FACULTY
Amy Bard, South Asia Studies
Christopher Candland, Political Science
Cathleen Cummings, Art History
T. James Kodera, Religion
Geeta Patel, Women's Studies
Smitha Radhakrishnan, Sociology
Nikhil Rao, History
Margery Sabin, English
Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, South Asia Studies
Amy Bard abard@wellesley.edu
Visiting Lecturer
South Asia Studies
I first went to India as a 15-year-old Rotary exchange student, and it’s been impossible to tear me away from South Asia since! Much of my research explores how gender, regional identity, or sectarian tensions mediate poetic production, appreciation, and meaning in contemporary South Asia. My writings also engage the anthropology of emotion/affect. I work on literature and language use in both Hindi and Urdu, with particular attention to expressive traditions among women, especially laments that gained prominence in the nineteenth century and continue to have vibrant (often religiously based) performance contexts today. Some of my newer research documents the construction of linguistic identity and heritage in areas within South Asia where speakers of “major” languages form minority communities. My most recent article,” A House Overturned: A Classical Urdu Lament in Braj Bhasha,” co-authored with Valerie Ritter of the University of Chicago, was published in Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols: Process, Power, and the Articulation of Religious Identities in South Asia (Routledge, 2009).
I earned my Ph.D. (2002), M. Phil., and M.A. from Columbia University, and did undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr, Banaras Hindu University, and the University of Wisconsin. Prior to Spring 2009, I was Assistant Professor of Hindi/Urdu at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and before that taught at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and Columbia. In an even earlier avatar, I spent three years as Academic Director of the School for International Training’s College Semester Abroad Program in western India.
Recent travels have taken me to India and Bangladesh to work on the manuscript of my book, He Made Me Light Up the Gathering: Women’s Piety, Poetry, and Performance in South Asian Shi‘i Islam. My upcoming schedule includes teaching courses in intermediate (my favorite level!) Hindi/ Urdu at Wellesley and Urdu literature at Harvard, and a visiting fellowship at the Max Planck Institute’s Center for the History of Emotions, Berlin.
Christopher Candland ccandlan@wellesley.edu
Associate Professor
Political Science Department
My research focuses on the politics of labor, health, and education in South and Southeast Asia. I was trained as a scholar of Southern Asian politics at Columbia University. I learned there how to use economics, history, languages and literature, religion, and sociology as well as political science to study politics. I began my teaching career at the University of California Berkeley in 1996.
At Wellesley, I teach courses on Comparative Politics; Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment; the Politics of South Asia; International Relations of South Asia; Ethnicity, Nationalism, Religion, and Violence; and the Politics of Community Development.
I have published on such issues as the contribution of Indian and Pakistani labor unions to democracy and development; Islamic education in Indonesia and Pakistan; health services provided by religious groups in Sri Lanka and in Thailand; and the contribution of Islamic women's organizations' to reproductive rights in Indonesia. My latest journal article is on "Workers' Organizations in Pakistan" (Critical Asian Studies 2007). My latest book is Labor, Democratization, and Development in India and Pakistan (Routledge 2007). These and other publications are available at www.candland.info.
I have been a project officer for Church World Service's refugee program in Sri Lanka; Assistant to the Secretary of the Political and Security Affairs Committee of the United Nations; an International Affairs Fellow of the Council of Foreign Relations; a staffer in the U.S. Congress, an advisor to the U.S. Department of State, and an advisor to non-governmental organizations in Indonesia and Thailand.
Cathleen Cummings ccummings@wellesley.edu
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of the Art and Architecture of South Asia
Cathleen Cummings in a specialist in South Asian art, particularly in the areas of Hindu temple architecture and Indian miniature painting. She received her doctorate in art history from The Ohio State University, specializing in the art of South Asia, with minors in Islamic and Himalayan Buddhist art. Her distertation, which she is now revising for a book, analyzed the iconography of the eighth-century Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal, in Karnataka, India, exploring issues of royal and female patronage, the development of Hindu kingship and its rituals, and certain Shaivite religious practices. She has also published on Himalayan Buddhist art. During the 2009-10 academic year, she will be teaching classes on Painting in India (Fall 09) and Architecture in India in teh Post-Mughal Era: 1650-1950 (Spring 10).
T. James Kodera jkodera@wellesley.edu
Professor of Religion
Co-Director, East Asian Studies Program
Since joining the Wellesley faculty in 1976, after three years of teaching at Oberlin, I have developed courses in the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion with a focus on Asia. For the first ten years, I taught courses on South Asia as well as East Asia. A growing demand for courses on Asian religions helped create a second Asianist in the Religion Department. The coverage of Asia was divided into South Asia and East Asia. While the South Asianist focused on Islam with a significant coverage of West Asia, as the East Asianist I focused on Buddhism that evolved out of the historical, cultural and religious milieu of South Asia. To that extent, my involvement in South Asian Studies remains strong. Courses on East Asian religions include Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, Buddhism of China and Japan. The courses I teach at Wellesley reflect my graduate school training in the academic study of religion with a concentration on Buddhist Studies, and language study in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese.
At Wellesley, I have also helped developed Japanese Studies, East Asian Studies and Asian American Studies. I have traveled to India, China, Korea and Japan.
The courses that I teach with a significant South Asia Studies content are:
REL 108, “Introduction to Asian Religions”
REL 253: “Buddhist Thought and Practice”
REL 353: “Seminar: Tibetan Buddhism
The following courses have some South Asian content:
REL 353: “Seminar: Zen Buddhism”
REL 257: “Contemplation and Action”
Geeta Patel gpatel@wellesley.edu
Associate Professor
Women’s Studies Department
Smitha Radhakrishnan sradhakr@wellesley.edu
Assistant Professor
Sociology Department
My background in development studies and gender served as my initial lenses for studying India. Since then, those lenses have given way to more contemporary themes: globalization, the “new” Indian middle class, and the shifting symbolic and economic roles of Indian women in defining “Indian culture.” My approach to these themes is qualitative, drawing upon long periods of ethnographic work and interviews, while always situating these findings in larger political, economic, and cultural trends. My recent work, based on 15 months of fieldwork in Mumbai and Bangalore, with comparative components in California and South Africa, explores the ways in which India’s information technology (IT) industry has helped to foster a new class of “global Indians” who have profoundly shaped contemporary conceptions of India and Indianness. In particular, the project examines the ways in which middle-class women working in IT bear significant symbolic power in articulating a new idea of India to the rest of India and the world. Prior to this project, I have studied issues of cultural politics among South African Indians in post-apartheid Durban and gender and development issues, particularly with regard to education, in the Indian states of Rajasthan and Kerala.
At Wellesley, I teach three courses that deal with South Asia in some part: SOC 233, Gender and Power in South Asia; SOC 234, Gender and International Development, and SOC 309, Race, Class, Gender and the Nation. The latter two courses can count towards the South Asian Studies major provided interested students write their papers on a topic pertaining to South Asia. Each of these courses is interdisciplinary; while informed by sociological perspectives, the readings draw from anthropology, geography, postcolonial theory and feminist theory as well.
In parallel with my academic life, I continue to learn, perform, and promote Indian classical dance, specifically the forms of Bharatnatyam and Mohini Attam, which I have studied continuously since the age of five. I have performed regularly in California, Arizona, South Africa and India at various times in the past fifteen years, and co-founded a classical dance company in California, NATyA. As a company, NATyA produced four original productions from 2003-2007, alongside active community outreach and involvement in schools, libraries, and the local arts community of the Bay Area.
Nikhil Rao nrao@wellesley.edu
Assistant Professor
History Department
I came to study South Asia in a pretty roundabout way, after flailing as an engineer in college for many years. Perhaps this background in engineering shaped my early interest, in graduate school, in the history of science education and technocracy in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. I also became very interested in the history of cities and urbanization, which is what I’m currently working on. How do cities respond to pressures such as industrialization over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries? How do South Asians respond to cities? What kind of buildings do they build and how did the streets they walk along become that way? I teach courses on the histories of South Asian cities, on ideas of “development” in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, and on notions of ethnicity in South Asia. My research interest in Bombay appears in "Hoops, Hunger, and City," in Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes, eds., Bombay, Eri Jann: Writings on Mumbai, New Delhi: Penguin, 2003. A more recent publication is "'South Indians are like that only': communal identity in late colonial Bombay," in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar, and Andrew Sartori, eds., From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Courses offered:
HIST 272: Political Economy of Development in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia
HIST 275: Ethnic identities in Modern South Asia
HIST 276: The City in South Asia
HIST 382: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar: The Making of Modern India
HIST 382: 1947: Partition in India and Pakistan
Margery Sabin msabin@wellesley.edu
Lorraine Chiu Wang Professor of English
Director of the South Asia Studies Program
With my training in Comparative Literature and my position in the English Department at Wellesley College, I have come to modern Indian literature in English with a special interest in questions of cultural and linguistic identity, the relationship of literature to history and politics, and all the dilemmas that can be traced to the legacy of colonialism and the pressures of modernization. I teach a course in modern Indian literature that begins with autobiographical writing by Gandhi and Nehru, and ends with an ever-changing selection of contemporary writers of current interest. In 2007 and 2008, that last selection has been the prize-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, whom we were fortunate to have as a visitor to campus in Spring 2007. Other writers studied in the course regularly include Indian, Pakistani, and diaspora Indian writers such as R.K. Narayan, Bapsi Sidhwa, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, and Amit Chaudhuri. Increasingly I have also been including samples of writings translated from the Indian vernaculars, both because they are extremely interesting in themselves and also because they provide a basis for considering the significance of the linguistic medium of South Asian writing. My recent articles and book, Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765-2000, explores some of these topics and has led me into my ongoing research into the meaning of cosmopolitanism for contemporary nonWestern (especially South Asian) writers. I have also co-taught with Christopher Candland, Associate Professor of Political Science, an interdisciplinary course, “Literature and Politics of South Asia,” and have directed senior Honors theses about a variety of South Asian topics, such as the representation of violence in the literature of Partition; patterns of social relationships in short stories by South Asian women writers; mythologies of gender in Indian nationalism.
Neelima Shukla-Bhatt nshuklab@wellesley.edu
Assistant Professor
South Asia Studies
Even though a native of South Asia, on my way to South Asia Studies I have traveled through several academic pastures. I took my first master's degree in English literature in India, and then obtained my doctorate in the Study of Religion from Harvard, where my focus was on sacred art, especially devotional literature of South Asia. While at Harvard, I had the opportunity to teach in the areas of religion as well as South Asian languages (Hindi/Urdu and Gujarati). I joined Wellesley as a Mellon fellow in Religion in 2004. I have since taught several courses on the religious history of South Asia – “Religion in South Asia”, “Women and Religion in South Asia”, “Religion in Modern South Asia”, and “Aesthetic Expressions of Religion in South Asia” – at Wellesley. My seminar “Metaphor of Erotic Love in Religious Literature” also contained substantial South Asian materials. These courses examine texts, practices, monuments, and social phenomena related to South Asian religions, taking a historical perspective. In addition to courses on religious phenomena in South Asia, I have taught courses that deal with cultures of South Asia. For two years, I have been teaching “Introduction to South Asia” (SAS 210), a course that gives an overview of South Asia as a distinctive world region.
Since 2006-2007, I have also taught a year long course in Introductory Hindi/Urdu (SAS 101-102), a widely spoken language in South Asia with two different scripts and some distinctive vocabulary associated with these scripts. Both scripts are taught in the course along with a few popular Bollywood songs. I truly enjoy teaching the language.
My research continues to explore religious expressions with aesthetic components from South Asia and theories about them. Within this field, I am increasingly drawn to two areas – women’s practices, and changing forms of sacred art and practices in the context of globalization. I have published articles on twentieth century women saints of India, devotional poetry of Gujarat (India), female poets of pre-modern India, and religious practices as purchasable products in commercials on international television. My forthcoming publications will include an article on the concept of bhakti-rasa (a religio-aesthetic theory based on an understanding of the intersection of devotional and aesthetic in religious art), an essay on Gujarati Hindu women’s dance for the worship of the goddess – garbo, and a monograph on Gujarati devotional poetry of Narasinha Mehta (ca 15th century CE) based on my doctoral dissertation.
"Bidis" (pronounced bee-dees), small hand-rolled cigarettes made of tobacco wrapped in tendu or temburni leaf, are popular in India, as seen here in production in Mysore.