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Chairs of Indian studies or seats of right-wing agenda?

Part I

Part II

Part III

What makes an individual choose a particular university for endowing a chair or a research programme?

"In many ways, it is a way of saying thank you to the university that has given you so much," says Navin Doshi while discussing his gift. Two generations of Doshis have studied at the UCLA, one of the top universities in America, where the renowned scientist Kumar Patel is a vice-chancellor since 1993.

Doshi, a retired engineer, has been successfully dabbling with the financial market for many years. His is the largest gift to UCLA from an Indian American. "But in more than one sense, it is also acknowledging your heritage, and hoping that the chair will help make Indian culture and history better known." The UCLA has appointed Damodar R SarDesai, who has taught there for over three decades, as the first holder of the chair.

Professor SarDesai's activities for the next year will include the search for a successor -- and the establishment of a comprehensive Website on South Asia including information on books, articles and films on India's history, politics, religion and literature.

He will also organise a conference on "Family Values and Gender Roles -- In Ancient India and Now." He also wants to establish a forum at the UCLA in which scholars would interact with Southernt California's large Indian community.

Not all the donors give money to their alma mater. "A lot depends on sentiments," says Darshan Singh Dhaliwal, a major donor. "I did not go to school in Milwaukee but I love this city, and I love my religion and culture. So I chose UWM."

Like most Indian American donors, he chose a public university. Private universities are better at raising funds, he points out, but public universities are dependent on government.

"I have always believed that when you educate one person, you educate the entire family," says Dhaliwal, president of Bulk Petroleum Corporation in Milwaukee, who owns, among other things, about 150 gas stations in the American Midwest.

"My father used to sponsor literary meets and awards in India, and I believe that I should his carry on his tradition." Apart from donating $ 360,000 for a Punjab/Indian studies programme two years ago named after his father Kartar Singh, Dhaliwal has donated $ 1 million to establish two chairs in South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, one of the best universities in the state.

UWM has also contributed matching funds, says Marshall Goodman, the dean of UWM's College of Letters and Science. "The University of Wisconsin, especially the Madison Campus, has had a strong history of Indian studies, and the Dhaliwal endowments -- which we expect to reach $ 3 million -- have given a new dimension to this."

Part of Dhaliwal's gift is also used for scholarship for over 50 students from Punjab for graduate and undergraduate studies at UWM. "I would want the number to go to 300 by the end of this year to mark the 300th anniversary of Khalsa," Dhaliwal says, adding that he has plans to offer scholarships outside Punjab too. Naturally, he would be contributing more money to the school.

"Dhaliwal is the kind of a man who does not make big announcements," says Goodman. "But when he sees results, he increases his commitments." About two years ago, Dhaliwal donated property worth $7 million to a community college in Iowa.

With Dhaliwal's help, UWM hosted the Fifth World Punjabi Conference in Milwaukee this year. With over 5,000 people attending its events, it was the biggest such event in the Midwest.

Chairs are not always established to support the teaching of a particular subject and pay partly or fully the salary of a professor. "One of the most foresighted endowments we have had is from the Gupta and Kailath family. "It is not tied to a chair but to provide resources for Indian studies," says Steven M Poulos, vice-chair of the Centre for South Asia Studies at UC Berkley.

The business-couple Narendar and Vinita Gupta and Stanford professor Thomas Kailath and his wife gave $ 400,000 in 1996 to establish the Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies with Professor Robert P Goldman as its first holder.

Among many other events, lectures and workshops, the chair helped a three-day workshop at Berkeley last year on "Representing Women: Women in the Literary, Performing and Visual Arts of India." The workshop was the culmination of a year-long project undertaken by Dr Sally Sutherland, a Sanskrit professor, who was the first Kailath Fellow. Scholars from India including Meenakshi Mukherjee were among the 17 scholars at the workshop.

The Tamil Studies Chair at UC Berkeley, inaugurated last November, was set up with about $ 400,000 raised from the Indian American community.

As part of the Indo-American community chair, several distinguished scholars have taught at Berkeley. Among them is sociologist and ecologist Ramachandra Guha who taught a course last spring on "Arguments with Gandhi" which re-examined the major controversies surrounding Gandhi's ideas and the continuing debates on such issues as caste, gender, violence and science.

George L Hart, who has taught Tamil at Berkeley for many years, chairs the Tamil studies chair; his wife, Kausalya, who is also a Tamil professor, has been actively involved in raising funds for the chair. Among its many goals is the computerisation of Tamil language, the development of a unified code for Tamil characters and placing the digitised Tamil text on the Internet, and having mirror sites in California, Germany and Singapore.

While the publicity that was received in the Indian media for the endowments could prompt more entrepreneurs to fund more chairs, some India studies experts fear that the chairs will perpetuate a conservative, even the colonial approach to studying India.

"India will continue to be taught as an exotic and glorious land," complained one professor who asked for anonymity. "Whether it is Sikh history or Indian history in general, it will be mostly a right-wing agenda."

Madhulika S. Khandelwal, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, welcomed the trend of Indian American endowments but wondered when a chair will be endowed for the study of the community in America.

"We are still looking at India," she said, wondering if the new chairs would lead to too much of a preoccupation with India of the past . "Besides, when will we be studying the diaspora? When will we start studying on a continuing basis the success and failures of over one million Indian Americans? When will we study about the working people?"

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