SASNET – A Unique National Swedish Research and Information Network
– BY LARS EKLUND
In May
2000, the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) was created through agrant from
Sida/SAREC and Lund University with the aim to create an institutional base inSweden for
academic competence building and thematic work on present day South Asia.The long-term
goal was to strengthen the relatively weak academic competence in Swedenin the field of
South Asia. SASNET soon became a successful network, funded by Sida for 10 years and after that by continued Lund University
funding.
Till December 2016, SASNET was a unique feature – a national all-Swedish research and information network, not found elsewhere in the World. However, from January 2017 SASNET was transformed into alocal Lund University Research Centre. It still keeps the network name but in reality it is a completely different institution than the ”old” SASNET. This is the story of old SASNET, 2000-2016, the SASNET that was built up by Staffan Lindberg and Lars Eklund in 2001, and within a few years became an internaionally highly recognised network connecting all Swedish and Nordic researchers in the field of South Asian Studies.
Please find the complete story of SASNET, 2000-2016, written by Lars Eklund HERE.
IMPORTANT: the 26th European Conference on South Asian Studies, ECSAS 2020 has been postponed until July 26-29, 2021. For further information regarding ECSAS 2020 please visit: https://ecsas2020.univie.ac.at/#mainwrapper and especially https://ecsas2020.univie.ac.at/faq/.
One of the stated aims of the European Association for South Asian Studies is to encourage and
support young scholars working in the field of South Asian Studies. In pursuit of this aim, the
Association offered awards linked to its biennial conference. Awards were to be made for the most
outstanding papers by currently registered research students presenting at the conference.
Awardees EASAS Research Student Award 2018 (in alphabetical order):
Madihah Akhter: A Wholly Unsuitable Heir: The
Bhopal Sucession Case, 1924-26
Madihah Akhter is a fifth year PhD candidate specializing in modern South Asian history. She received a Master’s in History from Tufts
University and a Bachelor’s in History from UCLA. Her research and teaching interests include modern South Asia, gender, queer and transhistory, and global history.
Her doctoral dissertation, titled, "In Her Own Right: Sovereignty and Gender in Princely Bhopal, 1901-1926," explores the mutual dependencies
and contestations of sovereignty between princely rulers and imperial administrators in the twentieth century. Specifically, she excavates the possibilities of princely sovereignty in
Bhopal under the direction of its ruler, Sultan Jahan Begum (r. 1901-1926). Bhopal, located in central India, was the only princely state under female rule in the twentieth century and
was the second largest Muslim princely state in India. In this project, she interrogates the conceptual and practical articulations of "in her own right" through gendered space, history
writing, anticolonialism, symbolism and succession. Her dissertation engages with political theory on early modern and modern sovereignty in South Asia, feminist analysis of performance
and embodied sovereignties, and postcolonial scholarship on anticolonialism and nationalism.
Sara Kazmi: Gender, Vernacular Tradition and the Politics of Voice in Punjabi Poetry: Radical Re-tellings of Hir by Amrita Pritam and Nasreen Anjum
Bhatti
In Memoriam
Dietmar Rothermund (1933-2020),
Professor of South Asian History at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg (1963-2001),
Chairman of the European Association for South Asian Studies (1997-2008),
Honorary President of the European Association for South Asian Studies (2010-2020)
It is with profound sadness that we announce that Professor Dietmar Rothermund passed away on 9 March 2020. He was an internationally distinguished historian of South Asia who focused on the history of Indian political ideas and Indian economic history.
In the first half of the 1950s, Rothermund studied history and philosophy in Marburg and Munich. A Fulbright fellowship took him to the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in 1959 for a thesis on the social history of America. After completing his studies, he travelled to India in 1960 as a recipient of a German Research Foundation (DFG) scholarship. This journey was decisive for his future research which thereafter centred on India.
Professor Rothermund’s entire academic career was associated with the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg where he worked from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. From there he was awarded his habilitation in 1968 for the monograph Die politische Willensbildung in Indien, 1900–1960 and was soon appointed to the professorship in the history of South Asia. He also directed the Institute for 15 years during several separate terms and succeeded in establishing an international network for research and cooperation.
In 1968, Professor Rothermund was among the founding fathers of the European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (ECMSAS) that later evolved into the European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) and gave birth to the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS). He contributed immensely to the association’s development for more than four decades and served as its first Chairman from 1997 to 2008. Professor Rothermund is especially remembered by EASAS members for his dedication to the cause of promoting South Asian Studies in Europe. In recognition of his decades-long engagement for and representation of South Asian Studies within and beyond academic circles, Dietmar Rothermund was made the – only – honorary life member of EASAS. His inspiration and presence will be sorely missed at future conferences and meetings.
A prolific scholar, in addition to numerous scholarly articles, Professor Rothermund authored many monographs, including Government, Landlord and Peasant in India: Agrarian Relations under British Rule 1865-1935 (1978), An Economic History of India (1993), Mahatma Gandhi: An Essay in Political Biography (1999), India: The Rise of an Asian Giant (2008) and Contemporary India: Political, Economic and Social Developments Since 1947 (2012). His most popular and probably most widely read work, A History of India (originally published in German in 1982), co-written with Hermann Kulke, is well known to students of South Asian Studies across the world as it has appeared in multiple, constantly up-dated editions and has been translated into several languages.
In 1988, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London. His work on the dissemination of knowledge on South Asia saw him recognised by the German government with the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2011) and by the German-Indian Society with the Rabindranath Tagore Culture Prize (2011).
The world-wide community of South Asian scholars has lost one of its most eminent members. He will be remembered as a distinguished professor who put South Asian Studies firmly on the academic map, as a supportive colleague bringing scholars together across Europe, and as an astute and kind human being,
The EASAS Council and Community
Photo: Prof. Dietmar Rothermund at the ECMSAS Conference 2008 in Manchester (courtesy of Lars Eklund).
The White Rose South Asia Network
Call for Papers:
4th Annual Conference - "Space, Place and Temporalisties"
The White Rose South Asia Network is hosting their fourth annual
conference online. This has been
rescheduled to April 2021, on
the theme Space, Place and Temporalisites.
India’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act of December 2019, which offers amnesty to non-Muslim religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, was announced by the federal government in order to protect religious minorities fleeing persecution from these three Muslim-majority countries.
This law, following on from what was popularly labelled as Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban in 2017, highlights a political climate where forms of nationalism are terrifyingly resurging. State borders are being redefined and contested the world over, from Brexit to the Scottish wish for independence. As such, it has become even more pressing to investigate space, place and temporalities, especially with regards to South Asia.
Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Hindi-Urdu at Wake Forest University
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY's Middle East and South Asia Studies Program is seeking applications for a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor in Hindi-Urdu
to start July 1, 2021. As a program, we are a large cohort of faculty across disciplines representing a variety of research and teaching interests pertaining to the Middle East and South Asia.
This Hindi-Urdu position marks an expansion into the formal, permanent instruction of South Asian languages.
You can find the full Job Announcement for a Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Hindi-Urdu with
the Middle East and South Asia Studies Program at WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA, HERE.
Please see also: https://hr.wfu.edu/careers/
Celebrate South Asia
Celebrate South Asia is a series of events recognising the University's connections to the region. This year events take place between 30 September to 23 October.
Details of all events and how to sign up are available HERE or on this main University page.
We would particularly like to flag up two events, but recommend that everyone checks out the website for more details of the whole programme.
During his lifetime, Mohandas Gandhi often looked like he had lost, but returned to the centre of public debate. Today at a time of historical reassessment he continues to be embraced from many political directions, and appears contemporary in a way his contemporaries do not. Why do Gandhi’s ideas continue to resonate 151 years after his birth, and what explains their applicability between generations?
Patrick French is a biographer and historian, and Professor for the Public Understanding of the Humanities and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. The event is free to attend but you must book via Eventbrite.
Following her unmissable conversation with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at the 2019 Edinburgh International Book Festival, we are thrilled to welcome back one of the world’s best-respected authors to discuss her new book of essays, Azadi. The slogan of the struggle in Kashmir for what Kashmiris regard as the Indian occupation, ‘Azadi!’ is the Urdu for ‘Freedom!’. It also became a chant on the streets of India against the project of Hindu nationalism.
In the light of the Covid-19 outbreak, freedom has, Roy says, taken on another meaning and in a new book of essays she invites us to see the pandemic as a portal between one world and another. Here, taken from this year’s 2020 Edinburgh International Book Festival, she argues, is our opportunity to imagine a better future. Arundhati Roy’s own career as a novelist began with the extraordinary success of her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things in 1997. Since then she has published two further novels as well as a major collection of essays last year. From this recorded event, Roy is in discussion with essayist, broadcaster and journalist Bilal Qureshi. The event is free to attend but you must book via Eventbrite.
Sign up here and find out about other events such as the South Asian Student Society evening this Friday: https://global.ed.ac.uk/celebrate-south-asia
The Environment and Social Justice in Asia - Asian Affairs Journal Special Issue 2020
Articles are invited for a special issue of the Asian Affairs Journal on the subject of "The Environment and Social Justice in Asia", to be published in November 2020. Articles covering any field or issue under this heading, including mining, water issues, forestry, manual scavenging, climate change, pollution, wildlife issues, or any other related matter are sought for this special issue of the Journal. This special issue hopes to focus attention on the interactions of environmental issues, politics, wealth, opportunities and privileges, as well as the effect of interventions and advocacy work on behalf of marginalised groups.
Articles should be 5-7,000 words long, and aimed at both a general as well as an academic audience. Full details guidelines on submissions can be found at the Journal Homepage.
Submissions or enquiries should be made by email to the editor, Bijan
Omrani
The deadline for submissions is 15 September 2020.
The Asian Affairs Journal has been published since 1914, and is the journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs in London (www.rsaa.org.uk). It is published internationally by Taylor and Francis, and has a wide readership amongst both academics, policy-makers, diplomats, and those in business and government. More information on the Journal can be found at the aims and scope page on the Journal Website.
Recent special issues of the Journal have focused on the Belt-and-Road Initiative, and also Religious Freedom in South Asia. Please see the links below to see these issues: