SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Visit to Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore
Friday 30 November 2007

Web page: http://www.cscsarchive.org/

The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society was established in 1996 by a group of scholars interested in developing new approaches to studying culture in India. This interest has been energised by a sense that the social sciences and humanities disciplines as they exist are no longer adequate to the task of engaging seriously with the problems of our time.

Today both the political frameworks of the post-colonial nation-state (democracy, secularism, development) and the institutional structures they endorse (among others, our universities and research entres) are clearly in crisis. The three key concepts for CSCS are: Critical Pedagogy; Interdisciplinarity; and Rethinking Social Sciences.

Several research programmes are currently running at CSCS. Among them, three programmes focus on Culture and Colonial Histories:
• Rethinking Indian Intellectual Traditions (coordinated by Dr. Vivek Dhareshwar)
• Modernity in Portuguese colonialism (coordinated by Dr. Rochelle Pinto)
• Defining Indian liberalism (coordinated by Dr. Prasanta Chakravarty)

The CSCS Director, Sitharamam Kakarala himself (photo to the right), is coordinating another research programme focusing on ”Law, Society & Culture” along with Dr. Sruti Chaganti and Dr. Lakshmi Arya (Visiting scholar at CSCS, PhD in History from JNU).

Besides, CSCS offers a number of PhD and Diploma courses, often in collaboration with other academic partners. The courses include a PhD course in Cultural Studies, where the CSCS PhD students are afflilated to Manipal University and Kuvempu University; Diploma Courses at Christ College in Bangalore for undergraduate students of the Journalism and Mass media; and a summer course titled ”The Global City: Mapping Bangalore" for students of the Eugene Lang College, New School in New York.

In total, 10 post-doc researchers are connected to CSCS, as well as around 30 PhD students (affiliated to different universities, as mentioned above). Our knowledge about CSCS came from meeting Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana (photo to the left), former CSCS Director, and a researcher that has made studies on the Indian Diaspora in the Carribean, especially Trinidad. In May 2006, Staffan and Lars met her in Denmark when she visited Roskilde University in Denmark, to participate in the PhD Researcher Training Course on ”Postcolonial sexualities: Politics and discourses”. They had a fruitful meeting over dinner, discussing possible links to establish between CSCS and Swedish researchers, and now we followed this up by a personal visit to the CSCS premises in Bangalore.

Unfortunately, Dr. Niranjana was not in town (she was in Berlin) but a meeting with a number of the researchers was kindly organised by Dr. Kakarala, directly after our arrival from Mysore. We were given a chance to present SASNET and the possibilities that we can offer in promoting more collaboration with Swedish researchers and institutions, and the CSCS researchers presented their respective ongoing projects. Besides the researchers and the projects mentioned above, we also met Dr. S.V. Srinivas who is involved in a project on Cinema and Popular Culture.
We also met a PhD student, Mr. Rajeev Kumaramkandath, who recently spent two months in Sweden during the Fall 2007. Mr. Rajeev is working on an interesting project titled ”Sexual minorities in a broad historical context in Kerala”. It is carried out in collaboration with Prof. Anna Jonasdottir, Center for Feminist Social Studies, Dept. of Social and Political Sciences, Örebro University, and Prof. Nina Lykke, Institute for Thematic Gender Studies, Linköping University.

Researchers at CSCS, from left to right: Vivek Dhareshwar, Rochelle Pinto, Lakshmi Arya, Sruti Chaganti, and Rajeev Kumaramkandath.