be made in several countries, and in South Asia Dr. Mats Mogren from the Dept. of Archaeology, Lund University, will do a study focusing on Sri Lanka. His project is titled ”Plantation Colonialism and the Change of Landscape in Sri Lanka. A historical-archaeological case study”.
Professor Annika Rosengren, Department of Emergency and Cardiovascular Medicine at Sahlgrenska Academy, Göteborg University, is another researcher to be funded by Formas for the period up to 2010. She coordinates a project titled ”PURE – a Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiologic study”. More information on the Formas grants 2007.
• Sida/SAREC announces grants for 2009 only
Grants to support Swedish development research are provided by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida, through its Developing Country Research Council (u-landsforskningsrådet). Applications for 2009 are open from 12 February till 7 April 2008. Please note that you may only apply for one year of funding (2009) for research and post-doctoral projects. Funding for continued support to ongoing PhD projects can be up to 2 years and for Network projects up to 3 years. This is due to a planned major reform of the funding system from Sida from 2009 onwards. The decisions of the application round will be announced before the end of October. More information.
• Time to apply for grants from the Swedish Research Council
The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) provides support for basic research of the highest scientific quality in all fields of science. Several South Asia related projects have been given grants in recent years. Applications for grants for 2008 and subsequent years should be given no later than: 2 April 2008 for projects within Humanities and Social sciences; 8 April 2008 for projects within Medicine; 15 April 2008 for projects within Natural sciences and Technology; and 22 April 2008 for projects within Educational science, and for Research infrastructures. Decisions will be taken in November 2008. Full information on grants announced, requirements, instructions etc.
