Gerald James Larson, IU's Rabindranath Tagore Professor of Indian cultures and civilizations, photographed at the IU Art Museum. He will lead a consortium, comprised of four Hoosier institutions, to be called INDIA.Photo by Chris Meyer
Gerald James Larson, IU's Rabindranath Tagore Professor of Indian cultures and civilizations, photographed at the IU Art Museum. He will lead a consortium, comprised of four Hoosier institutions, to be called INDIA.
Photo by Chris Meyer
By Jeff Austin
As India celebrates its 50th year as an independent nation, Indiana University's India Studies Program on the Bloomington campus is celebrating its first anniversary with the news that it has been awarded a grant to further India studies throughout central and southern Indiana. (See related story)
"Our India Studies Program has only been in place for a little over a year, and it is most gratifying to receive such a major federal grant so early along our program development," said Gerald James Larson, the Rabindranath Tagore Professor of Indian cultures and civilizations and director of the India Studies Program at IU. "The grant will enable us to grow much faster than we had originally anticipated."
The Department of Education Title VI-A grant will enable IU to lead the development of an educational consortium to be called the Indiana Network for the Development of India Awareness (INDIA). In addition to IU, the consortium will include Depauw University, the University of Indianapolis and Indiana State University. Larson will serve as director of the project.
After earning his doctorate from Columbia University, Larson did postdoctoral work in Sanskrit and Indology at Banaras Hindu University in India.
"I became interested in India through my studies in the classical language of India when I was a student at Columbia," Larson said. "I had studied a whole series of languages -- German, French, Greek and classical Hebrew -- when someone suggested I try an Asian language. I chose Sanskrit and then went on to Vedic, Pali, Buddhist Hybrid and Hindi."
With the establishment of the Tagore chair in India studies in 1995, IU joined the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University in New York as one of only three American universities with endowed programs for the study of India.
"In fact, we are the only program focused specifically on India," Larson explained. "We're not just a general South Asian program as Columbia and Berkeley are.
"India deserves to be understood by Indiana students much more than it has up to the present time," Larson said. "There are currently 1.1 million Indian nationals living in the United States, including 10,000 in Indiana alone. Hence the obvious need for a program at IU to make people aware of India as a world class nation and as people who are their neighbors."
Related Link:
http://www.indiana.edu/~isp/
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