DIRECTOR'S NOTE
Dr. Carol Babiracki
Associate Professor, Music History and Cultures
This year, the Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium
launched a multi-year Sustainable South Asia Initiative. This initiative is
supported by the Department of Education National Resource grant (see page 3)
as well as funding through the Central New York Humanities Corridor. On March
2, we hosted an inaugural workshop to begin to explore this theme. Our
presentations and roundtables quickly belied the facile gloss of sustainability
as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs.” The heart of the issue and its profound
challenges lie in the daily complexities of lives confronting unrelenting
change, as I have found in my own work with hereditary performers in eastern
India. Communities must weigh their cultural vitality against demands of
economic viability and environmental responsibility, all of which are
constrained by social inequities and history. The sweet spot of sustainability,
emerging from a balanced consideration of all of these elements, is an elusive,
moving target. Our inherited approaches to scholarship that attend to one of
the pillars of sustainability (cultural, economic, environmental,
social/political) to the neglect of the others are proving ineffective in
addressing the massive challenges and conflicts facing people in South Asia
today.
With our four year initiative, the South Asia Center seeks to
gather an interdisciplinary forum of the best minds of Central New York to
advocate for more holistic and locally grounded approaches to sustainability in
South Asia and here in our own communities. .jpg)
We also had an
opportunity this past spring to reflect on the hard work that has sustained the
South Asia Center and South Asian Studies over the past 49 years as we
celebrated the retirement of two of our past directors, Professors Susan S.
Wadley and Ann G. Gold. The fête of panels, workshops, performances, and an art
exhibition organized by and for them reminded us of how central they both have
been to the life of the Center. We will sorely miss their daily presence.
This fall, the Center
welcomes Professor Mona Bhan, Syracuse University’s newest Ford Maxwell
Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of Anthropology. Her
research and teaching on water systems, border communities, and conflict in
Kashmir resonates across disciplines, colleges, and programs. We know she will
find a warm and vibrant intellectual community of scholars of South Asia here
in Central New York.