The Mittal Institute Year in Review 2021-22

THE LAKSHMI MITTAL AND FAMILY SOUTH ASIA INSTITUTE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

YEAR IN REVIEW 2021-22

Cover Credit: Komal Shahid Khan Moonlight 2016 Gouache and Smoke on Wasli 7 by 13 inches Komal Shahid Khan was a 2016-17 Visiting Artist Fellow at the Mittal Institute.

Year in Review July 1, 2021 – June 30, 2022

Our Mission The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University (The Mittal Institute) engages in interdisciplinary research to advance and deepen the understanding of critical issues relevant to South Asia and its relationship with the world. The Mittal Institute collaborates with faculty members, students and in-region institutions to achieve its ends. With approximately two billion people facing similar challenges and opportunities throughout South Asia, there is a critical need for solutions

and systems to support such a significant global population. The Mittal Institute’s programs and projects are working to actively address issues impacting the region and fill knowledge gaps in key areas.

Through research conducted by students and faculty, to partnerships with governments and organizations to seminars held on campus and across the world, the Mittal Institute seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the challenges facing the region.

Harvard University’s formal engagement with South Asia started with the South Asia Initiative in 2003. The pilot initiative was recognized as a full-fledged Institute in 2013, signaling the University’s longstanding commitment to the region and the beginning of an exciting new era for studies related to South Asia at Harvard. The Mittal Institute now serves as the premier center on regional studies, cross-disciplinary research and innovative programming pertaining to South Asia.

Contents

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Letter from the Director 06 2021-22 Highlights 08 In the News 10 By the Numbers 11 Our COVID-19 Response 12 Rapid Response: Afghanistan and the U.S. Withdrawal 15 Fleeing Afghanistan: Fara Abbas on Starting Over 16 FACULTY Research The 1947 Partition of British India 20 The Big Read: Unearthing Partition’s Narrative 22 Faculty Grants, New Books and Awards 28 Spotlight on Faculty Grant Recipient: Doris Sommer 30 Platforms Arts at the Mittal Institute 32 The Lancet Citizens’ Commission: Reimagining Healthcare in India 36 Scienspur 38 India Digital Health Network 40 Teaching Crossroads Transitions to the Aspire Institute 42 Interfaculty Teaching at Harvard 43 STUDENTS Research, Language and Internship Grants 46 Student Spotlight: Nusrat Jahan Mim 48 Seed for Change (SFC) Competition 52 SCHOLARS Fellows, Artists, Affiliates and Student Associates 56 GSA Spotlight: Tina Liu 64 Events and Seminars 66 MITTAL INSTITUTE GOVERNANCE Donor Spotlight: Kushagra Nayan Bajaj 78 Statement of Activities 80 Administration 82

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his has been an exciting year of transitions at the Mittal Institute. For over a decade, Meena Hewett and I worked tirelessly to build the Institute into the thriving, interdisciplinary hub of South Asia that it is today. Last December, we welcomed our new Executive Director, Hitesh Hathi, to lead the Institute into the next era as we expand activities in our India office and growth in-region.

Hitesh joins us from Boston’s leading NPR station, where he spent decades building the station's most successful national and regional programs, “Here & Now” and “Radio Boston.” He is also no stranger to the Mittal Institute, having served on panels and speaking at conferences during his time as a Ph.D. student in South Asian Studies at Harvard. He has already brought tremendous energy and new ideas to the position while working with Harvard’s senior leaders and faculty members as well as staff, donors and our in-region network to collaboratively envision our next-decade goals.

Working alongside Hitesh is a committed team both in Cambridge and New Delhi, including a new finance director with a strong background in budget, human re-

Letter from the Director: The Next Decade sources, and administrative operations to oversee both offices; new communications leads; and a new coordinator to work with the Institute’s growing fellowship programs. We’re excited about the team’s diversity of talents.

Back on campus Personnel transitions are not the only changes happening; for the first time since the pandemic began, Institute staff and visitors reunited on campus last fall.

Students filled the hallways and classrooms again, and joined us for events, a South Asian student group leaders’ gathering and information sessions on student funding opportunities for travel in the region. Student Grant application numbers have returned to pre-pandemic levels, which is promising. It has also been thrilling to see our fellows back at the Mittal Institute’s Cambridge offices, including Visiting Artist Fellows from India, Nepal and Pakistan, as well as our visiting scholars, Vidya ­Subramanian, from India, and Fulbright Fellow, ­Yaqoob Bangash, from Pakistan.

We also were able to host a handful of in-person events both at Harvard and in New Delhi this past year, despite the

ongoing challenges in gathering. We had a wonderful, closed-door session geared towards Harvard students with Indian diplomat S ­ hivshankar Menon, and an important panel discussion at the India International Centre in Delhi focused on the country’s Assembly Elections. I was lucky to attend this session in person, and it was a delight to see so many engaged students from local colleges in the audience.

New Projects on the Horizon: Healthcare in India, Climate Change and Art Conservation We are also looking ahead to new projects and programs that will set the stage for the next decade at the Institute. The Lancet Citizens’ Commission started last year as an ambitious initiative to reimagine India’s health system and achieve universal healthcare for all. The project has seen tremendous growth and our goal now is to turn the platform into a permanent repository of expertise on healthcare for long-term and lasting impact. We have also continued to respond to critical issues in South Asia, including our work around COVID-19 and the withdrawal of the U.S. from Afghanistan last year.

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A new and exciting area of focus is on climate change in the region. The Institute will draw on its experience of facilitating interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research collaborations on a common research agenda and on developmental issues. The first step would be to convene Harvard researchers and regional experts on three urgent areas of engagement that are currently neglected: Climate and Business; Climate Law; and Climate and Public Health. These areas are critical to the issue, but existing academic and policy-focused scholarship in the region is limited.

Another effort will build on our existing work in art conservation. We are working to expand our successful art conservation program, CoSTAR, into a full-scale regional heritage conservation program. Currently, CoSTAR is training museum personnel in the science and technology of art conversation in India.

This work is urgently needed in every country in the region.

The introduction of these new focal areas comes as we wrap up several key projects, including the Building Bharat-Boston Biosciences (B4) and the multi-year program between the Mittal Year in Review 2021-22

Institute and the Tata Trusts, Multidisciplinary Approach to Innovative Social Enterprises. Our highly successful Crossroads Program, which engaged first-generation college students from around the globe, has spun off into its own 501c3 entity, the Aspire Institute– an exciting move for one of our projects.

The 1947 Partition of British India Project is also finishing up with the forthcoming release of a new co-edited book.

Expanding Our Reach in South Asia As an Institute, we continue to focus on our growth in the region. The Delhi office has become a hub for intellectual engagement and a space for scholarly exchange. In addition to hosting regular (mostly virtual) events, the India team recently welcomed its first cohort of Mittal Institute India Fellows (MIIF), a unique opportunity for selected scholars to remain in residence at our Delhi office and work remotely with a Harvard faculty mentor.

In Lahore, Pakistan, we continue with our long-standing MOU with Pakistan’s leading institution of higher education, Lahore University of Management Sci-

ences (LUMS), which provides us with a base of operations and intellectual connections for work in the country.

In Nepal, our Kathmandu affiliates and program alumni serve as a resource for Harvard faculty and students. And in Bangladesh, we are also working to expand collaborations to further solidify our regional network.

As you can see, there is a lot happening at the Mittal Institute. I hope this report will give you a glimpse into the important and inspiring research and programs underway and on the horizon. As always, we look forward to hearing your ideas for how we can work together to continue to advance our mission of deepening the understanding of critical issues relevant to South Asia today.

TARUN KHANNA Director, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School

2021-22

Highlights July 2021 - December 2021 DECEMBER The Mittal Institute welcomed new ­Executive Director Hitesh Hathi, who joined the Institute after two decades at one of Boston’s leading public radio stations.

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OCTOBER Two Visiting Artist Fellows–Bunu Dhungana, a photographer from Nepal, and Pragati Jain, a performance artist from India–arrived at Harvard for their eight-week research residencies.

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SEPTEMBER The academic year on campus kicked off with two events focusing on ­Afghanistan, just as the US’s withdrawal from the country was making headlines. The events covered Regional Perspectives on the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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The Lancet Citizens' Commission convened at the Mittal Institute's Delhi office for a theory of change workshop to clarify the scope of work and identify potential divergent points that needed to be addressed.

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NOVEMBER The Institute’s Conservation Science Research and Training Program ­(CoSTAR), which aims to build up a temper of scientific studies for the conservation of art objects in India in conjunction with art historical studies, launched Module 2 with a roundtable discussion featuring experts from the Harvard Art Museums on how they engage with research in technical art history.

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January 2022 - June 2022 JANUARY Co-hosted with the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER) and Harvard University’s Center for International Development (CID), the Mittal Institute kicked off a new speaker series, Post Pandemic: Driving Inclusive Growth in Asia, which aimed to catalyze research to take regional steps not only to recover, but also to chart a new economic course that ensures even the most vulnerable in society are included in the post-pandemic boom.

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MARCH The inaugural cohort of Mittal Institute India Fellows arrived in New Delhi. This new opportunity supports outstanding postdoctoral scholars in continuing their research out of the Delhi office.

Mayanka Ambade focuses on healthcare utilization among older adults in India, and Ankur Tamuli Phukan researches festivals in contemporary Assam.

Page 58 Year in Review 2021-22

APRIL The Mittal Institute awarded the largest class of faculty grant recipients in Institute history. Winning projects focused on issues in South Asia ranging from climate change to STEM education, disaster response to architecture.

Page 28 Twenty-nine student grants were awarded for Winter 2021 and Summer 2022, providing Harvard undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to pursue internships at news outlets, study advanced Classical Tibetan and research stories of Sri Lankan Tamil migrants to the United States.

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APRIL Harvard students and affiliates had a unique opportunity to engage with one of India’s leading diplomats, ­Shivshankar Menon, in a closed-door session, Leadership Lessons in Global Diplomacy.

Page 73 Nitasha Kaul of the University of Westminster gave a riveting talk on campus about Bhutan’s international relations and how the small Himalayan state is geopolitically mapped through an exhaustive and southward-oriented “inbetweenness” (“inbetween India and China”), a lens that is taken to be natural but, in fact, has shifted over the centuries.

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In the News The Mittal Institute Appoints Hitesh Hathi as Executive Director

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itesh Hathi was appointed as the second Executive Director of the Mittal Institute on December 7, 2021.

Hitesh comes to the Institute with extensive experience in leadership and management, and a deep, lifelong engagement with South Asia. He worked as a producer at Boston’s leading NPR news station, WBUR, for 20 years, most recently as Executive Producer of the show “Radio ­Boston,” where he successfully built deeper and richer connections with the region, increasing listenership and making the show into the station’s marquee program.

He also has a long connection with Harvard and the Mittal Institute. Hitesh received a Master’s in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard and was a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard. He focused on classical Indian aesthetic philosophy, classical and modern literature and architecture, and modern politics.

Additionally, Hitesh was an Assistant and Acting Resident Dean at Harvard’s Cabot House, and has contributed to several Mittal Institute programs over the years.

Image Credit: Jesse Costa.

Sheila Jasanoff Wins Prestigious Holberg Award

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ittal Institute Cabinet Member and Harvard Kennedy School professor Sheila Jasanoff received the 2022 Holberg Prize — dubbed the Nobel Prize for social science and humanities — for her pioneering work in creating the field of science and technology studies (STS).

STS examines the relationship between science, technology, law, and political power, and it was Jasanoff who introduced this field to Harvard in 1998.

Now, the program she founded offers a Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS) track for Public Policy Ph.D candidates at the Harvard Kennedy School.

It is in recognition of these decades of dedication that Jasanoff was honored with the prestigious prize. “As one of the

world’s most influential scholars in developing the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Jasanoff has forged a unique, interdisciplinary body of research at the intersection of the Social Sciences, Humanities, Arts for People & Economy (SHAPE) and STEM disciplines,” said Heike Krieger, Committee Chair on behalf of the Holberg Committee. “Jasanoff is a significant public intellectual, offering timely comments on topics of public concern such as fake news and climate change. Crucially, Jasanoff combines a high level of conceptual creativity with empirical rigor and accessible writing. Indeed, Jasanoff is read not only by humanities and social science scholars but also by natural and medical scientists and policymakers, her work being truly wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary.”

Image Credit: Kris Snibbe / Harvard Gazette.

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By the Numbers 1 Conference 40+ Workshops 63 Seminars

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new and exciting area of focus is on climate change in the region. The Institute will draw on its experience of facilitating interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research collaborations on a common research agenda and on developmental issues. ­— TARUN KHANNA

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NEW FELLOWS

RESEARCH AFFILIATES

NEWSLETTER

WEBSITE

249,647

267k

Sends

Open rate:

Up+7%

Year in Review 2021-22

200+

Events

Top Countries: India, United States, Pakistan

Speakers/ Panelists

NEW DONORS Lucinda Bhavsar MBA ’97 Rajiv Kothari OPM ’14 Namita Luthra and Anil Shrivastava AB ’90, MBA ’96 Vimal MBA ’02 and Punyashree Shah

$130,000

in Faculty Research Grants

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2021-22 Student and Seed for Change Grant Recipients

$112,000 Total Grants awarded

YOUTUBE

75,230 Views

10.9k+ watch-time hours

TWITTER

Increase in Impressions

205%

over previous three-month period

Our COVID-19 Response Faculty Projects

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uring the second year of the pandemic, South Asia has continued to be hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Mittal Institute’s community of experts continues to play an active role in the response to the ongoing crisis, contributing research, oped writing and events to inform the situation.

The Lancet Citizens’ Commission (LCC) The Commission, which was launched in December 2020, is an ambitious, cross-sector endeavor to lay out a citizens’ roadmap to achieving universal health coverage for the people of India.

Through its website, events, and articles, the LCC has become a health information hub around key healthcare questions and needs, including COVID-19.

Select Writings from the LCC COVID-19 pandemic & children: Focus on mental health

By Vikram Patel in Down to Earth “Two years on, it is explicitly clear that young people are the worst hit as far as mental health is concerned. In every survey published so far, younger groups have reported the worst mental health, particularly mood and anxiety symptoms.”

must benefit from the lessons of the past waves by strengthening the capacity for providing assured, timely and competent care at all levels, but especially so in primary care settings.”

Community Science Alliance (CSA) Launched in 2021 by Professors Satchit Balsari, this collaborative effort aims to counter misinformation with sci-

Covid-19: What Kind of Peace Accord Can We Negotiate With Virus and Variants This Year?

By K Srinath Reddy, LCC Commissioner, for News18 “...we must improve our capacity for genomic surveillance to detect and evaluate new variants. Our health systems

Events and Seminars JUNE-JULY 2021 COVID-19 IN SOUTH ASIA – PRACTITIONER’S WORKSHOP SERIES Starting in June of 2021, the Mittal Institute, with the support of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Lancet Citizens’ Commission, organized a series of

panel discussions by leading scientists and frontline clinicians on the latest evidence-based updates for COVID-19 care. The goal through these talks was to assist with the management of COVID-19 and improvement of health outcomes in South Asia. The three-part series focused on:

PART 1: OXYGENATION AND VENTILATION: AT HOME AND IN THE HOSPITAL This session shared the latest updates on protocols for oxygenation and ventilation in COVID-19 patients, contextualized for resource-limited and rural environments.

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ence-based guidelines for COVID-19 treatment. The project unites community-based organizations, frontline clinicians and leading scientists from India and the Indian diaspora in developing and providing a suite of clinical resources for use in rural and urban settings–all vetted for scientific accuracy. The group has also been publishing articles widely in public newspapers across South Asia as part of an information campaign to advance appropriate, evidence-based solutions to COVID-19.

Select Writings from the CSA Creating a Lasting Legacy of Collaboration Across South Asia This oped by Mushfiq Mobarak, Maha Rehman and Satchit Balsari appeared in numerous dailies across Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The article speaks to the commonality of societal

PART 2: HIGH VALUE THERAPEUTICS This session discussed the arguments for using high-value therapeutics for COVID-19 patients, including the latest evidence-based reasoning for their use.

Year in Review 2021-22

structures across the region and the need for trans-border knowledge exchange to combat COVID-19 in the region.

PART 3: TESTS AND VACCINES This session examined various vaccines, looking at how they work and their efficacy. Additionally, panelists detailed the types of tests that were available in South Asia and the role of vaccines and testing.

“Effective mask promotion requires visits to thousands of remote villages, and those same visits can be used to prepare for more

Faculty Projects effective community-based healthcare responses. To that end, a host of physicians, scientists and community-based organizations created the Swasth Community Science Alliance, committing to pragmatic, science-based protocols to manage mild and moderate cases of COVID-19 in rural India, where institutional health care access is limited.”

Contextualizing Evidence-based Recommendations for the Second Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic in India Co-authored by Satchit Balsari in The Lancet “For nearly a year, patients were being advised institutional isolation, regardless of disease severity or ability to isolate at home. For patients with mild disease, home-based care and self-monitoring with a pulse oximeter—

as has long been appropriate—has finally gained widespread traction, from sheer necessity. Clear directives (and telemedicine support, where possible) will prevent unwarranted presentations to the hospital.”

COVID-19 Educational Videos by Harvard Medical School Team

Mansukh Mandaviya, to discuss ways in which Harvard faculty and doctors in India could potentially collaborate. The video series was showcased on the MyGov platform, a platform that connects citizens in India to the government. The series focused on topics ranging from the management of patients isolating at home to the line of treatment for varying degrees of the disease.

In October 2021, the Mittal Institute’s Delhi office hosted Prof. Ajay Singh, Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Medical School (HMS), to speak about COVID-19. Singh conducted a live chat at the office with professors from Indian medical institutions and government officials to showcase a series of COVID-19 educational videos developed at HMS for dissemination to the public. Singh also met with India’s Health Minister,

Events and Seminars AUGUST 2021 AN EPIDEMIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON WHETHER THERE WILL BE A THIRD WAVE OF COVID-19 IN INDIA? Divya Rajagopal (Moderator) William P. Hanage; Chandrakant Lahariya

NOVEMBER 2021 VACCINATING INDIA AGAINST COVID: LESSONS FROM HISTORY Prerna Singh (Moderator) Harish Naraindas

JANUARY 2022 THE THIRD WAVE: THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON INDIA AND THE WAY FORWARD Vidya Krishnan (Moderator) Gagandeep Kang; Prabhat Jha; Vijay Chandru; Zarir Udwadia

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Rapid Response: Afghanistan and the U.S. Withdrawal

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ver the past few decades, the people of Afghanistan have experienced large-scale and ongoing violence and conflict, with the events of 2021 only adding to the turmoil and suffering. During this crisis related to the U.S. withdrawal and its aftermath, the Mittal Institute responded by developing programming with partner institutions around Harvard to bring timely, informed and expert-driven discussion to key issues impacting Afghanistan.

The Mittal Institute also developed an “Afghanistan Resources” page on the Institute’s website to track ongoing relief efforts and provide community members with opportunities to help Afghan people in need.

Finally, in an effort to support experts and scholars in potential danger in the country, the Mittal Institute contributed to a stipend used to assist Fara Abbas–a specialist in Afghan security, peace, and

development–with fleeing Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover and joining Harvard’s community on a one-year fellowship. Abbas served in senior government positions, representing Afghanistan in international negotiations and conferences. She served as a panelist on several of this year’s Afghanistan-focused events and also shared her experience with the Mittal community in an interview published on pages 16-17.

The Institute held several “rapid response” events throughout the year focused on regional and global implications of events in Afghanistan. The first program, “Implications: Regional Perspectives on the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” featured international journalists sharing their perspectives.

Events and Seminars SEPTEMBER 2021 IMPLICATIONS: REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE US WITHDRAWAL FROM AFGHANISTAN Shirin Jaafari, Shubhanga Pandey, Nasim Zehra

Year in Review 2021-22

OCTOBER 2021 AFGHANISTAN’S NEXT TRANSITION: HOW WE GOT HERE, AND WHAT COMES NEXT Arvid Bell (Moderator) Fara Abbas, Philipp Ackermann, Anand Gopal

NOVEMBER 2021 LEARNING IN DISTRESS: PLIGHT OF EDUCATION IN AFGHANISTAN James Robson (Moderator) Kamal Ahmad; Pashtana Durrani; Shirin Jaafari; Sakena Yacoobi

Fleeing Afghanistan

Fara Abbas on Starting Over Fara Abbas, a Fellow with the Harvard Negotiation Task Force is a specialist on Afghan affairs with over 10 years of in-country experience on security, peace, and development. She fled Afghanistan in August after the Taliban takeover, and a stipend by a number of Harvard entities – including the Mittal Institute – is supporting her year-long Fellowship at Harvard. Prior to her role at Harvard, Fara served in senior government positions, representing Afghanistan in international negotiations and conferences.

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ittal Institute: I know your journey here was arduous – you fled Afghanistan for a refugee camp in Qatar, before coming to Cambridge. Can you expand a bit upon your experience?

Fara Abbas: Yes, I’d be happy to. The first few days after the takeover were surreal.

We were in complete shock and the situation was chaotic. It all happened so suddenly, and everyone was caught off guard. Just as it happened in Ukraine.

My husband and I initially decided to move house in case the Taliban came looking for us - which they did later on.

At that point, we had both been working for the government’s security sector.

The day we were supposed to move, my friend from the US embassy called and said I should come to the airport now.

It was clear to us that we had no other option than to leave. Our lives would be under threat – the Taliban are infamous for their brutality.

As soon as I entered the airport, I broke down. I cried for the country, for our people, for all that could have been, for our potential, for my home, my family… it makes me emotional even today. We had come so far and achieved so much.

And it was all gone. At the same time, I was relieved that my husband and I were now safe. We were brought to Qatar first.

By the time we left Doha two weeks later, the camp population had doubled. We

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then traveled to the US and were housed in a Marines base. The journey was emotionally arduous for all of us. We were all mourning the loss of our home, not knowing if we would be able to see it again, worried about friends and family left behind, uncertain about the future.

It took us a couple of weeks to get out of the Marines’ base and come to Cambridge. Our arrival in the US was so unplanned and sudden that the first couple of months were overwhelming. I remember being exhausted all the time. Our minds were on overdrive trying to make sense of our new reality while coping with all that happened. It all still feels like a nightmare.

Mittal Institute: You have spent your entire professional career in civil service. What led you on your career path, and what research are you focused on while here at Harvard?

Fara Abbas: I went into civil service because I wanted to make a difference – to help Afghanistan develop so it breaks free from the cycle of poverty and conflict. I don’t know how much of a difference I made, but I enjoyed my work.

I got to work on some very interesting projects – from negotiating regional economic cooperation to formulating foreign and security policies. There was also never a dull moment. Coming to terms with losing the achievements of the past two decades has been the hardest for me.

At Harvard, my research focuses on the new complex conflict and negotiation environment in Afghanistan with the Taliban in power. The former Afghan government spent nearly a year trying to reach a power-sharing agreement with the insurgent group. Those negotiations Year in Review 2021-22

failed to produce a deal that could have formed a new coalition government and a stable political order. My research will be looking at the various national, regional, and international actors, and their key interests, alliances and rivalries to help understand the new sets of challenges to negotiations on peace and stability.

Mittal Institute: Many of us read about the collapse of Afghanistan – you lived it. Were there early warning signs of the Taliban takeover, or did it come as a surprise to you?

Fara Abbas: It was both. There were signs it was coming, but it was also a shock when it actually happened.

I think everything changed last April when President Biden announced total US withdrawal by September 11. Before then, the Afghan government thought Biden would reverse Trump’s Doha deal.

When it became conclusive that Biden would not, the security forces lost morale. While Afghan leadership tried to continue the fight throughout the early summer, without critical US support, they eventually learned the hard truth: Corruption had hollowed the government. The security forces did not want to fight; they were poorly coordinated; and they lacked a larger strategy.

The insurgency made rapid advances through the late spring and summer, often capturing territories without a fight.

Their advances were so quick that even foreign intelligence reports couldn’t keep up. In early summer, the intelligence predicted 9 to 18 months until the Taliban takeover of Kabul. By late summer, they predicted three months. Days before Kabul’s fall, they predicted 30 days. No one saw it coming as swiftly as it did.

Mittal Institute: It has been reported that the Afghan people are facing a humanitarian crisis after the collapse. In your opinion, where does the country go from here – what should the international community focus on in terms of helping Afghanistan stabilize?

Fara Abbas: The situation is unfortunately very dire. The most urgent priority to address is the humanitarian crisis.

The international community should take any conceivable measure to prevent the looming humanitarian disaster. The US, UN, and others have come up with some creative solutions to help mitigate these challenges in a way that limits undue benefits to the Taliban. For instance, UNICEF just announced they will pay teacher salaries. The IRC has been distributing cash to those in need.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has been distributing food.

But these are temporary solutions and not sustainable. The second urgent priority should be to help stabilize the economy that is suffering from severe lack of liquidity. The US government is currently working on designing and setting up temporary financial mechanisms that allow the country to receive some of their foreign reserves to recapitalize the financial system without lifting sanctions on the Taliban leadership. The Treasury Department’s recently issued general licenses that authorize transactions involving Afghanistan and its governing institutions that would otherwise be prohibited by US sanctions.

These are all measured steps in a positive direction.

[This interview took place in March 2022.]

Faculty

Clockwise from top left: Satchit Balsari; Diana Eck; Vikram Patel; Kristen Stilt; Asim Khwaja (upper left); Mariam Chughtai (left) and Amartya Sen (right); Venkatesh Murthy; Conor Walsh; Jennifer Leaning.

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The Mittal Institute supports faculty-led multidisciplinary research projects and ­programs in the disciplines of arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Clockwise from top left: Jinah Kim (left) and Mehwish Abid, Visiting Artist Fellow; Durba Mitra; Roluahpuia (left) and Sugata Bose; Rahul Mehrotra; Ajay Singh; Homi Bhabha; Tarun Khanna, Martha Chen and Jacqueline Bhabha.

Year in Review 2021-22

RESEARCH

The 1947 Partition of British India A research project that seeks to develop a rich and ­empirically grounded understanding of the 1947 Partition of British India by exploring its demographic and humanitarian consequences. / Project Leads JENNIFER LEANING SHUBHANGI BHADADA / Contributors ORNOB ALAM DIANE ATHAIDE TIARA BHATACHARYA UMA CHAKRAVARTI MARIAM CHUGHTAI MEENA HEWETT ZEHRA JUMABHOY NADHRA S.N. KHAN TARUN KHANNA SANJAY KUMAR KARIM R. LAKHANI RAHUL MEHROTRA RIMPLE MEHTA OMAR RAHMAN NAVSHARAN SINGH RUIHAN WANG RITA YUSUF

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he Mittal Institute’s research project on the 1947 Partition of British India explores many of the unanswered questions that surround the demographic and humanitarian consequences of this largest instance of forced migration in world history. Under the direction of Jennifer Leaning, Senior Research Fellow at the FXB Center at Harvard University and retired Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and through its affiliation with the Mittal Institute, the project has expanded to become an international and interdisciplinary project that aims to deepen understanding of the 1947-48 mass displacement and its myriad of consequences.

Expanding Scholarship and New Directions In their research on this project, scholars and researchers from across the subcontinent have drawn from a variety of sources including demographic analyses, archival records, collected narratives, urban geography, historical archi-

tecture and contemporary art. This data has allowed researchers to construct multi-layered understandings of the intense stress that such a cataclysmic crisis of forced migration imposes upon a population and the complex social adaptations that may follow the initial crisis.

Collecting Narratives and Crowdsourcing Memories Tarun Khanna, Director of the Mittal Institute and Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, participated in this project by enlisting Karim Lakhani, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, to collaborate with him. Together, they collected and analyzed more than 2,300 oral narratives from survivors of Partition across the three affected regions of the subcontinent (now Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan). The narratives were collected by using a modified form of crowdsourcing with the help of volunteer ambassadors. These focused on outreach to poor populations and underrepresented voices, spanning gender, religion and caste,

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Historical images capture the Partition of British India.

This is the ‘granddaddy’ of humanitarian response. There is a tradition of human concern that shaped the humanitarian response arising out of the Partition of British India that is unique in its shape, rooted by culture and traditions, but similar and in some ways more magnificent than many of the humanitarian responses we’ve now been able to muster.

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with demographic groups such as Muslims in India; Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan; Biharis in Bangladesh; and Parsis, Dalits and Christians.

This collection of essays related to Partition studies constitutes the first wherein experts from the three modern nation-states–Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan–have actively collaborated in the research and writing to develop a mixed and fraught account of Partition and its consequences. These contributions serve to cast a light, both somber Year in Review 2021-22

and uplifting, on the enormous challenges Partition forced upon these societies, just as they were emerging from generations of colonial rule into a postwar world depleted of resources and robust capacities to help.

The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations will be published by SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. in late summer of 2022. It contains 10 chapters written by 19 authors from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States,

JENNIFER LEANING

and is edited by Jennifer Leaning and Shubhangi Bhadada. These chapters are divided into three overarching sections: Migration and Relief in the 1947 Partition of British India; Memories of Partition; and Cities, Art, and Architecture.

Contributors include Uma Chakravarti and Navsharan Singh (India); Nadhra Khan (Pakistan); Ornob Alam, Omar Rahman, and Rita Yusuf (Bangladesh); Zehra Jumabhoy (United Kingdom); Rahul Mehrotra, Tarun Khanna, Karim Lakhani, and Jennifer Leaning (United States).

The Big Read

Unearthing Partition’s Narrative Despite the atrocities that took place during it, Dr. Jennifer Leaning, who has led the Mittal Institute's 1947 Partition Project since its inception in 2016, says it's the "kindness of strangers" that has shone through Partition’s darkness.

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n expert in public health and rights-based responses to humanitarian crises, Dr. Jennifer Leaning, Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and retired Professor of the Practice at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, has spent her nearly 50-year career at the intersection of war and disaster, atrocities and conflict. Despite witnessing some of the most challenging instances of human behavior, it is a ‘kindness of strangers’ motif that motivates her work. She applies this approach to the Mittal Institute’s 1947 Partition Project, which she has led since its inception in 2016.

The Project studies the 1947 Partition of British India, which ended a 300-year British rule and allowed self-determination for countries in the subcontinent. In a demographic upheaval that often turned violent, the population of the subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan and directed toward the new countries of West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan) and East Pakistan (which is

now Bangladesh) according to religious beliefs. The subsequent mass movement throughout the region is often referred to as the ‘greatest mass movement of humanity in history,’ During this forced migration, millions of people fled their homes to find safety in areas across the new border. Tragically, many never completed the journey because of sectarian attacks en route.

Yet in the midst of profound tragedy, Dr. Leaning notes the courage and compassion of the millions who were forced to relocate. “Partition is a deeply tragic episode in the birth story of these new nation states,” she explains, “and it is also a story of harried officials and charitable organizations who scrambled to respond and sustain the desperate millions who were in need.” This is what she emphasizes most about the experience of Partition. Dr. Leaning will share her decades of Partition work in a new edited book, a collection of essays convened by the Mittal Institute with contributions from scholars in all three major affected countries in the subcontinent.

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A ‘Complete Disruption’ Dr. Leaning was first fascinated by the Partition as an undergraduate at Radcliffe. It was there, and then as a Master’s student at the Harvard School of Public Health (and prior to earning her MD from the University of Chicago), that Dr. Leaning recalled reading a number of Partition accounts that caught her attention. “Such a large-scale migration of people who did not want to move – but were forced to – was already becoming a noticeable aspect of modern war,” she says. “It struck me as a really devastating aspect of the human condition.”

Her work on human rights and humanitarian response initially took her in a different direction. She focused on clinical work in emergency medicine and served as the medical director of the Harvard Community Health Plan. In 1997, she founded the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights at the Harvard FXB Center. In 2000, she attended a Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies talk, and prompted by the discussion, broached the subject of Partition with the then-director Sudhir Anand. She asked him if he was aware of any studies on the numbers of who had been forced to move and time scale over which this Partition migration had occurred. He only knew of a few recent studies, and they both agreed that these questions merited further study.

The first step was to organize a seminar inviting scholars working on the demography of British India.

“At the first meeting, we talked about what was known and unknown in terms of the data; it turned out that there were many, many aspects that were not known and had not been explored,” Dr. Leaning explains. “We thought that the Year in Review 2021-22

estimates of the numbers who had fled were low and there were no really solid numbers on those who had been killed.

So we set out to pursue this.”

Dr. Leaning mobilized a small team, including Ken Hill, an esteemed demographer and professor at HSPH, and Sharon Stanton Russell, then a senior research scholar at the Center for International Studies at MIT. The first order of business was to decide to focus on a specific region - either East or West Pakistan.

The group decided on the Punjab area, because a larger number of people were required to cross borders in a shorter period of time when compared with the Bengal side of the subcontinent. Partition-related migration along the Bengal border took place over a longer time period and the historical circumstances were different. The second move was to examine the excellent census records of British India and compare the undivided Punjab in 1941 against 1951, this time taking Punjab as again undivided and looking at both the Pakistani and Indian 1951 census reports and tables. This approach allowed for an exploration of who had moved and who was missing from the undivided Punjab in 1941 compared to the 1951 census. Past historical records indicated that the bulk of the population of the Punjab had moved between 1947 and 1948.

A key boost to the analysis was finding that both the Indian and Pakistani census directors had agreed to ask one crucial additional question in the 1951 census—“where were you in 1947?”

The team then extended their work to analyze the 1931 and 1971 census records and used techniques of indirect estimation to compare expected and actual noted births and deaths, by age and sex, across this 40-year record. The

Top: Jennifer Leaning shares her research.

Bottom: Partition team and collaborators gather together.

team found radically different and higher numbers of who had moved and who had died than in the then-current estimates. Approximately 2-3 million people had died and 18 million had crossed the border, in either direction, from 1947-1951.

“I knew enough about contemporary forced migration to recognize that these rates of deaths and migration were the largest that had ever been recorded. It still remains the largest ever recorded,” says Dr. Leaning. “It was clear that this period of time had been one of complete social disruption throughout the Punjab.”

Together, the team published a 2008 paper, “The Demographic Impact of Partition in the Punjab 1947,” in the Journal of Population Studies that provided the technical report of this research. “At the time, as a volunteer investigator with Physicians for Human Rights, I had been looking at forced migration in settings of war, where people were being hunted, such as in Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Darfur…you had very high numbers because there was active hostile pursuit and killing,” says Dr. Leaning. “The Partition death rate that we had found was very high – and unless people are being actively chased and shot at and bombed and hunted, it does not approach the number of deaths that we witnessed and had been tracking in contemporary armed conflict. It was horrific how deadly Partition was compared to any experience of forced migration that I knew about.”

These sobering numbers spurred Dr. Leaning and the team to expand their work. They poured over Partition records in US libraries and the UK, especially in the British Library in London,

as well as exploring library and archival sources in Delhi, India. They presented at conferences of the Population Association of America. They applied for grants from the Carnegie Foundation and the Weatherhead Center to support their research. And it was at that time that the Partition Project found a home at the Mittal Institute.

Humanizing the Data In 2008, economists Prashant ­Bharadwaj, Asim Khwaja, and Atif Mian released their own Partition study, “The Big March: Migratory Flows after the Partition of India,” in Economic And ­Political Weekly. They were investigating economic parameters but they, too, examined the migration numbers using census comparisons – and came out with findings that were very similar to Dr. Leaning’s team.

“This really validated our numbers – that another team within a year had replicated what we found, through a completely different approach,” says Dr. Leaning.

“So then for the next few years I began to acquire more and more information and decided that I would start to work on this book.”

Dr. Leaning herself began collaborating with the Mittal Institute in 2013, where she met Meena Hewett, former executive director, and Tarun Khanna, faculty director. Together, they explored transitioning the information-seeking phase to a new goal: putting a human face to the data. “I needed to understand much more of the social dynamics and what Partition meant to the people in India and Pakistan,” she explains. “Meena was the one who helped me recognize and shape this mission.”

The Partition team collects and reviews oral histories.

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Millions of people were forced to relocate during Partition.

After receiving a Mittal Institute grant for her work, Dr. Leaning set out to involve scholars from across the subcontinent in Partition research. With the help of Shubhangi Bhadada, a lawyer working at the Mittal Institute, they gathered scholars from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, as well as from Harvard University—a first-of-its-kind project in which all three countries actively collaborated to document the demographic and humanitarian consequences of Partition. The project, officially titled, “Looking Back, Informing the Future: The 1947 Partition of British India,” and housed at the Mittal Institute, had a twofold aim: to build a network of scholars aligned on Partition research in the hopes of cultivating a rich, interdisciplinary exploration into one of the subcontinent’s most-defining events and to use techniques of crowdsourcing to capture memories: firsthand oral narratives from people in the subcontinent willing to recall the Partition history of themselves or their families.

Year in Review 2021-22

The project on crowdsourcing memories was developed under the leadership of Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, and Karim Lakhani, Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Founder and Co-Director of Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. Most of the 2,300 narratives they collected over the course of two years (2017-2019) were captured by trained volunteers who sought to reach those not represented in earlier histories, such as women and minorities.

“Through the survey questionnaires, which I helped develop, we were interested in modes and conditions of flight: what they carried and who they lost along the way,” explains Dr. Leaning. “We also aimed this crowdsourcing to reach the poor, because most of the people who were being memorialized in the current archived collections of interviews talked primarily about their life

post-Partition, and most of those people were well-to-do.” Eventually, these narratives became one of the underpinnings of the Mittal Institute’s Partition Project, and contributed to the foundational essays in the forthcoming book.

A History of Pain and Healing When asked about the Partition book, which is tentatively due out in Fall 2022, Dr. Leaning says, “There’s always much more to learn, but what I’m hoping is that this book will spark a real interest and respect in the subcontinent about an episode of distress and death that has not been matched anywhere else in the world.” The book represents the voices of 19 scholars, each with their own reflection on Partition: how it affected the fabric of the region’s politics, demographics and religion; how it has played out in art and architecture and urban design; how families told their stories and what the survivors now recall from those desperate days of flight and early resettlement.

Top: The Partition team reviews materials.

Bottom: Migrants fleeing across borders carry their belongings. Right: Nehru and Jinnah meet.

It is paramount for Dr. Leaning that this book be readily available to the general public across South Asia. She and Bhadada are co-editors of the book, titled The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations. The team is working with SAGE India Publishing to print and price the book so that people of modest means can purchase even one article. Digital access will also allow readers to download the book online for a nominal fee, and it will be available through outlets like Amazon. “This book will hopefully help substantiate a history of pain, which did not have very much basis except through the received stories from their families, or the sharing of these painful stories with other families close to them,” says Dr. Leaning. “I hope that it will resonate with people across the subcontinent and allow them to acknowledge the saga of survival and courage embedded in Partition, as well as the grief and loss.”

Dr. Leaning’s own chapter focuses on the six months leading up to Partition and the six months post, wherein she recounts the first months of the Indian and Pakistani governments’ efforts to navigate something totally unprecedented. Despite the bedlam of those first months – millions on the roads and trains harassed by violent factional groups on both sides – there were also moments of humanity. “I want those in the humanitarian community to realize that this is the ‘granddaddy’ of humanitarian response,” she explains. “There is a tradition of human concern that shaped the humanitarian response arising out of the Partition of British India that is unique in its shape, rooted by culture and traditions, but similar and in some ways more magnificent than many of the humanitarian responses we’ve now been able to muster.”

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The Partition team shares their research at an Asia Society event. Image Credit: Asia Society.

The fate of two nations depended on the adept handling of this vast movement of people – and the weight of that responsibility was staggering. It brought out the ‘kindness of strangers’ as the subcontinent struggled to cope with the scale of misery and hate. “You had two governments behind the humanitarian response, and they all – the civil services, the military services, the bureaucrats, as well as the organized charities – did everything they could possibly do in their first two years of existence on both sides of that fraught border. And everything was mobilized towards easing the distress that their people experienced,” Dr. Leaning explains. “I’m quite surprised that these leaders didn’t crack and break down.”

Year in Review 2021-22

For now, Dr. Leaning hopes that a ‘sense of humanity’ comes through in the book’s essays, which are sometimes deeply personal. “In most cases, people fought valiantly to help their family members but also strangers in need along the way. The basic story is survival through pain and suffering, hope in the midst of fear and the unknown. The volunteers and charitable groups tried so hard to help others,” she says. “Humanity will generally always come through.

But often, as in Partition, with a great sense of loss.”

The Big Read was written by Kellie Nault, writer and editor at the Mittal Institute.

RESEARCH

Faculty Grants, New Books and Awards Each year, the Mittal Institute supports faculty research projects with grants to fund scholars from a variety of fields, disciplines and regions whose research relates to South Asia.

Faculty Grants

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ach year, the Mittal Institute supports research projects that bring together faculty from different fields and regions whose scholarship relates to South Asia. Traditionally, the Mittal Institute has prioritized interdisciplinary research, as well as projects that catalyze connectivity between scholars at Harvard and those in South Asia. For the 2022-2023 academic year, the Institute awarded the highest number of grantees in the organization’s history with over $130,000 in funding. 2022-23 recipients include: Satchit Balsari, Caroline Buckee A Data Repository for Disaster Response in India Homi Bhabha The Right to Interpretation Caleb Dresser Climate Change, Health Security and Emergency Care in India: An Exploratory Evaluation

Asim Ijaz Khwaja Increasing Salience to Rebuild the Social Compact: Urban Service Delivery and Property Taxes in Pakistan Jinah Kim Mapping Color in History in Action: Mobile Heritage Lab for Scientific Analysis of Paintings in India Gabriel Kreindler Measuring Spatial Frictions in Urban Labor Markets in the Bangladesh ReadyMade Garment Sector Elizabeth Levey, Alexandra Harrison A feasibility Study of the Building Baby Brains Training Program for Health Workers in Rural Pakistan Mashail Malik Who Owns the City? Migration, Ownership and Urban Ethnic Parties in Karachi Rahul Mehrotra The State of Architecture in South Asia

Venki Murthy Scienspur: Building a better society through STEM education Gautam Nair Financial Politics in Contemporary India Vikram Patel Evaluating the Preliminary Impacts, Feasibility, Acceptability, and Sustainability of MeWeSports: A Sports-mediated Substance-use Prevention Program in Adolescents in India Ajay K. Singh Education to Combat Vaccine Hesitancy Kristen Stilt Halal Animals: Food, Faith, and the Future of Planetary Health Adaner Usmani The History of Punishment in India Kavishwar Wagholikar Feasibility of Deploying an Open-source Analytical Platform for Electronic Health Records in India

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New Books Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind Tarun Khanna and Geoffrey Jones This past February, Professors Tarun Khanna and Geoffrey Jones, of Harvard Business School, released the print edition of their book, Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind. The book was published by Penguin Books and is available in India.

Society tends to glorify the get-rich-quick entrepreneur who builds a company, takes it public and then (maybe) contributes to charity. In Leadership to Last, Jones and Khanna interview iconic leaders in India who have demonstrated leadership to last, including Ratan Tata, Anu Aga, Adi Godrej, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Devi Shetty and Rahul Bajaj. The authors corroborate how these stories are less about building a get-rich-quick organization and much more about triggering foundational and institutional change in society.

The Kinetic City & Other Essays Rahul Mehrotra Rahul Mehrotra, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and founder of the Mumbai- and Boston-based RMA Architects, released a new book in 2021 entitled The Kinetic City & Other Essays. The book presents his writings over the last 30 years and illustrates his long-term engagement with urbanism in India and his work which has given rise to a new conceptualization of the city–a concept he calls the “Kinetic City.” In contrast to the static way in which the city is conventionally depicted on maps, he argues that cities are kinetic and should be perceived, read and mapped in terms of patterns of occupation and associative values attributed to space.

Book Award Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought Durba Mitra Durba Mitra, a professor at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was awarded the B ­ ernard S. Cohn Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies. The prize honors “outstanding and innovative scholarship across discipline and country of specialization for a first single-authored monograph on South Asia.” Indian Sex Life, which demonstrates how ideas of deviant female sexuality became foundational to modern social thought, also received an honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize from the Law & Society Association. Mitra works at the intersection of feminist and queer studies and her scholarship spans analysis of the history of sexuality in the Global South, histories of science and social science and the politics of gender in the colonial and postcolonial world.

Year in Review 2021-22

Spotlight on Faculty Grant Recipient

Arts-based Pedagogy Training in India Each year, the Mittal Institute selects unique proposals from Harvard faculty members to fund projects and research related to South Asia. One of last year’s recipients, P ­ rofessor Doris Sommer, launched her pioneering Pre-Texts Program in India–a program she has brought to schools around the globe.

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re-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. While the number of readers has grown worldwide, reading comprehension stays alarmingly low, because students need to use texts in order to understand them. With Pre-Texts, students master texts by using them to create visual and performative arts.

Pre-Texts also coincides with the Indian government’s recent mandate to integrate arts into all school curricula. While this mandate asks teachers to focus on the rich art traditions throughout India, it does not guide teachers and principals on how to implement the arts-integration directive. That is where Prof.

Sommer believes the Pre-Texts program can have a transformative impact in the country. In early 2022, she visited the Indian city of Pune to work with FLAME University to start Pre-Texts in India.

The teachers, principals, and students who participated in the demonstrations of Pre-Texts in Pune experienced the ad-

vantages of this approach and were eager for their schools to be chosen as the site for a forthcoming pilot intervention.

Creating Art from a Text Traditional teaching methods often fail due to the pyramidal design that they follow: teaching begins with a base of technical information, leading to an understanding and interpretation of the material, then concludes with a creative expression of what has been learned.

Unfortunately, this method of teaching often leads to boredom and disaffection among students, who may become fearful or disengaged when trying to memorize new concepts, formulas, and words.

Since art in this context represents an expression of what students already know, as opposed to a form of exploration, the act of learning in this way leads students to make a conceptual error about the discipline.

With the Pre-Text format of learning, the pyramidal design is reversed and

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Doris Sommer visits schools in Pune, India in early 2022 to launch her Pre-texts Program.

rather than being given facts about art, students are challenged to create art from a text. This leads to a dramatic difference in the classroom where students are now addressed as artists rather than struggling learners and, in this context, can learn to address challenges as opportunities instead of obstacles. The texts can be mastered through dance, drawing, theater, or creative writing.

Selecting Schools To begin the initiative, Professors Sommer and Professor Yugank Goyal of FLAME visited several schools in Pune with different structures and models – three government-run municipal schools, mentored and run by the nonprofits Leadership for Equity and Akanksha Foundation, as well as four private schools. The team also gave a talk to school principals and coordinators from 10 other schools in the region and participated in several other meetings with relevant stakeholders, including the Municipal Commissioner of Pune.

Year in Review 2021-22

In several exploratory conversations with various schools and nonprofits, Professors Sommer and Goyal made a brief presentation of Pre-Texts, where they shared evidence gathered by the Shamiri Institute in Nairobi on the mental health intervention in that city’s biggest slum, Kibera. In Kibera, half the adolescents are clinically depressed – yet they have no money for therapy, no available therapists, and experience stigma against acknowledging mental disorder. Pre-Texts does therapeutic work there with no change of protocol. It is an effective and low-cost intervention, as it allows the entire cohort of adolescents to participate, without singling out a student. After one month of after-school, the results have been exceedingly positive.

Training Future Trainers The next steps in Pune will be to identify a few schools as the sites for program pilots. Then Professor Sommer will virtually train the principal and teachers

from two different levels. The group of 20-25 future facilitators will include the FLAME University team and other relevant stakeholders who can be trainers for future cohorts, expanding the program’s potential and impact.

PLATFORM

Arts at the Mittal Institute Partnering with arts fellows, faculty and in-region institutions, the Mittal Institute supports artistic commentary on South Asia’s issues, while working to inform the preservation of the region’s art and cultural sites. / Conservation Science Research and Training Program (CoSTAR) Team JINAH KIM MEENA HEWETT NARAYAN KHANDEKAR ANUPAM SAH / Visiting Artist and Distinguished Artist Fellowships Faculty Lead JINAH KIM / The State of Architecture in South Asia Project Faculty Lead RAHUL MEHROTRA

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he Mittal Institute continues its dedication to the scholarship and preservation of South Asian art, sculpture and architecture through research and training on conservation and collections management, the Visiting Artist Fellowship, an arts fund program, and numerous arts-related events.

Conservation Science Research and Training Program (CoSTAR) Led by Jinah Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asia Art at Harvard University, Anupam Sah, Head of Conservation at CSMVS Museum, Narayan Khandekar, Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, and Meena Hewett, Arts Program Advisor at the Mittal Institute, the CoSTAR Program aims to bridge the gap between art history, museology, art conservation, and conservation science with the goal to strengthen art conservation practices in South Asia. The Mittal Institute collaborates with the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj

Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) Museum, Mumbai, and the Harvard Art Museums to develop programming for CoSTAR. Launched in December 2020, CoSTAR is envisioned as a series of theoretical and practical modules covering various topics in conservation science.

CoSTAR’s Module 1 inaugurated the way for a ‘Knowledge Commons’: a virtual platform to bring together museums and cultural and academic institutions to collaborate and share best practices that constitute a viable ecosystem for museums and the scientific study of cultural heritage in India. It was run between April 15 – June 20, 2021, and comprised of online lectures.

CoSTAR’s Module 2 ran from No­vember 2021 to June 2022 and nurtured the seeds im­planted by Module 1. It focused on building knowledge in technical stud­ ies of painted surfaces and South Asian Art’s historical interpretation. Sessions in Module 2 included ‘Introduction to the Paintings / Painted Surfaces of South Asia,’ ‘Painting Techniques in India,’ and ‘Setting up a Painted Surfaces

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Clockwise: Rahul Mehrotra speaks at a launch event; a pigment analysis session at CSMVS museum; New VAF exhibit opens; CoSTAR held 40+ virtual programs.

We look forward to expanding the Program for Conservation of Culture... With hands-on, awareness-building workshops in the region, we will work to impart robust conservation training and knowledge to South Asia’s conservators.

Analysis Workspace.’ Module II engaged with a) institutions committed to building up basic facilities for art conservation research and interested in building their conservation science facility; b) motivated early and mid-level career art historians, curators, museologists, archeologists, art conservators, architects; advanced undergraduates (at least two years of study); and early graduate students from a science/technology institution of higher education in India; and c) scientists interested in the field of art and archeology.

Year in Review 2021-22

The State of Architecture in South Asia Project South Asia is in a period of rapid change, and architecture and its different forms of engagement with society – whether preservation and reconstruction or new buildings – force societies to make choices for spatial organization but also identity formations and, more deeply, the representation of their aspirations.

Under the direction of Rahul Mehrotra, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the project has been conceptualized as a three-to-five year

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JINAH KIM

project that looks to answer the fundamental questions related to architecture in a region in transition. These questions include: Does architecture matter in these states of transition, which range from political and economic shifts to cultural and religious impulses? What does the practice of architecture in the region mean for the next generation – for the making of the architect and architectural education? Can architecture address the abject inequity that has surrounded us in South Asia? And many more questions that range from the protocols of practice to the nature of emerging patronage and pedagogy.

Clockwise: VAF exhibit virtual event; Identity Crisis (2018) by VAF Pragati Jain; Confrontations (2017) by VAF Bunu Dhungana.

The long-term project will take the form of numerous formats, including a sustained lecture series, a podcast highlighting upcoming practitioners from the region, as well as workshops, conferences, and a publication. The project will culminate in a traveling exhibition, which will start its journey in South Asia and end in the U.S., accruing modifications and adaptations as it travels. In order to achieve this, the project team has already embarked on creating a coalition of partners and collaborators from different parts of South Asia.

The ultimate goal of the project is to address a critical gap in the discourse surrounding contemporary architecture and design in the region. The project will focus on the field in the post-2000 period (the last 20 years) and attempt to articulate the role of architecture in responding to this state of transition in the South Asia region.

Visiting Artist Fellowship Under faculty director Jinah Kim, the Mittal Institute selects four artists from South Asia each year to visit Cambridge as Visiting Artist Fellows (VAF). During their fellowship, the artists deepen their artistic explorations of South Asia through the use of Harvard’s museums, libraries, and archives.

The VAF Program has grown from a short exchange to a vibrant eight-week academic program with more than 25 alumni artists from across South Asia, all of whom have enriched the campus community with their creative interests and intellect.

The Mittal Institute was thrilled to welcome two Visiting Artist Fellows to Harvard after a year of virtual programming.

Nepali photographer Bunu Dhungana and Indian artist Pragati Jain spent eight busy weeks at Harvard from October to December 2021, taking classes, re-

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VAF Mehwish Abid discusses her exhibit with Homi Bhabha.

searching new areas of interest, preparing an exhibit for the campus community, and meeting with the university’s esteemed faculty.

entitled ‘Women in South Asia: Expectations, Burdens and Obligations’ that featured Pragati and Bunu in conversation with Jinah Kim.

One of the special aspects of the program is the opportunity for VAFs to advance their artistic practice by tapping into Harvard’s vast library network.

To look more closely at how women’s movements have influenced public performances, Pragati spent hours in Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, researching the writings of poets and photographers, including Adrienne Rich and Indian poet Amrita Pritam, to explore their approaches to women’s movements. Bunu immersed herself in different courses on campus, especially film. She visited Professor Julie Mallozzi’s class, “Observation and Intervention: Filmmaking as Inquiry,” where she learned from other students about their process in making and editing films. One of the highlights of this year’s VAF Program was a moving virtual art exhibition

During the Spring 2022 semester, Pakistani artist Mehwish Abid joined us on campus and hosted a fascinating participatory exhibit on the material culture related to the Partition titled, “South Asian Narratives: Reclaiming and Retelling.” She also spent time visiting the Harvard Art Museums, met with faculty, joined classes taught by Prof. Homi Bhabha and even squeezed in a trip to New York City before heading home.

Year in Review 2021-22

Distinguished Artist Fellowship The Mittal Institute will welcome the first-ever Distinguished Artist Fellow to the Harvard campus in 2023.

The Distinguished Artist Fellowship (DAF) is designed to bring forth critical

issues relevant to South Asia through the lens of art and design. Each year, a nominating committee composed of Harvard faculty and contemporary South Asian art experts will nominate a senior visual artist from South Asia who will be invited to Harvard’s campus. The artist will have the opportunity to spend two weeks engaging with Harvard faculty, students, and the Mittal Institute’s broader community, and will share their work through a public lecture.

To select the DAF, the Mittal Institute accepts nomi­nations from leading cura­ tors and practitioners from South Asia and beyond. This year, the Committee gathered and deliberated on more than 30 outstanding names from across the region. A new DAF is expected to be announced in the summer. This program is funded by the generous contribution of Dipti Mathur, Chair of the Mittal Institute’s Arts Council.

PLATFORM

The Lancet Citizens’ Commission: Reimagining Healthcare in India The Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System is an ambitious, cross-sectoral endeavor to lay out the roadmap to achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC) for the people of India. / Co-Chairs TARUN KHANNA VIKRAM PATEL KIRAN MAZUMDAR-SHAW GAGANDEEP KANG / Commissioners YAMINI AIYAR VIJAY CHANDRU MIRAI CHATTERJEE SAPNA DESAI ARMIDA FERNANDEZ ATUL GUPTA NACHIKET MOR ARNAB MUKHERJI POONAM MUTTREJA THELMA NARAYAN BHUSHAN PATWARDHAN SUJATHA RAO SRINATH REDDY SHARAD SHARMA DEVI SHETTY S.V. SUBRAMANIAN LEILA E. CALEB VARKEY SANDHYA VENKATESWARAN

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he Lancet Citizens’ Commission, which launched in December of 2020, aims to develop a roadmap to achieving universal health coverage (UHC) in India in the coming decade. The pandemic has had profound impacts on India’s people, and has highlighted structural weaknesses in the health system, including a disproportionately high disease burden, widespread risk factors, and deep inequities in access to care. The Commission’s work remains underpinned by a commitment to strengthening India’s public health system in all its dimensions, including promotive, preventive, and curative care.

The Commission and COVID-19 The devastating second wave of COVID-19 in India in the summer 2021 prompted the Commission to formulate and suggest urgent measures that the government needed to take. The Comment on COVID-19 Resurgence in India was published on May 25, 2021 in The Lancet. The Commission called for India’s central and state governments to

take eight urgent actions to “address one of the greatest humanitarian crises facing the country since its independence.”

Five Key Structural Areas The Commission’s work is structured across five workstreams: financing, governance, human resources, technology, and citizens’ engagement. Each of these workstreams includes a group of Commissioners and Fellows who have generated the key questions they plan to address through diverse research activities. The backbone of the Commission is a series of Theory of Change Workshops to map pathways for achieving UHC. The Commission has conducted five Theory of Change workshops as well as a full-day workshop that cut across workstreams in March of 2022.

The workshop, held in collaboration with Catalyst Management Services at the Indian Institute of Science, brought together LCC commissioners, fellows and experts from diverse sectors of the Indian health system. The participants articulated the paradigm shifts and

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The Lancet Citizens’ Commission and collaborators convene to map the way forward for UHC.

As the world enters the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, all countries have realized the need for health systems that are universal, responsive, equitable, evidence-informed, and resilient. The active engagement of citizens is critical to realizing this goal.

high-level strategies needed to truly reimagine India’s health system and move towards UHC in the coming decades.

of UHC is that the state must act as the steward of the health system.

A Go-to Healthcare Platform

Toward Universal Healthcare Coverage

The Commission has also developed into the “go-to” platform for UHC-related discussions in India with over 100,000 website views. Since May 2020, it has also hosted 11 webinars and 55+ speakers/panelists with over 3,500 attendees. One of the primary audiences of the Commission’s work is the government, as a guiding principle for its vision

At the heart of the Commission’s mission is an unprecedented attempt to gather insights into the expectations of healthcare from the people of India – and that of the diverse actors in the health system. It is undertaking two major complementary research efforts: one aims to interview 50,000 citizens of India from 125 districts across all states

Year in Review 2021-22

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VIKRAM PATEL

and territories on questions related to their expectations of health care, and the other study will conduct a district-level, mixed methods approach to interview citizens and health care actors in about 16 districts.

The Commission expects to complete its research by the end of 2022 and to publish a final report in 2023 in The Lancet, laying out its recommendations for the achievement of UHC in India.

PLATFORM

Scienspur: Free STEM Program Continues to Grow in 2022 Scienspur aims to nourish the scientific curiosity in students by teaching fundamental concepts and introducing emerging areas in science to students at Indian public colleges free of charge. / Project Team VENKATESH MURTHY NAGARAJU DHANYASI VINAY VIKAS / Instructors MAYA ANJUR-DIETRICH JONATHAN BOULANGER-WEILL RUDRA NAYAN DAS RAJESH GUNAGE FARAH HAQUE SIDDHARTH JAYAKUMAR AISHWARYA KRISHNAMOORTHY KUMARESH KRISHNAN TARUN KUMAR KAMALESH KUMARI RUBUL MOUT ANUP PARCHURE MOSTAFIZUR RAHMAN MADHUMALA SADANANDAPPA SHIVAPRASAD SATHYANARAYANA SANJEEV SHARMA PARIJAT SIL RAJAN THAKUR

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n the fall of 2021, Scienspur, a new initiative “spurred” by a Mittal Institute grant, enrolled its first cohort of 60 undergraduate and master's students in courses in cell biology and neurobiology, which were taught virtually by over 15 instructors, including post-doctoral fellows and senior Ph.D students from many Ivy-League institutions.

Conceptualized by Nagaraju Dhanyasi, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard, and Vinay Vikas, a biotech professional, under the leadership of Venkatesh Murthy, Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Scienspur was designed to provide free STEM courses to economically disadvantaged students attending publicly funded colleges and universities in India.

The founders, who both grew up in India and found their way to leading labs in the US, have thought a lot about that path and how particularly challenging it is for students from India’s government

schools. They decided that students could become globally competitive if they had a stronger foundational training and solid mentorship.

The two recruited and brought together an all-volunteer team of post-doctoral and independent researchers from world-class institutions across Europe, India and the US to teach key foundational science courses. The program has quickly grown in popularity, and in the summer of 2022, courses will run from June to August and will expand to accomodate 100 student participants. New course offerings will include developmental biology and molecular genetics.

In addition to expanding students’ foundational training, Scienspur also provides mentorship opportunities to guide student participants as they decide on their future endeavors, particularly their career paths. “We believe it’s always helpful to have a mentor who can guide students at key times during their academic career. This can help tremendously when making decisions and navigating their academic journey. Most

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Scienspur participants from India’s public colleges receive free STEM courses led by postdoctoral researchers from Harvard and beyond.

We try to talk about science as a field that brings together endless possibilities and important discoveries. In our classes, we discuss ground-breaking discoveries in biology to pique our students’ interest, and we combine these talks with the scientific methods that led to those results. We have found that this style of teaching helps students develop a strong grip on scientific concepts.

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NAGARAJU DHANYASI AND VINAY VIKAS

of us were fortunate to have excellent mentors as we navigated the journey towards our current positions,” say Dhanyasi and Vikas.

tion program focused on memorizing textbook concepts. “We want to inspire scientific curiosity. That is our ultimate goal.”

All students receive training in cutting-edge scientific concepts and techniques related to the course topic, a certificate for active participation and an overview of career options.

In Their Own Words: Student Participants Share their Experiences

The founders both believe that the program is more than just a science educaYear in Review 2021-22

“Scienspur is really a wonderful initiative. This course has helped me understand scientific concepts and improve my observation skills–both of which are

much-needed qualities for a researcher to have. The course provided me with the exposure and motivation I need to strengthen my goal of pursuing a career in research.”

“This course helped me get a clearer idea of my career path ahead. The way we are taught has impacted me positively.

I want to enter the research field, and I will continue to look for guidance by team Scienspur.”

PLATFORM

India Digital Health Network A research and policy collaborative focused on advancing the science and practice of digital health implementation in India.

KIRAN ANANDAMPILLAI SATCHIT BALSARI ABHISHEK BHATIA BARBARA E. BIERER CAROLINE BUCKEE LEO ANTHONY CELI MERCÈ CROSAS URS GASSER ADRIAN GROPPER ABHIJIT GUPTA JOHN HALAMKA BHARAT KALIDINDI SEHJ KASHYAP TARUN KHANNA NISHANT KISHORE KENNETH MANDL RAHUL MATTHAN SUNITA NADHAMUNI TONY RAJ ANGSHUMAN SARKAR VIVEK SINGH VERGHESE THOMAS NITA TYAGI ABIJEET WAGHMARE

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he India Digital Health Network (IDHN), led by Professor Satchit Balsari, Assistant Professor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is a research and policy collaborative working towards advancing digital health implementation science and practice in India.

Shaping the Policy Landscape Since 2016, the program has helped shape the design of India’s digital health information architecture. The team’s proposal for an API-enabled health exchange ecosystem was adopted and implemented by NITI Aayog in its approach paper for the National Health Stack—a government initiative to digitize personal health records and service-provider records—and then by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India (GoI), in its National Digital Health Blueprint. Key contributions include a) the inclusion of the term “machine-readable” while mandating the portability of personal health data, setting the stage for health data

interoperability in India; b) inclusion of Regulatory Sandboxes in the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which are controlled-testing environments within which existing regulations may be temporarily relaxed to allow experimentation for novel technologies; c) the concept of organizing the core of India’s digital health ecosystem around personal health records as opposed to hospital-based electronic medical records.

During the past year, the team also collaborated with a consortium of technology partners to analyze and publish policy responses to key proposed building blocks of the National Health Stack.

Prototyping Digital Health Innovations The IDHN team is also working towards facilitating the operationalization of this proposed digital health ecosystem.

Implementation-focused activities have been organized under two workstreams.

The first workstream is aimed at testing real-world deployments of digital health solutions that combine technology and task-shifting for primary care. In part-

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IDHN team works to advance digital health implementation in India.

Digital health innovation teams continue to struggle to develop contextually intelligent solutions, precluding interventions from scaling beyond pilots. Frontline clinicians, community health workers and the communities themselves are seldom at the design board.

nership with the Government of Karnataka (GoK), DellEMC and St. John’s Research Institute in Bengaluru, the team evaluated the national digital platform for non-communicable diseases screening and management. This entailed devising novel methods, adapted for the Indian context, to evaluate the usability and use of the digital health platform.

Subsequently, Bharat Kalidindi, Sehj Kashyap, Verghese Thomas and Abijeet Waghmare spent two months conducting field-based research in Karnataka, including 240 hours of observations, interviews and tests. Key design chalYear in Review 2021-22

lenges that emerged were the need for rapid user training at scale and methods for enabling real-time use in the busy and chaotic workflows of frontline providers.

The goal of the second workstream has been to prepare the regulatory and operational infrastructure required to rapidly iterate and test digital solutions prior to widespread deployment. The team has set up Digital Health Innovation (DHI) hubs at 10 newly designated Health and Wellness Clinics in Karnataka to serve as labs for rapid iteration of new digital

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SATCHIT BALSARI

technologies in a clinical environment.

Optimization of the GoI’s Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) Screening and Management tool is underway at these sites. The team has also begun to expand these DHI hubs into the private sector to facilitate widespread development of digital health solutions. Key partners include health IT platforms like the NCD platform, Accessible Medical Record via Integrated Technologies (AMRIT), and ImTeCHO; technology partners and entrepreneurs like iSPIRT, Dell EMC, and Social Alpha; as well as primary care centers in India.

TEACHING

Crossroads Transitions to the Aspire Institute In an exciting move, the Crossroads Emerging Leaders Program, which launched at the Mittal Institute with a mission to transform the lives of youth in marginalized situations, has spun off into the Aspire Institute.

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he Crossroads Emerging Leaders Program (CELP), a highly successful program at the Mittal Institute, transitioned to a standalone non-profit, called the Aspire Institute, in October 2021 to build on the enormous success that had started at Harvard.

of aspiring leaders, 47% male and 53% female, from cities across the Middle East, South Asia, Central and East Asia, Africa and the Americas. The finalist cohort included a professional gamer from Lebanon, a writer from Brazil, a digital law specialist from Haiti, and a youth activist from Nepal.

CELP grew from the premise that, while talent is distributed equally around the world, financial and educational resources are not. Just this past year, the program provided thousands of low-income, first-in-family college students with resources to tackle opportunity gaps while identifying how the COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating inequality in the realms of education and beyond.

This diverse group joined together in July 2021 for a virtual two-week intensive curriculum grounded in the casestudy method. Facilitated by Harvard Business School faculty members Tarun Khanna, Karim Lakhani, Kristin ­Fabbe, and Caroline Elkins, the curriculum took students from Santiago, Chile, to Lagos, Nigeria, to Bangalore, India, in a novel interdisciplinary classroom setting.

In 2021, the program reached students across 135 countries; offered thousands of fully funded HarvardX courses to low-income students (worth over $1 million); and held vibrant sessions directly connecting students to industry and academic leaders. CELP’s finalist class of 114 students was a diverse group

A key development in 2021’s program was a new initiative with extended learning opportunities for program finalists. In an effort to equip graduates with the tools to pursue their dream careers, CELP aimed its focus on networking, mentoring, and professional and personal development. New extended

learning opportunities included access to internships in students’ home countries, a host of mentorship opportunities from global industry stalwarts, and scholarships for continued access to online courses. Select finalists of the 2021 program were also granted Community Action Awards of $10,000 each to catalyze high-impact student ideas.

Now as the Aspire Institute and with former Mittal Institute Executive Director, Meena Hewett, at the helm, CELP will continue to carry on its mission in new ways as it pursues its goals of transforming the lives of low-income, first-generation college students around the world.

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TEACHING

Interfaculty Teaching at Harvard The Institute supports the creation of curricula that explores solutions to complex challenges in the developing world, providing interdisciplinary courses taught by Harvard faculty to students and the virtual global community.

GenEd 1011 Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems

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or over a decade, this unique and innovative course has been open to undergraduate and graduate students across Harvard. The course, started by Prof. Tarun Khanna, Mittal Institute Faculty Director, provides an interdisciplinary framework and multiple lenses through which to think about the economic and social problems that affect five-billion people in the developing world. Taught by multiple Harvard faculty members across schools, case-study discussions cover challenges and potential solutions in fields as diverse as health, education, technology, urban planning, arts and the humanities.

Starting with an introductory module taught by Professor Khanna that reviews salient approaches to development and the roles that entrepreneurs can play within these, the course is co-taught

Year in Review 2021-22

by Professors Satchit Balsari, Krzysztof Gajos, Rahul Mehrotra and Doris Sommer. Students are introduced to cases across the developing world, with a particular focus on Africa, China, Latin America, and South Asia. Throughout the course, students work in teams to design entrepreneurial solutions that address one of the many problems identified, thinking about complex issues from perspectives and disciplines different from their own.

edX Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies In a virtual business and management course on edX taught by Mittal Institute Faculty Director Tarun Khanna, hundreds of thousands of participants from around the world have enrolled to explore how entrepreneurship and innovation can tackle complex social problems in emerging economies.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the course delves into the prior attempts to address these issues across emerging markets, and students identify points of

opportunity for entrepreneurial efforts and propose and develop their own creative solutions. The goal of the course is to make students aware of their own individual agency, exploring what they themselves can do to address a seemingly intractable problem.

Throughout the course, students investigate financing, scaling up of operations, branding, management of property rights and how to create the appropriate metrics to assess the progress and social value of their entrepreneurial endeavors.

From issues of healthcare and online commerce to fintech and infrastructure, students examine the diverse geographic regions of Africa, China, Latin America and South Asia to better understand the entrepreneurial opportunities in these emerging markets.

Students

Clockwise from top left: Nosher Ali Khan ’23, in Pakistan, earns a Guinness World Record for the highest-altitude dance party; Harvard students celebrate with festive dress; Elizabeth Hentschel ’26 researches early childhood responsiveness in Pakistan; e-Rehri wins Seed for Change award; Student grant recipient Nariman Aavani studies Islamic and South Asian philosophical traditions; Zhuu Fruits, an agricultural-tech start-up, wins Seed for Change grant; Members of Harvard’s South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA); Nosher Ali Khan holds his award.

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Clockwise from top left: South Asian students meet on campus; students celebrate together; student organization fair; South Asian students on the steps of Harvard Law; a mela on campus; students present their projects.

The Mittal Institute supports Harvard undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in their South Asia-related research and internships, entrepreneurial projects, and on-campus student group activities.

Year in Review 2021-22

STUDENTS

Research, Language and Internship Grants The Mittal Institute supports the work of undergraduate and graduate students focused on deepening their academic engagement with issues facing South Asia through our grants.

Student grant awards were made possible by generous contributions from Mukesh Prasad, Syed Babar Ali, and the Arts Council.

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he Mittal Institute provides funding to students for their pursuit of research, language studies, or internships focused on South Asia during the winter and summer recesses.

Winter 2021 Grants Nariman Aavani PhD Candidate in Comparative Study of Religion Hindu Engagement with Rumi's Mathnawi in Mughal India (India) Manasa Acharya Master in Urban Planning, 2023 Internship with Community Design Agency, an architecture firm focused on informal settlements (India) Arielle Bernhardt PhD Candidate in Economics The Local Transmission of Gender Norms: Evidence from India Nikhil Dharmaraj Harvard College, 2023 Internship at The Caravan magazine (India)

Ronak Jain PhD Candidate in Economics An Economic Inquiry into Begging and Street Vending: Evidence from India (India) Pankhuri Jha Master in Public Administration, 2022 Spending for Health: A State-level Analysis of Health Spending in India (India) Heer Vipul Joisher PhD Candidate in Molecular and Cellular Biology Impact of Menopause on the Quality of Life of Working Women in India (India) Nosher Ali Khan Harvard College, 2024 Exploring Burushaski Music in the Burusho Diaspora (Pakistan) Shrinkhala Khatiwada Master in Urban Planning, 2023 Internship at Daayitwa with Nepali Planning Commission to propose the addition of an Urban Green Infrastructure Department in Nepal’s cities

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Shruthi Kumar Harvard College, 2024 The Power of Ancient Indian Knowledge: Documenting Health and Tradition in Rural and Urban Societies

Abhinav Ghosh PhD Candidate in Education Foundational Literacy and Numeracy: Examining the Reformatting of Education in India (India)

Seton Uhlhorn PhD Candidate in South Asian Studies Popular and Personal Cannons: Multilingual Poetry Notebooks in Kashmir (India)

Aaran Patel Master in Public Policy, 2022 Policy Analysis Exercise on Municipal Climate Governance in Mumbai (India)

Nosher Ali Khan Harvard College, 2024 Internship in economic policy at the Commissioner's Office, Gilgit, Pakistan (Pakistan)

Kristen Zipperer PhD Candidate in Anthropology The Politics of Purity: Democratic Transformation in Nepal's Southern Borderland (Nepal)

Vaishnavi Patil PhD Candidate in Art and Architecture Internship in the Department of Asian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (USA)

Student Organization Grants

Vaishnavi Patil PhD Candidate in Art and Architecture Documenting the Mother-child Goddess Imagery in South Asia (South Asia) Aeshna Prasad Graduate School of Design, 2022 A Case for Incremental Urbanism (India) Shaharyar Zia PhD Candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Arabic Online Tutoring Sessions

Summer 2022 Grants Nithyani Anandakugan Harvard College, 2023 "Off the Record": Tracing Stories of Sri Lankan Tamil Migrants to the United States, 1983 - 1995 (Sri Lanka) Victoria Andrews PhD Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Study of Advance Classical Tibetan Aniket De PhD Candidate in History United States of India: Imperial Federation and Anticolonialism in South Asia (South Asia) Leren Gao Master of Theological Studies, 2023 Summer Sanskrit Intensive (Virtual) Year in Review 2021-22

Ana Luiza Penna Rocha Miranda PhD Candidate in Population Health Sciences Associations between Responsive Caregiving and Maternal Empowerment in Rural Pakistan (Pakistan) Pariroo Rattan PhD Candidate in Public Policy Digitizing Difference: Subjecthood and the Making of the Modern Indian Social Contract (India) Aneesa Roidad Harvard College, 2025 Pashto Language Study Program at the University of Wisconsin (USA) Ravi Sadhu Master in Global Health and Population, 2023 How Resilience Shapes Mental Health Outcomes of Indian Adolescents at Sangath, Goa (India) Arshaya Sood Master in Design Studies, 2022 Internship at World Resources Institute, Mumbai (India)

The Mittal Institute offers grants to undergraduate and graduate student organizations for projects relating to either individual countries or spanning the region of South Asia. Mittal Institute grants also support student events that have an academic focus and Harvard faculty involvement, as well as social events, such as concerts, mixers, and holiday celebrations.

Select student organizations and events funded and partnered with in 2021–22 include: — — — —

Harvard Dharma Pakistani Student Association South Asian Association South Asian Americans in Public Service Association

Student Spotlight: Nusrat Jahan Mim

Urban Modernity, Religion, and the Urban Informalities: A Study on Makeshift Cattle Markets in Dhaka Nusrat Jahan Mim was a recipient of a Mittal Institute Summer 2021 Research Grant.

As a part of her Doctor of Design thesis, she investigated and collected spatial data from the largest annual makeshift cattle marketplaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh, during Eid ul-Adha in July of 2021.

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adal Mia*, a 45-year-old cattle farmer, was cooking lunch for himself and his cousin beside the bamboo poles, where his cows were tied up. It was a weekday afternoon under Dhaka’s scorching summer sun. The temporary cattle market around him was not yet crowded with customers. Mia had been staying at this market for the last three nights. He brought four cows to Dhaka from his farm, about 130 kilometers northwest of the city.

Badal Mia and his cousin hired a van to bring their cows to sell in Dhaka for purchase in preparation of the Eid ul-Adha sacrificial ritual. They brought cooking utensils, sleeping mattresses, and pillows with them, since it was not safe to leave their cows in the market and sleep

elsewhere at night. They planned to stay in this market until Eid, which would be celebrated in four days. A temporary food stall in the market was selling Khichuri (a local dish made with rice and lentils) for 60 TK ($0.89 USD) per plate.

Since it was quite expensive for Badal Mia, he cooked his own rice and vegetables for lunch.

He planned to give his cows a quick bath directly after lunch. He sent his cousin to fetch some water from the tap near the temporary toilets of the market. He had to prepare his cows before the customers started flooding in. He wanted to get a reasonable price for his cows. After selling all four of his cows, he would go back to his village and celebrate the Eid festival with his family.

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Cattle Study Background Every year thousands of rural farmers like Badal Mia come to Dhaka to sell cows, goats, sheep, and buffalos to the urban population during Eid ul-Adha, the “Feast of Sacrifice” for Muslim communities. To accommodate the cattle sellers and their cattle, the city of Dhaka arranges several makeshift cattle marketplaces at select open urban spaces.

These marketplaces actively interact with the city’s existing physical, social, and political infrastructures at a spatio-temporal level. Such interactions generate narratives, which on one hand, help us to understand how religion (as an instrument) influences the formalities of the state and informalities of the market forces during a festival. On the other hand, they comprehend the performance “anomalies” of a South Asian city that go beyond the conventions of urban modernities.

Year in Review 2021-22

To document such narratives, I spent the summer of 2021 collecting data from Dhaka during Eid ul-Adha with the support from the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, I had to conduct my study remotely. A group of three enthusiastic Bangladeshi researchers and photographers helped me to collect data from the sites: Muhammad Bin Monsur (architect, Studio Roudh), Noufel Sharif Sojol (Consultant photographer, BRAC), and Md Mahmudur Rahman (Graduate student, MLA+U, Illinois institute of technology).

Initially, my research team and I planned to collect data from four designated cattle marketplaces (chosen based on location, road network, supply and demand scenarios) and three illegal marketplaces that emerge randomly around the city during Eid. Unfortunately, our study was hampered by the city area-wide COVID

Spaces in Dhaka transform into makeshift cattle markets.

Rural farmers sell cows, goats, sheep and buffalo to the urban population during Eid ul-Adha.

lockdowns. Therefore, we collected data from two designated, makeshift cattle marketplaces out of our original four.

Additionally, we collected data from three street-side markets.

Data Collection Process Our first site was located at North Shahjahanpur, in the Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) area. Almost every year, DSCC picks this open space in the middle of a housing area to hold one of the city’s busiest cattle markets. This location is particularly popular among those cattle sellers who bring their cattle by railway or roads. After DSCC leased this space, the leaseholder started transforming the open space into a cattle market two weeks ahead of Eid. We started documenting the transformations as local contractors built temporary bamboo structures; rural cattle sellers started arriving; and the market

gradually became busy with urban customers and rural sellers.

We also documented the temporal changes of this market throughout the day. We mapped the spatial and infrastructural arrangements done by the leaseholder’s volunteers and adjustments by the cattle sellers to accommodate the maximum number of cattle/sacrificial animals in a limited space. We documented the circulation patterns both inside and outside this temporary market. For two weeks, we observed and documented the changes in the surrounding neighborhoods to accommodate this very “rural” environment in an urban area. We developed a series of photo stories to explain the selling process of a sacrificial animal and other informal economic activities around this market. Walk-through video documentation helped us record functional arrangements, ambience, and acoustics of the market area.

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Similarly, we documented our second cattle market, Eastern Housing Cattle Market at Mirpur 6. This site was located on the bank of the Turag River in the Dhaka North City Corporation area and was popular among the cattle sellers who brought their animals through the waterway. We documented the temporal changes, spatial and infrastructural arrangements, photo stories, circulation patterns, changes in the surrounding neighborhoods, and activities of the cattle sellers, buyers, and other visitors.

Apart from these two major makeshift cattle markets, we documented unlisted makeshift cattle markets from Tinsho feet road, Aftabnagar, and Rahmatganj.

To understand the differences between Dhaka city’s markets and suburban markets, we also documented the Mymensing Circuit House makeshift cattle market, located in Mymensing (nearly 70 miles north of Dhaka).

Year in Review 2021-22

Study Results In total, the study produced 3,520 photographs, 80 hours of observation, more than 250 pages of observational field notes, and 18 hours of video footage.

I am now analyzing this data with my thesis advisers, Professor Rahul Mehrotra and Professor Eve Blau, and Professor Martha Chen is acting as a thesis committee member. I believe the collected data will contribute to developing theoretical lenses around the urban spatial and design politics in the cities of South Asia.

By Nusrat Jahan Mim *Name has been changed to protect the person’s identity.

Due to COVID travel restrictions, Nusrat hired in-country photographers and researchers to conduct the data collection remotely.

Nusrat documented the temporal changes, including spatial and infrastructural arrangements, at the markets.

STUDENTS

Seed for Change Competition An annual student competition to develop new entrepreneurial projects for India and Pakistan that aim to positively impact social, economic, and environmental issues.

The Seed for Change ­competition is made possible by a generous grant from KP Balaraj MBA ’97 and Sumir Chadha ­MBA ‘97.

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hrough the Seed for Change (SFC) Program, the Mittal Institute fosters and supports the development of a healthy, vibrant ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship in both India and Pakistan. Each year, the Mittal Institute holds this competition to identify and reward interdisciplinary student projects that positively impact social, economic, and environmental issues in India and Pakistan.

To bring new, substantive ventures and ideas to the region, the program prioritizes projects that are in the early stages of development, rather than start-ups that have already received financial support. Through this program, numerous entrepreneurial ventures have sprouted in Pakistan and India and continue to positively impact the lives of those who reside there.

The program has helped to build an enriching experience that provides our students with opportunities to receive mentorship from prestigious Harvard faculty, interact with esteemed entre-

preneurs from South Asia, and the funding to make their projects a reality on the ground in South Asia.

2022 Seed for Change Winners India Electric Rehri - Carts for Street Vendors Gauri Nagpal Graduate School of Design, Class of 2023 e-Rehri is working towards providing affordable, electric and modular carts for street vendors in Indian cities, making the daily delivery of fresh produce efficient for both the vendors and the consumers alike. Electric vehicle technology is retrofitted to traditional Indian street carts, creating an incremental and affordable transition to green energy. Using this method, any existing cart can be transformed into an electric vehicle while retaining its ability to function as a mechanical tricycle cart.

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Electric Rehri - Carts for Street Vendors.

Pakistan Zhuu Fruits - Agricultural-tech Startup Nosher Ali Khan Harvard College, Class of 2024 Zhuu Fruits is an agricultural-tech startup that facilitates logistics, branding, packaging and online retail to ensure farm-to-table service for fruits in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. Zhuu Fruits will be working with local farmers to ensure that their produce is compensated fairly, customers get the highest quality fresh fruit and there is minimal post-harvest loss.

Year in Review 2021-22

India Rehnuma - Capacity-building and Research Lab for School Principals, by Principals Jonathan Frank Mendonca Graduate School of Education, Class of 2022 Rehnuma works with motivated school principals to find simple ways that improve the quality of education in under-resourced schools by using limited resources effectively and leveraging their community. Rehnuma documents these sustainable best practices into

short courses and partners with largescale NGOs, such as Teach for India, to coach and support principals from similar contexts as they implement these practices.

Scholars

Clockwise from top left: Affiliates gather for a research presentation; Confrontations (2017) by VAF Bunu Dhungana; Ashutosh Varshney; GSA Ronak Jain at the Mittal office; Asghari Begum seating in kitchen – Peeray circa 1940 by VAF Mehwish Abid; Navneet (2020) by VAF Pragati Jain; Vidya Subramanian with STS Fellows at HKS; Sehj Kashyap with the Mittal Institute Delhi team.

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Clockwise from top left: Adjust (2021) by VAF Pragati Jain; VAF alum Sunanda Khajuria presents at the Mittal Institute Delhi office; a visitor looks through VAF Mehwish Abid’s interactive exhibit; Jinah Kim; Graduate Student Associate Tina Liu’s research on agricultural fires and air pollution; a speaker at the Institute’s Bangladesh Rising Conference.

The Mittal Institute serves as an active platform for connecting faculty and students from across Harvard and other U.S. academic institutions with scholars, public and private organizations, and governments in South Asia.

Year in Review 2021-22

SCHOLARS

Fellows, Artists, Affiliates and Student Associates The Mittal Institute offers fellowships to scholars and ­practitioners from South Asia to utilize the university’s resources to contribute to self-driven, independent research within a variety of disciplines. / Fellowships — BABAR ALI FELLOWSHIP — BAJAJ TRUST VISITING RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP — MITTAL INSTITUTE INDIA FELLOWSHIP (MIIF) — PAKISTAN IN-REGION

RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP — RAGHUNATHAN FAMILY FELLOWSHIP — VISITING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP / Research Affiliates / Graduate Student Associates

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he Mittal Institute provides ever-expanding opportunities for scholarly and artistic exchange between Harvard and South Asia. With the generous support of our donors, the Institute has launched several new on-campus residencies as well as an exciting new initiative to host new postdoctoral scholars at our New Delhi office. We are also expanding our offering of in-region opportunities outside of India to provide exceptional scholars in South Asia with new ways to work with faculty while remaining in their home countries.

The Mittal Institute continues to invest in our Scholars Program as it grows in scope and expands in reach. A new Program Coordinator has been working closely with Institute Fellows, Research Affiliates, and Graduate Student Associates (GSAs) to connect them to Harvard faculty and programs, elevate the visibility of their work, and provide new ways to advance their scholarship and take advantage of the wide variety of resources at Harvard.

New activities this year included a Library Research Orientation with the Head of Academic Partnerships and liaison to South Asian Studies at the Harvard Libraries, as well as a GSA Roundtable to provide space for South Asia-focused PhD students to learn from each other’s research. Planned activities for the future include: — LMSAI networking hour and casual afternoon tea — Private tours of Harvard Museums with a focus on South Asian collections — Walking tour of historical Boston for Visiting Scholars — Tour of Museum of Fine Arts and other Boston museums — Op-ed writing workshop — Data science and visualization training

Fellowships The Babar Ali Fellowship supports advanced degree-holders and recent PhD recipients in their continued research in areas related to Pakistan.

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Clockwise: Jennifer Leaning (left) visits an exhibit by VAF Mehwish Abid; S.V. Subramanian (left) with Mayanka Ambade; Yaqoob Bangash at a Mittal Institute event.

The Bajaj Trust Visiting Research Fellowship supports scholars who hold a PhD or terminal degree with priority given to those who have not had past opportunities to access Harvard’s resources, who have primarily been educated at institutions in South Asia, and who have a research interest in India.

The Mittal Institute India Fellowship (MIIF) is a unique opportunity that funds highly qualified postdoctoral researchers focused on India or connected with India to be based at the Mittal Institute’s New Delhi office and collaborate remotely with Harvard faculty.

The Pakistan In-Region Research Fellowship supports outstanding junior faculty from reputable universities across Pakistan. Fellows reside in Pakistan and are mentored remotely by a Harvard faculty member in their area of research.

Year in Review 2021-22

The Raghunathan Family Fellowship supports recent PhD recipients in the humanities and social sciences with their research on historical or contemporary South Asia. The Raghunathan Fellow is in-residence for one academic year in the Cambridge office.

Research Affiliates

The Visiting Artist Fellowship is a unique opportunity for mid-career visual artists from around South Asia to spend eight weeks on the Harvard campus. The VAF differs from a typical artist residency program in that it is research-centered, providing artists with the vast resources of Harvard’s intellectual community to enhance their artistic practice. While the VAFs are on campus, they are mentored by a Harvard faculty member in their area of research interest.

Graduate Student Associates

The Mittal Institute’s Research Affiliates contribute to Harvard’s scholarship on South Asia through their wealth of expertise on the region, from political economy to public health.

The Mittal Institute supports Graduate Student Associates (GSAs) from across the different schools at Harvard who conduct research focused on South Asia.

This program aims to support graduate and Ph.D. students at Harvard and is centered on the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.

KHYATI TRIPATHI Bajaj Fellow India Khyati is a death scholar and tries to bring together events, emotions and practices related to death to explore the psychosocial significance and intricate connections between them. Her work lies at the intersection of social anthropology, psychology, and psychoanalysis. She completed her PhD from the University of Delhi.

Yaqoob Khan Bangash is the 2022-23 United States Educational Foundation in Pakistan (USEFP) Fulbright Fellow. A historian of modern South Asia, Dr. Bangash is Associate Professor, Department of Governance and Global Studies and Director, Centre for Governance and Policy at Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan. He studies Pakistan as a post-colonial state – its state formation, identity, and conflicts. He authored A Princely Affair: Accession and Integration of Princely States in Pakistan, 1947-55 .

at the intersection of technologies and societies. Her current research investigates the changing nature of citizenship in the technological society we now inhabit. Focusing on India, her research is loosely framed by two large issues: the first is of the colonization of the everyday so-called real world by the digital; and the second is how power permeates and is implicated in such technologies.

MAYANKA AMBADE Mittal Institute India Fellow India LIAQUAT CHANNA Syed Babar Ali Fellow Pakistan

VIDYA SUBRAMANIAN Raghunathan Family Fellow India YAQOOB BANGASH Fulbright Fellow Pakistan

University of Sindh, Pakistan; M.Ed. in English Language Teaching from the University of Glasgow, UK; and a PhD in Language and Literacy Education (TESOL & World Language Education) with distinction from the University of Georgia, USA. He is a Fulbright alumnus.

Vidya Subramanian is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests lie

Liaquat Ali Channa serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering & Management Sciences (BUITEMS), Quetta, Pakistan. He holds an MA in English with a silver medal from the

Mayanka is a demographer with an academic background in Economics and a deep interest in Sociology and Health Sciences. She has a Ph.D. in Population Studies from the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai. During the fellowship, Mayanka will examine attitudes and access to healthcare utilization among older adults in India.

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ANKUR PHUKAN Mittal Institute India Fellow India Ankur has a Ph.D in History from the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (affiliated with Jadavpur University in Kolkata).

During the fellowship, Ankur will study the idea of indigeneity and how it is produced through performative practices by tracing Bihu, the national festival of Assam in the post-colonial electoral democratic context of South Asia.

Year in Review 2021-22

NADHRA KHAN Pakistan Fellow Pakistan

MEHWISH ABID Visiting Artist Fellow Pakistan

PRAGATI JAIN Visiting Artist Fellow India

Nadhra Shahbaz Khan is Associate Professor of Art History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. A specialist in the history of art and architecture of the Punjab from the 16th to the early 20th century, her research covers the visual and material culture of this region during the Mughal, Sikh, and colonial periods. She is the author of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samādhi in Lahore: A Summation of Sikh Architectural and Decorative Practices, a monograph published as the University of Bonn’s Studies in Asian Art and Culture (SAAC) series.

She is the recipient of the LUMS Research Award, 2018-19.

Mehwish Abid is the principal architect at the Studio of Architecture, Research, and Design (S A R D). She is a trans-disciplinary academic and visual artist heading the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at IAC, Lahore. She has received distinctions for both her graduate and postgraduate dissertations at COMSATS University Islamabad and the University of Liverpool, UK. As a visual artist, she explores the formation of new methods of immersion through material culture and experiments with the medium of sound, text, image, and objects. Her practice is research-based andt roots itself in decolonial notions of investigation.

Pragati Jain’s work draws attention to prevailing conflicts in civilized societies, where each one of us has similar aspirations, struggles, and persistent ideas of practicing equality. In an atmosphere of shared fear, confusion, and hope, she creates art about the likenesses that bind us.

BUNU DHUNGANA Visiting Artist Fellow Nepal

Bunu Dhungana uses photography as a medium to explore and question the world around her. While her personal projects center around gender, she has worked in a wide range of forms — from visual ethnography and non-profit work, to commercial and journalistic work.

Dhungana believes that visual stories can reach out to people, engage them, and start conversations.

KALAIYARASAN ARUMUGAM Research Affiliate United States Post-Doctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs in Brown University; Assistant Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, India

NAVEEN BHARATHI Research Affiliate United States Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CASI, University of Pennsylvania; Raghunathan Family Fellow, 2019-2020

ATANU CHAKRABORTY Research Affiliate India Former Secretary to Government of India, Ministry of Finance

ABDUL RAZAQUE CHANNA Research Affiliate Pakistan Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Sindh, Jamshoro; Syed Babar Ali Fellow, 20192020

SANJEEV CHOPRA Research Affiliate India Former Additional Chief Secretary to the Government of West Bengal, Departments of Industry, Commerce & Enterprises

MARIAM CHUGHTAI Research Affiliate Pakistan Associate Dean and Assistant Professor, LUMS School of Education; Pakistan Programs Manager, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

RONAK DESAI Research Affiliate United States Associate, Paul Hastings

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HARDEEP DHILLON Research Affiliate United States Post-Doctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality, American Bar Foundation/National Science Foundation

SWAGATO GANGULY Research Affiliate India Associate Editor, Times of India

Year in Review 2021-22

RAHUL GUPTA Research Affiliate India Senior Fellow, Harvard University, Advanced Leadership Initiative

AKSHAY MANGLA Research Affiliate United Kingdom Associate Professor in ­International Business, University of Oxford

SEHJ KASHYAP Research Affiliate India Fellow, India Digital Health Network

RAJEESH MENON Research Affiliate India Healthcare Technology Leader

DINYAR PATEL Research Affiliate India Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts, S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research

ROLUAHPUIA Research Affiliate India Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Technology-Roorkee

SALIL SHETTY Research Affiliate United Kingdom Vice President, Open Society Foundations’ Global Programs

IAN TALBOT Research Affiliate United Kingdom Professor Emeritus, History of Modern South Asia, University of Southampton; Former Head of the History Department and Director of the Centre for Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

IMTIAZ UL HAQ Research Affiliate United States Economist, World Bank

MICHAEL VAN HAVILL Research Affiliate New Zealand Healthcare Product Design Leader

VERONICA VARGAS Research Affiliate Chile Economist: Global Health, Health Policy, and Pharmaceuticals

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY Research Affiliate United States Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science, Brown University; Director, Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University

LAURA WEINSTEIN Research Affiliate United States Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

FATIMA ZAHRA Research Affiliate United States / Bangladesh Postdoctoral Fellow, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University

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­Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University

RAILE ROCKY ZIIPAO Research Affiliate India Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; Raghunathan Family Fellow 2017-2018

BENNETT COMERFORD Graduate Student Associate PhD Candidate, Comparative Studies, Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University

RONAK JAIN Graduate Student Associate PhD Candidate, Economics, Harvard University AIDAN MILLIFF Graduate Student Associate PhD Candidate, International Relations and Security Studies, Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

HANSONG LI Graduate Student Associate PhD Candidate, Government, Harvard University

MUHAMMAD ZAMAN Research Affiliate United States Professor, College of Engineering; Faculty Fellow, Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University

Year in Review 2021-22

AKSHAY DIXIT Graduate Student Associate PhD Candidate, Political Economy & Government, Harvard University

TIANJIA (TINA) LIU Graduate Student Associate PhD Candidate,

BLAIR READ Graduate Student Associate PhD Candidate, Comparative Politics and Methodology, Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

GSA Spotlight: Tina Liu

The Impacts of Forest Fires on Air Quality and Public Health in India Tianjia (Tina) Liu, who joined the Mittal Institute as a Graduate Student Associate for academic year 2021-2022, is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard. Her research focuses on using satellite data and atmospheric modeling to quantify the impacts of fires on air quality and public health in India, Indonesia, and globally.

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he Mittal Institute interviewed Tina about her interdisciplinary research.

Mittal Institute: What are your academic interests, and how or why did you first become interested in your current research topics?

Tina Liu: I first became interested in research on fires and air quality during my junior year at Columbia University, when I applied for an undergraduate research assistantship at the Earth Institute. For the project, I used satellite fire data and air quality measurements to determine if agricultural fires had any large impacts on air quality in major Indian cities, such as Delhi and Bangalore.

During my undergraduate years, I also explored other research topics, such as paleoclimate and oceanography, at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, but most of the other projects were not as relevant in today’s world and required extensive lab work.

Mittal Institute: When focusing on forest fires and climate change, why is it that your research is centered on India and Indonesia? Likewise, can you explain the linkage between wildfires and climate change?

Tina Liu: While my India and Indonesia work focuses on how and why humans use fire and the consequences for air quality and public health, climate

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change could certainly be a factor in exacerbating the dry and hot conditions needed for fires to grow out of control or influencing farmers’ decisions to burn crop residues. In north India, agricultural fires are set by farmers to quickly clear their fields of crop residues before planting the next crop. To stem groundwater depletion, state policies delayed rice planting dates closer to the summer monsoon onset. However, this inadvertently worsens air pollution issues during the post-monsoon as more farmers set crop residues on fire in order to save time and cope with the shorter turnaround time between rice harvests and wheat planting.

Climate change may have played a role in accelerating groundwater depletion in north India by modulating monsoon onset and precipitation and increasing evaporation rates. In Indonesia, forest fires are tied to deforestation, agriculYear in Review 2021-22

ture, and management of oil palm, timber, and logging plantations. During drought years, such as 2006, 2015, and 2019, fires often burn out of control.

In particular, some fires occur in carbon-rich peatlands; when the water table is low, peat dries out, and fires can burn for weeks to months. If climate change plays and/or continues to play a role in exacerbating drought conditions in Indonesia, the fire season could become even more severe in future years.

Mittal Institute: The public health impacts of wildfires are obviously profound. Can you talk a bit about that, and do you interface with anyone from Harvard to look at the public health data?

Tina Liu: When we link fires to public health, we look at concentrations of fine particulate matter, or tiny aerosols, that fires emit. Because these aerosols are smaller in diameter than that

of your hair, they can get lodged deep into the lungs and can even enter the bloodstream, causing cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and worsening pre-existing conditions. For our Indonesia work, we collaborated with Dr. Joel Schwartz, Dr. Samuel Myers, and Dr. Jonathan Buonocore at T.H. Chan School of Public Health to quantify the number of premature deaths due to the 2015 fire season.

In our study, we estimated 100,000 premature deaths across Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia throughout the year following the fires. We used robust relationships between fine particulate matter and mortality that are generalized from many epidemiological studies. In more recent work, we collaborated with Dr. Francesca Dominici and her group to quantify links between wildfires and COVID-19 in the western US.

SCHOLARS

Events and Seminars The Mittal Institute strengthens South Asia-related ­research in a variety of disciplines by providing platforms for scholars to present and discuss their research at our symposiums, conferences, workshops, and seminars.

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cross-regional conference

40+ workshops

63 200+

seminars

speakers & panelists

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ach academic year, the Mittal Institute hosts a multitude of events covering topics in the arts, humanities, sciences, education, business, and more. In partnership with relevant organizations, student groups, and academic institutions, the Institute’s events provide platforms for faculty, scholars, industry leaders, and others to present their research, discuss developing issues, and deepen the public’s understanding of the critical issues that South Asia faces.

During the academic year of 2021–2022, the Institute hosted a cross-regional conference, 40-plus workshops, and over 60 seminars that featured more than 200 speakers.

Affairs; Shivshankar Menon, Former Indian Foreign Minister and National Security Advisor; and Sima Samar, Chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Co-sponsors for some of these events include the MIT Center for International Studies, the Watson Institute at Brown University, the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research at the National University of Singapore, and various Harvard schools and departments, including the Harvard Business School India Research Center, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health India Center, the Asia Center, the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

These events brought together world-renowned speakers, including Jayant Sinha, Member of India’s Lok Sabha; Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art; Philipp Ackermann, Director General for Africa, Latin America, and Near and Middle East at the German Ministry of Foreign The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

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WORKSHOPS Conservation Science, Training, and Research (CoSTAR) In November 2021, the Mittal Institute launched the second module of Conservation Science, Training, and Research (CoSTAR). The CoSTAR modules have seen participation from over 150 participants and 20 speakers, representing over 50 cultural and scientific institutions in South Asia. The program continues to build a “Knowledge Commons”—a virtual platform that allows museums and other cultural and academic institutions to collaborate and share best practices in creating a viable ecosystem for museums and the scientific study of the cultural heritage of the region. The first CoSTAR module took place from April-June 2021 and the second module culminated in June 2022.

Module II hosted 40 sessions that provided technical study in painted surfaces, enabling participants to fill gaps in practical expertise. Sessions focused on skills that can be applied on a day-

to-day basis, such as learning how to establish a workspace for analysis of painted surfaces of art objects and how to conduct technical studies to identify pigments.

SESSION 7: Sampling and documentation

SESSION 1: Harvard Art Museums Research Road Map

SESSION 9-12: Self practice by participants in preparation of samples & observations with microscopes

SESSION 2: Introduction to the paintings/painted surfaces of South Asia SESSION 3: Introduction to the paintings/painted surfaces of India

SESSION 8: Use of microscopes to observe samples

SESSION 13: Review and use of microscopes and accessories SESSION 14: Introduction to multi-spectral imaging

SESSION 4: Painting techniques in India SESSION 5: Research Methodology Formulations of research and technical studies questions SESSION 6: Setting up a painted surfaces analysis work space

SESSION 16: Application of the results for conservation or research purposes SESSION 18: Application of the results for art historical research purposes SESSION 19: Presentation of work done by the participants SESSION 20-24: Spectroscopic tech SESSION 26-28: Sharing of results with CoSTAR network and Engagement of CoSTAR participants in the art conservation seminar to be held at CSMVS SESSION 29: Confirmation of objects for analysis of selected art objects SESSION 30- 41: Analysis SESSION 42: Summer Solstice CoSTAR seminar & Presentation of certificates SESSION 15, 17, 21, 23, 25: Practicals

Year in Review 2021-22

CoSTAR Participants.

SEMINAR SERIES Post Pandemic: Driving Inclusive Growth This Spring 2022 seminar series, hosted by the Mittal Institute in partnership with the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research at the National University of Singapore (ABFER, NUS) and Harvard University’s Center for International Development (CID), focused on the unique challenges and opportunities faced by many Asian countries recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

This series aimed to catalyze research on what steps can be taken in the region to not only recover, but also to chart a

new course to ensure that even the most vulnerable in society are included in the post-pandemic boom.

Over the span of three seminars, Tarun Khanna from the Mittal Institute, Asim Khwaja from CID, and Bernard Yeung from NUS, organized an array of panelists to discuss how the pandemic caused very massive shifts in healthcare, economics and education that have impacted billions of people greatly.

Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Jishnu Das, Rukmini Banerji, Bernard Tan.

WORKSHOP Subnational Climate-Change Policy in India The Mittal Institute, in collaboration with the Harvard Project in Climate Agreements and the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and with support from the Harvard Global Institute, hosted a two-day online research and policy workshop focused on subnational climate-change policy in India. The event examined how Indian states formulate and implement policy to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and adapt to climate change, as well as collaborations and challenges between states and the central government with regard to

climate-change and energy policy. The workshop brought together 29 academic, policy and economic experts from Canada, India, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Key organizers for the conference included Robert Stavins and Robert Stowe from the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, Tarun Khanna from the Mittal Institute, Navroz K. Dubash from the Centre for Policy Research, and Johannes Urpelainen from Johns Hopkins University.

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SYMPOSIUM The Annual Cambridge Symposium Commemorates 75 Years of Modern South Asia clude remarks from Lawrence Bacow, President of Harvard University; Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University; and Syed Babar Ali AMP ’73, founder of Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

Lakshmi Mittal speaks at the 2021 Annual Symposium.

The Annual Cambridge Symposium is set to take place on May 18 and 19, 2022. The Mittal Institute will welcome its donors and faculty to participate in a hybrid format over two days, and in-

The overarching theme of the symposium aims to commemorate the history and development of modern South Asia over the past 75 years. The first panel of the symposium will focus on climate change, and will be hosted by James H. Stock, Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard; he will be joined by Sheila Jasanoff and Michael McElroy from Harvard, and Anthony Acciavatti from Yale University. The following panel will explore the impact of the Partition of British India on the arts, and will be chaired by Jennifer Leaning, Professor of the Practice at the Harvard

T.H. Chan School of Public Health and faculty lead of the Mittal Institute’s Partition research; the panel includes Bhaskar Sarkar of UC Santa Barbara, Nadhra Khan of LUMS and Iftikhar Dadi from Cornell University.

On the second day, the first panel will discuss healthcare in the region, and will be chaired by Vikram Patel, the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School. Prof. Patel will be joined by Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Executive Chairperson of Biocon Ltd.; Satchit Balsari, Assistant Professor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Professor of Economics at Yale University. The final panel of the symposium will highlight the work being done by young scholars at the Mittal Institute, including Vidya Subramanian, Raghunathan Family Fellow at the Mittal Institute, and Nosher Ali Khan, Harvard College ’23.

LAUNCH EVENT Conservation in a Shifting Landscape: The Future of Modern Architecture in South Asia In coordination with the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, the Mittal Institute organized a launch event for a multi-year project exploring South Asia’s post-partition architectural heritage & contemporary practices. The panel–comprised of Rahul Mehrotra and Eve Blau of the GSD, Martino Stierli of the MoMA and KathYear in Review 2021-22

leen James-Chakraborty of the University College Dublin–served as a first step in exploring how buildings act as cultural heritage, and was timed to coincide with the MoMA’s exhibit, “The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985,” the museum’s first transnational show focused on the region.

Lancet Citizens’ Commission Seminars JULY 19, 2021 POLITICAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH SYSTEM IMPROVEMENTS – COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES Louise Tillin (Moderators), José Anaya, Rifat Atun, Viroj Tangcharoensathien , Yamini Aiyar , Nachiket Mor, Sandhya Venkateswaran AUGUST 3, 2021 THE ROLE OF COMMERCIAL HEALTH INSURANCE IN FINANCIAL PROTECTION Atul Gupta (Moderator) Johnathan Gruber, Sherry Glied, Michael E. Chernew, Philipa Mladovsky, Dan Zeltzer, Tarun Khanna (Closing Remarks) SEPTEMBER 23, 2021 REIMAGINING MEDICAL AND NURSING EDUCATION Dame Anne M. Johnson, Wanicha Chuenkongkaew Leila C. Varkey, Bhabatosh Biswas, Devi P. Shetty (Moderator) OCTOBER 18, 2021 THE RIGHT TO HEALTH AND UNIVERSAL HEALTH COVERAGE

Shivangi Rai (Moderator) Dr. Dainius Puras, Dr. Gita Sen, Meera Sanghamitra, Vivek Divan NOVEMBER 23, 2021 HEALTH SEEKING BEHAVIOR IN FOUR INDIAN STATES Sapna Desai (Moderator) Barbara McPakeArnab Mukherji, Sumit Kane, Devaki Nambiar Poonam Gupta (Closing Remarks) DECEMBER 7, 2021 ROLE OF AYUSH SYSTEMS IN ACHIEVING UNIVERSAL HEALTH COVERAGE IN INDIA Sarika Chaturvedi (Moderators) Emeritus Prof. John Porter, Leena Abraham, Geetha Krishnan, Darshan Shankar, Bhushan Patwardhan JANUARY 28, 2022 THE THIRD WAVE: THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON INDIA AND THE WAY FORWARD Vidya Krishnan (Moderator) Gagandeep Kang, Prabhat Jha, Vijay Chandru, Zarir Udwadia

FEBRUARY 10, 2022 THE UNION BUDGET AND HEALTHCARE INVESTMENT: NEED FOR MORE? Yamini Aiyar (Moderator) Rakesh Mohan, K Srinath Reddy, Amarjeet Sinha, Avani Kapur APRIL 7, 2022 HEALTH PROMOTION FOR WELL-BEING, EQUITY, AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Vikram Patel (Moderator) Thelma Narayan, Abhay Bang, Prashanth N.

Arts Seminars AUGUST 1, 2021 CONCERT FROM BANGLADESH (Musicians & Performers) Adittya Arzu, Meerashri Arshee, Arif Baul,

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MARCH 29, 2022 SOUTH ASIAN NARRATIVES: RECLAIMING AND RETELLING Jinah Kim (Moderator) Mehwish Abid

In Focus: Afghanistan

WOMEN IN SOUTH ASIA: EXPECTATIONS, BURDENS AND OBLIGATIONS Jinah Kim (Moderator) Bunu Dhungana, Pragati Dalvi Jain

Gape within I - Pigeonholes (2017)

by VAF Mehwish Abid.

Nishit Dey, Enayet, Moumita Haque, Nazrul Islam, Gully Boy Rana and Tabib Mahmud, Jawaad Mustakim Al Muballig, Provhat Rahman, Saidur Rahman , Shoummo Saha, Sohel SEPTEMBER 11, 2021 ART WALK: LIMINAL WORLDS

BY SUNANDA KHAJURIA Sunanda Khajuria NOVEMBER 8, 2021 VISITING ARTIST FELLOWSHIP VIRTUAL ART EXHIBITION:

Year in Review 2021-22

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021 ENTANGLED HISTORIES: THE BAMIYAN BUDDHAS—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Deborah Klimburg-Salter; Masanori Nagaoka Cosponsored with Harvard Art Museums

NOVEMBER 19, 2021 FACES OF GOD: IMAGES OF MUSLIM DEVOTION IN INDIAN PAINTING Jinah Kim (Moderator) Murad Khan Mumtaz, Yael Rice Co-sponsored with the American Society of Southern Asian Art

OCTOBER 15, 2021 AFGHANISTAN’S NEXT TRANSITION: HOW WE GOT HERE, AND WHAT COMES NEXT Arvid Bell (Moderator) Anand Gopal, Fara Abbas, Philipp Ackermann Co-sponsored with The Negotiation Task Force at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

MARCH 23, 2022 CONSERVATION IN A SHIFTING LANDSCAPE: THE FUTURE OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN SOUTH ASIA Eve Blau (Moderator) Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Martino Stierli, Rahul Mehrotra Co-sponsored with Harvard Graduate School of Design, Museum of Modern Art

NOVEMBER 19, 2021 LEARNING IN DISTRESS: PLIGHT OF EDUCATION IN AFGHANISTAN James Robson (Moderator) Kamal Ahmad, Pashtana Durrani, Shirin Jaafari, Sakena Yacoobi Co-sponsored with The Asia Center

FEBRUARY 15, 2022 AFGHANISTAN AFTER THE COLLAPSE: WHERE ARE WE NOW AND WHAT COMES NEXT? Fara Abbas (Moderator) Heather Barr, Pashtana Durrani, Shaharzad Akbar, Sima Samar Co-sponsored with the Negotiation Task Force at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

Seminars on Borders in Modern South Asia OCTOBER 21, 2021 ARCHIVES OF THE INDIAN OCEAN Sugata Bose (Moderator) Sana Aiyar, Kalyani Ramnath, Gitanjali Surendran Co-sponsored with the Asia Center NOVEMBER 4, 2021 SARONG REVOLUTION: THE MYANMAR COUP, MILITARIZATION, AND GENDERED RESISTANCE IN THE BORDERLANDS Sugata Bose (Moderator) Sumitra Thongdaijam Co-sponsored with the Asia Center

Image Courtesy of Nirupama Rao.

NOVEMBER 11, 2021 DECOLONISATION, POSTIMPERIAL SPACES, AND THE MAKING OF HUMAN RIGHTS Sugata Bose (Moderator) Raphaëlle Khan Co-sponsored with the Asia Center FEBRUARY 17, 2022 THE FRACTURED HIMALAYA Sugata Bose (Moderator) Nirupama Rao Co-sponsored with Asia Center, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Seminars on South Asian Politics and History SEPTEMBER 24, 2021 POLITICAL MISINFORMATION IN INDIA: EVIDENCE FROM EXPERIMENTAL SOLUTIONS Sumitra Badrinathan

Co-sponsored with Watson Institute at Brown University; The Weatherhead Center at Harvard University, MIT Center for International Studies OCTOBER 6, 2021 INDIA AT 75: THE GLOBAL ROOTS OF INDEPENDENCE Dinyar Patel (Moderator) Nico Slate, Carolien Stolte Co-sponsored with Harvard Club of India OCTOBER 29, 2021 THE PAST AND FUTURE OF INDIA-CHINA RELATIONS Vipin Narang (Moderator) Kanti Prasad Bajpai, Vijay Gokhale, Shivshankar Menon Co-sponsored with the Watson Institute at Brown University; The Weatherhead Center at Harvard University, MIT Center for International Studies

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NOVEMBER 19, 2021 VACCINATING INDIA AGAINST COVID: LESSONS FROM HISTORY Prerna Singh (Discussant) Harish Naraindas Co-sponsored with the Watson Institute at Brown University; The Weatherhead Center at Harvard University, MIT Center for International Studies DECEMBER 3, 2021 HOW DO GENDER QUOTAS IMPACT ACCOUNTABILITY? Zuheir Desai Co-sponsored with the Watson Institute at Brown University; The Weatherhead Center at Harvard University, MIT Center for International Studies MARCH 4, 2022 COLOSSUS: THE ANATOMY OF DELHI Neelanjan Sircar Co-sponsored with the Watson Institute at Brown University; The Weatherhead Center at Harvard University, MIT Center for International Studies MARCH 30, 2022 ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS AND AFTER Ashutosh Varshney (Moderator) Sanjay Kumar, Yamini Aiyar, Gilles Verniers, Rahul Verma

Year in Review 2021-22

MIGRATION’S IMPACT ON TOLERANCE AND INTERNATIONALISM Nikhar Gaikwad Co-sponsored with the Watson Institute at Brown University; The Weatherhead Center at Harvard University, MIT Center for International Studies

APRIL 5, 2022 SHIVSHANKAR MENON: LEADERSHIP LESSONS IN GLOBAL DIPLOMACY Shriya Yarlagadda (Moderator) Shivshankar Menon APRIL 28, 2022 THE HIJAB BAN AND THE FUTURE OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM IN INDIA Diana Eck (Moderator) Faizan Mustafa, Zakia Soman, J. Sai Deepak MAY 5, 2022 CRISIS AND CONSEQUENCES IN PAKISTAN Yaqoob Khan Bangash (Moderator) Huma Baqai, Najam Sethi, Salman Akram Raja MAY 6, 2022 BRIDGING THE GULF: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE ON

Seminars on New Corners of South Asia NOVEMBER 17, 2021 WINDS OF CHANGE: THE SILK ROAD TO SOUTH ASIA Sugata Bose (Moderator) Hasna Moudud FEBRUARY 4, 2022 POETRY AGAINST TYRANNY: A READING AND CONVERSATION WITH THREE BURMESE POET Chu May Paing (Discussant) Me Me Khant, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, Edna Du Co-sponsored with the Asia Center, Aruna Global South MARCH 25, 2022 EXPLORING BANGLADESH’S POTENTIAL ALIGNMENT WITH ASEAN Jay Rosengard; Rubana Haq,

Image Courtesy of Oishik Sircar.

Salmon F. Rahman, Selim Raihan, Shahidul Haque Co-sponsored with the Asia Center APRIL 7, 2022 ‘INBETWEEN’ INDIA AND CHINA: BHUTAN’S INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Arunabh Ghosh (Moderator) Nitasha Kaul Co-sponsored with Asia Center, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies’

Book Talks APRIL 7, 2022 THE KINETIC CITY & OTHER ESSAYS Sarah Whiting (Moderator) Rahul Mehrotra Co-sponsored with Frances Loeb Library MARCH 24, 2022 PHANTOM PLAGUE: HOW TUBERCULOSIS SHAPED HISTORY Richard Cash (Chair) Vidya Krishnan, Madhukar Pai

APRIL 13, 2022 VIOLENT MODERNITIES – CULTURAL LIVES OF LAW IN THE NEW INDIA Durba Mitra (Chair) Oishik Sircar, Faiza Jawad Siddiqi, Mini Saxena

Conference DECEMBER 6, 2021 ASSOCIATION FOR ASIAN STUDIES NEW ENGLAND REGIONAL CONFERENCE Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Center, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Korea Institute, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

Seminars on Energy and Environment MARCH 30, 2022 DECARBONIZING INDIA’S ENERGY ECONOMY Michael B. McElroy Co-sponsored with the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy, and Environment

APRIL 28, 2022 TACKLING TRASH: SOUTH ASIA’S INFORMAL WASTE ECONOMY Marty Chen (Moderator) Lakshmi Narayan, Saumya Roy

Post-Pandemic Seminar Series JANUARY 19, 2022 EDUCATION IN ASIA: POST PANDEMIC Asim I. Khwaja (Chair) Bernard Tan; Jishnu Das; Rukmini Banerji Co-sponsored with Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research at the National University of Singapore, Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School

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Image Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums.

CoSTAR Public Talks

FEBRUARY 16, 2022 HEALTHCARE IN ASIA – POST PANDEMIC Tarun Khanna (Chair) Manoj Mohanan, Nachiket Mor, Sonia Bhalotra Co-sponsored with Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research at the National University of Singapore, Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School MARCH 16, 2022 POST PANDEMIC: ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL POLICY DRIVING SOCIAL COHESION IN ASIA Danny Quah (Chair) Jean Yeung, Jonathan Ostry, Mirai Chatterjee Co-sponsored with Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research at the National University of Singapore, Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School

Year in Review 2021-22

NOVEMBER 18, 2021 THE RESEARCH AGENDA OF HARVARD ART MUSEUMS’ STRAUS CENTER FOR CONSERVATION AND TECHNICAL STUDIES: A ROUND TABLE CONVERSATION Anupam Sah (Moderator) Angela Chang, Narayan Khandekar, Penley Knipe, Kate Smith Co-sponsored by Harvard Art Museums and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai MARCH 22, 2022 COLLABORATIVE CONSERVATION Anupam Sah (Moderator) Georgina Rayner, Jen Thum, Kate Smith Co-sponsored by Harvard Art Museums and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai

Image Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums.

APRIL 12, 2022 HEADS AND TALES: A FRAGMENT FROM HADDA, AND THE STORIES IT TELLS US Anupam Sah (Moderator) Katherine Eremin, Angela Chang, Deborah Klimburg-Salter Co-sponsored by Harvard Art Museums and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai APRIL 26, 2022 THE WORLD OF COLOR: WHAT PIGMENT ANALYSIS REVEALS Anupam Sah (Moderator) Barbara H. Berrie Co-sponsored by Harvard Art Museums and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai

Mittal Institute Governance

The Mittal Institute’s donors, staff and Steering Committee members

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Year in Review 2021-22

Donor Spotlight: Kushagra Nayan Bajaj

Bajaj’s New Gift Expands Opportunities for South Asian Scholars The Mittal Institute is delighted to announce a new gift from Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, which significantly expands opportunities for inquiry and exchange on questions critical to South Asia.

W

ith this gift, the Mittal Institute has launched the Jamnalal Kaniram Bajaj Trust Visiting Research Fellowship. Leading scholars from South Asia will have the opportunity to spend a semester on the Harvard campus, engaging with faculty, researchers and students and availing of the university’s vast resources.

Bajaj, a member of the Mittal Institute’s Advisory Council, is Chairman of India’s Bajaj Group, Chairman and Managing Director of Bajaj Hindusthan Limited and Chairman of Bajaj Corp Limited.

He has studied at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and received his master’s degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In 2007, he received the Young Achiever award from the jury of the 10th Rajiv Gandhi Awards.

In 2011, he was nominated for the Indian government’s prestigious Padma Shri award.

The Mittal Institute spoke with Mr. Bajaj to learn more about his background, his motivations for this gift, and what he hopes it will bring to South Asia.

Mittal Institute: Mr. Bajaj, what inspired you to support the creation of this fellowship at MI? Kushagra Nayan Bajaj: I’ve grown up in an environment that placed supreme emphasis on learning, education and knowledge. Right since childhood, it was ingrained in us that true education can transform not only your own life, but also that of millions around you. I’m a beneficiary of such education myself, so I’m aware of what it can do. The fellowships have been set up with an objective

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of encouraging and supporting scholarship and research of the kind that India and its fellow countries in South Asia today require to prosper and be more meaningful to humanity, not only in their countries but the world over.

Mittal Institute: Why did you choose Harvard and the Mittal Institute?

Kushagra Nayan Bajaj: I like the work both entities are doing. It’s admirable what they are doing to disseminate knowledge, build capacity, inspire policy and engage with issues that are shaping India and this part of the world—home to not only one fourth of the world population but also to issues and challenges of the kind not seen in the other parts of the world. This, as I’ve said earlier, is a subject very close to my heart.

Mittal Institute: How do you hope this fellowship will strengthen opportunities for some of India’s leading scholars?

Kushagra Nayan Bajaj: India has talent, intellectual capital, scholars and scholarship in abundance. What it doesn’t have, perhaps, is an organized structure to support these at a large scale. Fellowships, I believe, are a good way of bridging the gap to an extent.

Year in Review 2021-22

Mittal Institute: What impact do you hope the fellowships will have?

Kushagra Nayan Bajaj: I sincerely hope the fellowships are able to provide the necessary encouragement and support to scholarship and research that India and fellow nations in this part of the world need today to become more meaningful, not only to themselves but to the world at large. India, for instance, in the last few years under the current political leadership has been striving to rediscover its glorious historical heritage and its several elements, like art and culture. I haven’t seen such an awakening in the past. It’ll be so good if we are able to get the whole world visiting us to see us, our glorious past, and go back feeling richer.

The Jamnalal Kaniram Bajaj Trust Visiting Research Fellowship officially opened for applications this past fall, and, with a highly qualified application pool, the selection committee chose Khayati Tripathi as the Institute’s first Bajaj fellow. Khayati’s research focuses on topics relating to the social status of death workers and executioners in India. She will be mentored by Professor Parimal Patil and will be in residence at the Mittal Institute for a semester, beginning Fall 2022.

Statement of Activities LMSAI Cambridge Headquarters FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED JUNE 30

Income + Balances Forward: Balances Forward

FY 2021 $

1,085,914

FY 2022 (Projected) $

1,489,929

FY 2023 (Projected) $

1,608,049

1,347,477

1,336,021

1,467,155

350,000

350,000

350,000

22,954

51,100

2,783,391

3,198,904

3,476,304

** Faculty Research, Fellows and Students

387,443

478,018

679,678

Programs, Events and Outreach

222,152

321,191

291,561

656,261

763,500

877,421

27,606

28,146

25,504

1,293,462

1,590,855

1,874,164

$ 1,489,929

$ 1,608,049

$ 1,602,140

Current-Use Gifts and Endowment Income Provost support Sponsored and HU internal awards Total Income + Balances Forward

Expenses:

Program support, Communication and Admin Administrative Fees (FAS 15% Gift Assessment Fee) Total Expenses

Net Operating (Deficit)/Surplus

** The Mittal Institute awarded the largest class of faculty grant recipients in Institute history. Winning projects focused on issues in South Asia ranging from climate change to STEM education, disaster response to architecture. Twenty-nine student grants were awarded for Winter 2021, Summer 2022 and the Seed for Change Competition, providing Harvard undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to pursue internships at news outlets, study advanced Classical Tibetan and research stories of Sri Lankan Tamil migrants to the United States. In FY22 the inaugural cohort of Mittal Institute India Fellows arrived in New Delhi. This new opportunity supports outstanding postdoctoral scholars in continuing their research out of the Delhi office.

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LMSAI New Delhi Office FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED MARCH 31

Income + Balances Forward: Balances Forward

FY 2020 $

35,183

$

FY 2021

FY 2022 (Projected)

205,975

$ 249,877

Current-Use Gifts Income

890,383

367,976

510,000

Total Income + Balances Forward

925,566

573,951

759,877

345,826

166,231

286,576

26,872

17,483

85,663

Program support, Communication and Admin

234,928

108,485

197,879

Administrative Fees (Harvard FAS & Harvard Global)

111,965

31,875

85,517

Total Expenses

719,591

324,074

655,635

$ 205,975

$ 249,877

$ 104,242

Expenses: ** Faculty Research, Fellows and Students Programs, Events and Outreach

Net Operating (Deficit)/Surplus

NOTE: Exchange Rate: US$1 = 70 INR (Indian Rupee)

Year in Review 2021-22

Administration EXECUTIVE COUNCIL The Mittal Family (UK) KP Balaraj, MBA ’97 (India) and Sumir Chadha, MBA ’97 (USA), Chairs, Advisory Council Dipti Mathur (USA), Chair, Arts Council Tarun Khanna (USA), Faculty Director, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute

ADVISORY COUNCIL

ARTS COUNCIL

Chairs: KP Balaraj, MBA ’97 (India); Sumir Chadha, MBA ’97 (USA)

Faculty Director: Jinah Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of ­Indian and South Asian Art, Harvard University (USA) Chair: Dipti Mathur (USA) Arts Program Advisors: Shanay Jhaveri (USA) Meena Sonea Hewett (USA)

The Mittal Family (UK) Syed Babar Ali, AMP ’73 (Pakistan) Kushagra Nayan Bajaj (India) Lucinda Bhavsar MBA ’97 (USA) Kuntala Das and Bharat Das ’08, s/o late Purandar Das (USA) Mark Fuller ’75, MBA ’78, JD ’79, and Jo Froman (USA) Meera Gandhi (USA) Vikram Gandhi, MBA ’89, ExEd ’00 (USA/India) Mala Haarmann ’91, MBA ’96 (UK) Rajiv Kothari OPM '14 (USA) Anuradha and Anand Mahindra ’77, MBA ’81 (India) Dipti Mathur (USA) Karen ’82, and Sanjeev Mehra ’82, MBA ’86 (USA) Victor Menezes (USA) Chandrika and Dalip Pathak (UK) Chandni and Mukesh Prasad ’93 (USA) Sribala Subramanian and Arvind Raghunathan (USA) Rajiv and Anupa Sahney (India) Vimal MBA ’02 and Punyashree Shah (USA) Vijay Shekhar Sharma (India) Parul and Gaurav Swarup, MBA ’80 (India) Tom Varkey, MBA ’97 (USA) Osman Khalid Waheed ’93 (Pakistan) Arshad Zakaria ’85, MBA ’87 (USA)

Archan Basu ’93 and Madeline Jie Wang ’97 (USA) Poonam Bhagat (India) Anurag Bhargava (India/USA) Radhika Chopra, MPP ’96 (India) Sunil Hirani (USA) Chandrika Pathak (UK/India) Pinky and Sanjay Reddy (India) Omar Saeed (Pakistan) Sana Rezwan Sait (USA) Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani (Bangladesh) Shilpa Sanger (USA) Osman Khalid Waheed ’93 (Pakistan)

FRIENDS OF THE INSTITUTE Nadeem Elahi, MBA ’01 (Pakistan) Namita Luthra and Anil Shrivastava AB '90, MBA '96 (USA) Usha and Diaz Neesamoney (USA) Anwarul Quadir Foundation (USA)

INDIA ADVISORY BOARD The Mittal Family (UK) Gobind Akoi, GMP ’10 (India) KP Balaraj, MBA ’97 (India) Sumir Chadha, MBA ’97 (USA) Radhika Chopra, MPP ’96 and Rajan Anandan (India) The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

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FACULTY CABINET Chair: Tarun Khanna, Faculty Director; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jacqueline Bhabha, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Lecturer in Law, Harvard Law School; Adjunct Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School Martha Chen, Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School Asim Khwaja, Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development, Harvard Kennedy School Jinah Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art, Harvard University Jennifer Leaning, Senior Research Fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights; Professor of the Practice at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health

Studies; Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Harvard University Satchit Balsari, Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center David Bloom, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Member of the Faculty of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School Durba Mitra, Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor, Radcliffe Institute; Assistant Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health Parimal G. Patil, Professor of Religion and Indian Philosophy, Committee on the Study of Religion; Chair of the Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University Ajay Singh, Senior Associate Dean for Postgraduate Medical Education, Harvard Medical School; Director, Master in Medical Sciences in Clinical Investigation (MMSCI) Program

Rahul Mehrotra, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and in African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Venkatesh Murthy, Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University

Pawan Sinha, Professor of Vision and Computational Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Vikram Patel, The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health, Harvard Medical School

Milind Tambe Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Research in Computation and Society (CRCS), Harvard University

Kristen A. Stilt, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School Conor Walsh, Paul A. Maeder Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, John A. Paulson Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

FACULTY STEERING COMMITTEE * includes members of Cabinet Ali Asani, Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Year in Review 2021-22

Ashutosh Varshney Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science, Brown University; Director, Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University Muhammad H. Zaman Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering and International Health, Boston University

MITTAL INSTITUTE ADMINISTRATION Tarun Khanna, Faculty Director; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School Hitesh M. Hathi, Executive Director Mirela Vaso, Director of Finance and Administration

CAMBRIDGE Shubhangi Bhadada, Project and Research Director, Lancet Citizens’ Commission Carlin Carr, Communications Manager Ahva Davis-Shiva, Financial Associate Neha B. Joseph, Research Fellow Selmon Rafey, Program Manager Sneha Shrestha, Arts Program Manager Danielle Wallner, Programs and Administrative Coordinator Affiliates Sarah Banse, Associate Aakrity Madhan, Student Intern Kellie Nault, Writer/Editor Aeshna Prasad, Student Intern

IN-REGION India Pooja Gupta, Communications Director, Lancet Citizens’ ­Commission Sweekruthi Kaveripatnam, Program Manager, Scienspur Sushma Mehta, Grant and Finance Manager Taamra Segal, Communications and Outreach Manager Namita Varma, Program Coordinator Pakistan Mariam Chughtai, Pakistan Programs Director Nepal Pukar Malla, Nepal Programs Director

The Mittal Institute is grateful for the work and dedication of former staff members: Maryam Mirza Alivandi, Financial Associate Karen Christopher, Financial Associate Chelsea Ferrell, Associate Director Sarah Gordon, Director of Finance and Administration Meena Sonea Hewett, Executive Director Sanjay Kumar, India Country Director Kathryn Maldonis, Senior Financial Associate Farhana Siddiqui, Administrative Assistant The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

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Year in Review 2021-22

IMAGE CREDITS: Asia Society (p. 27); Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) Museum (p. 33); Jesse Costa (p. 10); Harvard Art Museums (p. 75); Harvard Ash Center (p. 54); Nusrat Jahan Mim (pp. 49-51); Tina Liu (p. 65); Gauri Nagpal (p. 53); Oishik Sircar (p.

74); Shutterstock (pp. 8, 12-15, 44, 68, 70-75); Kris Snibbe / Harvard Gazette (p. 10); Doris Sommer (p. 31).

Selmon Rafey, Taamra Segal.

CGIS South, 4th Floor, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA B- 43, Middle Circle, Connaught Place, New Delhi - 110001, India Lahore University of Management Sciences, DHA, Lahore Cantt. 54792, Lahore, Pakistan https://mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu/