Roots in South Asia

Maxwell’s historic strength in Indian scholarship is showcased in the South Asia Center.

India leaves its mark—literally—on Ann Grodzins Gold every time she visits the Rajasthan village where she’s done research since 1979. Before she leaves, the villagers color her nails with henna. “You see my henna is growing out,” she says with a smile. “That’s how long since I’ve been there.”

Gold, professor of anthropology and religion and recently appointed director of the South Asia Center, is far from the only Maxwell scholar with deep ties to India and its neighbors. Maxwell has been a hub of South Asian studies for decades, thanks to the leadership of faculty members such as political scientist Marguerite Fisher, one of the first Fulbright scholars to go to India (in 1956), and Delhi-born historian Robert Crane, who in 1968 became the first Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies. Anthropologist Susan Wadley, who now holds that title, has been a pillar of India studies at Maxwell since 1970.

Since 1984, the South Asia Center (SAC) has been a National Resource Center for the U.S. Department of Education, in a consortium with Cornell. Scholars affiliated with the center hold appointments across the University—“from ethnomusicology to civil engineering,” says Gold, “so there’s genuine interdisciplinarity.”

Language teaching is a key component of a National Resource Center, and SU’s courses in Hindi and Tamil are complemented by Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhala at Cornell. The center also has a popular outreach program that lends videos and other teaching materials to local schools. And it sponsors many lectures, symposia, and cultural events, such as a troupe of Kathak dancers and musicians from India who recently performed to a packed SU auditorium.

Nicely complementing SAC’s educational programming is a new semester-abroad program, through which SU undergraduates study in the gracious south Indian city of Mysore. Offered by SU’s Division of International Programs Abroad, in conjunction with the University of Iowa, the Mysore program kicks off with language study and other coursework, followed by a two-week traveling seminar led by Wadley, and then an internship.

The South Asia Center resides within the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs alongside regional studies centers devoted to Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean. (New programs in Middle East and East Asian studies are being planned.) Gold says SAC increasingly works with Moynihan’s other centers to coordinate outreach and events and to explore “shared intellectual agendas” and transnational issues.

Back in the ’50s, South Asian studies at SU and other universities got a boost from the U.S. government through the National Defense Education Acts, which Wadley describes as “a Cold War response to, ‘We don’t know enough about the rest of the world.’” In 2006, it’s déjà vu all over again. In January President Bush announced the National Security Language Initiative, one of several new programs that will promote kindergarten through college education in specific languages, including Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali. In that endeavor, Maxwell’s South Asia Center is decades ahead of the curve.

—Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

This article appeared in the Spring 2006 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2006 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.