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Million dollar education efforts for Motherland's sake

Part I

Part II

Arthur J Pais in New York

The Indo-American community chair at Berkeley was established in 1991 with about $ 400,000 raised from over 1,000 gifts from Indian Americans. Two other chairs have come up there including a Tamil studies chair.

A Sikh studies chair was set up three months ago with about a $ 350,000 contribution from businessman Narinder Singh Kapany of Santa Barbara. Three chairs, including a Sikh studies one at the University of Madison, in Milwaukee were set up in the last 18 months.

Indian history chair has also been endowed at Brown, one of the Ivy League universities.

The India studies chairs -- which are in most cases backed by matching contributions by the universities -- either offer new subjects for studies or strengthen the existing ones, by facilitating research, expansion of libraries, exchange of scholars and field activities.

Although the South Asian studies have had a long history at many top American universities -- Sanskrit was taught at Berkeley from 1897 - and there are over 100 colleges and universities across America that offer partly or fully courses about Indian religion, history, literature and archaeology, in recent years there has been a nagging fear that the general attrition in government funding for universities would lead to the demise of many programmes.

The establishment of a chair not only strengthens the existing programmes but could also save it from getting axed due to financial constraints. The interest accrued from the endowment fund will be used to pay fully or partly the salary of a professor or support research and cultural activities of a chair.

"It is not just that Indian studies feel the threat," says Frederick M. Asher, president of the American Institute of Indian Studies based at the University of Chicago. In his Art Department at the University of Minnesota, there were 15 faculty members a decade ago, now there are just eight. But he readily acknowledges that when there are big cuts, the non-American programmes are bound to suffer severely.

While he acknowledges that the growth of the endowments by the Indian community is slowly rising, it could certainly be ten fold. The AIIS, operating on an annual budget of about $ 1.5 million, gives away over $ 1.3 million a year in grants and scholarships to American and Indian scholars.

"How I wish we had a very big grant for a change," Asher says with a sigh. He, for one, believes that while an endowed chair often employs a "superstar professor" at a particular university, a grant given to institutions such as the AIIS will utilise the money to support scores of individual scholars.

"I spend enormous amount of time writing grant proposals and going around with my hat," Asher says. Among the donors are the Smithsonian Institution and the USIA.

"I wish I had received a hefty grant from Indian philanthropists and the community." The Institute has been responsible for the publication of over 2,000 books and hundreds of scholarly articles in its 35 years of existence.

Chairs for history or contemporary studies?

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