SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Report from Staffan Lindberg’s and Jan Magnusson’s visit to Karlstad University, December, 1, 2000

Present at the meeting from Karlstad University:
Per-Olof Fjällsby, Division of Social Sciences, History
Kjell Härenstam, Division of Social Sciences, Science of religion
Marc Katz, Division of Social Sciences, Science of religion
Sune Berger, Division of Geography and tourism (Dean of Social Sciences)
Gerhard Gustafsson, Division of Geography and tourism
Aida Aragão-Lagergren, Division of Geography and tourism
Kristina Lejonhud, Division of Geography and tourism
Ingela Jansson, Division of Social care
Eeva Lakomaa, Division of Nature and Environment, Dept. of Zoo Physiology
J.A. Karunaratne, Division of Economics, Dept. of Business and Economics
Lihong Yun, PhD student in economics at Karlstad University
Dhammika Withanage, Lecturer, University of Sri Jaywardenepura, Sri Lanka (guest researcher)
Magnus Lindh, Political Science, Division of Social Sciences, development studies (after lunch)

From SASNET, Lund University: Staffan Lindberg and Jan Magnusson

P-O Fjällsby hosted the meeting. He started with an introduction of the South Asia activities at Karlstad University and lamented that these activities had not been properly mentioned in the Foreign Office Report on Asia in 1998.

Karlstad has been involved in a number of activities in South Asia over the last two decades, which will be presented below. Besides these, Karlstad has earlier been engaged in the training of school headmasters in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Then each participant made a short presentation (see list above).

Student field studies in eastern Uttar Pradesh and northern India

The activities in South Asia go back to the mid-1980s when Marc Katz was doing research in Varanasi (he had earlier been engaged in the Wisconsin program there).
Karlstad started to send students in teacher training to Varanasi, and now every year a batch of students goes either to Varanasi (fall) or to Dharamsala (spring semester).
Totally about 300 students have gone to India since the start of the program. Since 1995, Karlstad has a study centre, Ganga Mahal, in Varanasi where students can live. Students from other programs than the teachers’ training program also go for field studies in India. Researchers and doctoral students from other universities in Sweden have also visited the centre and made it a base for their field studies.

MFS-students from various universities are using the centre. Karlstad University has made agreements with Benares Hindu University at Varanasi and other universities and institutes in the region and the students from Karlstad attend courses at these institutions.
Persons in charge of these activities are P-O Fjällsby, Inga-Lill Fjällsby, Kjell Härenstam, and Marc Katz.Ingela Jansson, Division of Social Sciences, Dept. of Social Care, has been taking students to India since 1997. It is done within a 5 credit course in Social Care in International Perspective. The Dept. of Social Work at Benares Hindu University is engaged in this program.

Overall, in Varanasi there is co-operation with the Kashi Vidyapith (School of Social Education), the Tibetan Institute of Higher Studies in Sarnath, and the Aligarh Muslim University.Karlstad will start a Linnaeus-Palme program in the fall of 2001, in which Indian students will come to Karlstad for half a year, and Karlstad students will go to India. In Karlstad the Indian students can study, for example, world religions and Swedish geography. Varanasi is the node for this exchange program.

Research in eastern Uttar Pradesh in India

The departments of religion and geography are engaged in research in eastern Uttar Pradesh:

• Marc Katz, religion, and biologist Eeva Lakomaa are engaged in the Swatcha Ganga Project, which has been set up to clean the Ganges River. They have collected funds and set up a laboratory for analysing the water in the river. They now plan a website for regular information of the sanitary situation. MFS-students have done fieldwork in this project. Funds have come from Sida and from 'Svenska Naturskyddsföreningen'.

• Kjell Härenstam, religion, is engaged in studies of religion in northern India. His field of studies concerns the didactics of religion, especially Tibetan Buddhism, and by bringing students to India and discussing their experiences he also gets a direct feedback into his research. (Publication: Härenstam, Kjell, 2000, Kan du höra vindhästen? Religionsdidaktik - om konsten att välja kunskap, Lund: Studentlitteratur.)

• Gerhard Gustafson, geography, is engaged in village studies, which is a broad type of panel study. There is a comparative perspective involving changes in village life in Sweden (Värmland) and the United States. In this program, Gustafsson and Kristina Lejonhud, doctoral student, is particularly engaged in a study of three villages close to Varanasi. The starting point is a village study by Rana P.B. Singh from Benares Hindu University in 1977. These villages used to be typical agricultural villages but have now become suburbs in terms of economic activities. There are striking similarities in this development with what has happened in rural Sweden and the Unites States.

Doctoral studies in Cultural Geography, Sri Lanka

At the department of Geography and Tourism there is a program for doctoral training of Sri Lankan PhD candidates from University of Kelaniya and University of Sri Jaywardenepura, Sri Lanka. Ten doctoral students participate in the program, which is carried out in co-operation with the universities of Uppsala (Claes Lindberg) and Gothenburg (Anders Närman), and is funded by Sida-SAREC. There is an emphasis on poverty studies and regional development. GIS (Geographical Information system) is used in the program.

Some students from Karlstad University have also been involved in the programme and there are plans to develop this further.

Research in Sri Lanka

Sune Berger and others at the geography department are now engaged in regional development studies in Sri Lanka, northern and central provinces. This is done in a comparative perspective, in which similar studies in Sweden serve as one vantage point. Industrialisation and the development of tourism are focussed in these studies.

In October 2000 they organised a workshop in Colombo on this theme. Dhammika Withanage, Lecturer, University of Sri Jaywardenepura, is engaged in a study of industrialisation in the northern province. She gave a short report from this study.

Aida Aragão-Lagergren, geography, is engaged in a study of child labour in the northern and central province in Sri Lanka. The study draws on earlier studies in Managua in Nicaragua. It is done in co-operation with a medical researcher in Sri Lanka and four doctoral students are involved in the project.

J.A. Karunaratne, Division of Economics, Dept. of Business and Economics, is involved in a number of studies of the Sri Lankan economy. His main interest is in rural development, especially rural development policies and industrialisation. Currently engaged in a study of globalisation in relation to developing countries. He is attached to the international Sri Lanka Study Group and to the Network for Asia Research in Finland. Lihong Yun from China is a PhD student in economics associated with his studies.

There is some co-operation with Hans Jansson, Dept. of Business Economics at Gothenburg University.

Discussion of SASNET and Karlstad's participation

After the presentation of the basic ideas of SASNET (by Staffan) and the work to build an Internet Gateway to South Asian studies, we had a lively discussion.
The participants accepted the principles on which SASNET are built.

We discussed how networking should be done in various types of activities. One way is via E-mail groups, another is via the Gateway. In principle the gateway communication should be completely open, but some expressed fears that the communication would not end up in any focussed efforts.

On networking across disciplines: One advantage of Karlstad and other newer universities and colleges is that they are already organised along inter-disciplinary lines, with researchers from different disciplines in the same department.What would make students and researchers visit the gateway regularly? Some suggestions:

• a billboard for information

• for isolated student it would be a way to get into different types of research networks and their results, find literature, etc.

• publication of scholarships and research funding available for South Asian studies
  useful links to South Asian studies, libraries, etc.

• chatting on the net: new students can learn from the experiences made by older students

A final discussion related to the funding of research and education. All the activities carried out at Karlstad University are not properly funded. Some money for travelling and fieldwork is provided by Sida-SAREC, but salaries of teachers/researchers and students' expenses are covered either by Karlstad University or by students themselves.

There is a lot of voluntary work involved in this. The Linneus-Palme program will help the students in the future, but the financing of teaching and research as well as of co-ordination is more difficult. Karlstad would, for example, need some resources for co-ordination and information of its various international activities, including its South Asian studies.

From the viewpoint of SASNET, we emphasised that the Gateway would present one possibility to reach a wider network with homepages from Karlstad.

Transcribed from minutes taken by Staffan Lindberg.