Harvard South Asia Institute

Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. He’s also a member of India’s Parliament. On behalf of SAI, he’s speaking at the Dhaka Art Summit, a huge South Asian cultural event that takes place from Feb 2-10.

There aren’t many people who combine two distinct careers, both at the very highest level. But Rahul Mehrotra manages to runs a successful architecture firm in India and is also senior faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In this episode, the first in our series of short interviews with South Asia-focused Harvard faculty, Professor Mehrotra talks about an exhibition of his architectural work, his future plans and also India’s severe housing problems.

For this latest podcast, we dip into a fascinating conversation between three of the faculty who are leading Harvard's research into Partition.

Arun Jaitley, India’s Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs, delivers the annual Mahindra Lecture for 2017/18, in honor of the late Harish C. Mahindra, a distinguished alumnus of Harvard College and a major industrialist in India.

On the 70th anniversary of the Partition of British India, here is the final podcast in our special series. Here is Part II of DR Martha Chen's extraordinary story - she was a child in India in 1947 but as an adult, she also happened to be based in the city of Dhaka as it became the capital of Bangladesh, following South Asia’s second Partition in 1971.

In Part 1 of her extraordinary and unusual story, the Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Martha Chen - who was in India in 1947 and later, witnessed the creation of Bangladesh from Dhaka in 1971 - explains her family’s deep and continuing connections to South Asia and reads from letters written by her grandmother in the months leading up to Partition.

In part 2 of Dr Lucy Chester’s compelling lecture about cartography and conflict, we hear about the Radcliffe Boundary Commission's deeply politicised role in drafting the map of India and Pakistan - 70 years later, the border remains an unresolved issue and source of violent tension.

We hear from Lucy Chester, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of Colorado and the author of 'Borders and Conflict in South Asia'. Here's the first part of her fascinating lecture from Spring, 2017.

Nearly 70 years ago, British India was partitioned along mostly religious lines - Muslims in the newly-created East and West Pakistan; Hindus, Sikhs and others in what remained of India. But, of course, it was never that simple. Here, Professor Ali Asani talks about the distinctiveness of South Asian Islam and the way in which political narratives emerged in the period leading up to Partition.

Tens of thousands of women were abducted, raped and killed during Partition. Catherine Warner, who is a College Fellow in the Department of South Asian Studies and the Department of History at Harvard, talks about what happened to many of them during - and long after - the intense violence they experienced.

Jennifer Leaning is the François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. In this extract, Professor Leaning talks about the violence that erupted during the traumatic migration caused by Partition.

Sunil Amrith is the Mehra family professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard.