India's economic boom and South Asian studies: a linkage?

[Frank Conlon]

Dear Colleagues:

I hesitate to throw cold water upon the idea that somehow maybe the 
emergence of India as an economic tiger will carry over into enhanced 
support for the academic study of India and Indian languages.  I am, 
however, persuaded that in the near term future, those of us who are in 
the enterprise of teaching and researching on traditional India, or who 
have the constant concern about protecting South Asian studies from the 
budget cutters, will not gain much advantage.  With luck we may get a 
small breathing space.

My reasons for this view are:

1.  India's continued use of the English language will mean that 
transactions at the elite level will continue in that medium.  A person 
who is well-connected and knowledgeable about India said something to the 
effect that "There is no need for me to insult my Indian counterparts by 
speaking grade three Hindi when their command of English is better than 
the average high school graduate in America.  It may break the ice and be 
a source of laughter, but negotiations will be in English."  In Japan and 
Korea and China, the perception of such a utility for English is not present.

2.  India's economic liberalization -- if successful -- will attract much 
interest and again, we may be able to leverage some of our activities on 
the grounds of their strategic value.  However, my impression so far as 
that the emergence of India as a hot topic has meant the entry into the 
arena of academics who are comparativist in perspective--industrial 
policy and political economy specialists who doubt that knowledge of 
Kannada or Marathi will be of any use other than for giving orders to a 
taxi driver.  Some of these scholars are very attuned to the import of a
local culture, others assume that the world is going to converge, so why
worry about local details.  

The latter point reflects my sense that South Asia as an academic field 
has tended to be a zone of refuge for a wide variety of people who do not 
take much pleasure in more mundane or pedestrian pursuits.  (This of 
course does not apply to you or me who are very much "with it", but there 
may be others...)

This is not to say that knowledge of the Gita, the Mahabharata, the 
Quran, the Buddhacaritra, the abhangs of Tukaram, the Guru Granth Sahib, 
the poetry of Ghalib, or the dramas of Kalidas, is not valuable and 
important.  The problem is that such study is not viewed as practical.  It
is the same for knowledge of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible.  These 
are items which may stretch the mind, but they do not have any apparent 
application to short term business or strategic solutions.  

Remember, the bottom line is as low as you can go.


Frank F. Conlon
Professor of History
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
Co-editor of H-ASIA
<conlon at u.washington.edu>


p.s.  I have not entered above into the widespread problems of the 
application of the industrial production model to academic institutions 
in Europe and America--here too the bottom line comes into play in terms 
of student enrollments and allocation of scarce resources.  The tragedy 
of the situation is that we are very inexpensive until you factor in the 
relative ability to obtain external research funding with potential for 
overhead (indirect cost) charges which help many American universities to 
balance the books each year.

So let us concentrate upon the work and not upon the fruits thereof...