Recycled rainwater and gender divides in education took center stage Sept. 26 and Oct. 10 as the Brown-India Initiative undergraduate and graduate fellows gave presentations on their summer projects. The panels were held in the McKinney Conference Room at the Watson Institute for International Studies.
The Brown-India Initiative awarded $92,000 to students and faculty to conduct research in India this summer and to “participate as active members of the India Initiative seminars” throughout the year, according to the initiative’s website.
Seven undergraduates, six graduate students and two faculty members received fellowships sponsored by the initiative, according to its website.
“Our goal is to give our students a systematic, intellectual exposure to India,” said Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Brown-India Initiative and professor of international studies and political science, adding that in many cases, the students also had the opportunity to gain important insights into Indian culture.
Given that the United States and India are interlocked through trade and investment, fostering a warm relationship between the two large countries is beneficial for both parties, said Somanahalli Mallaiah Krishna, India’s former minister of external affairs, at the inauguration of the Brown-India Initiative, The Herald previously reported. The Initiative’s goals are to explore India’s history and current political and social climate, as well as strengthen the partnership between India and the United States, he said. Founded in fall 2012, the Brown-India Initiative is run through the Watson Institute for International Studies.
The Brown-India Initiative’s mission is to create dialogue and research surrounding contemporary India, and examine these issues by melding information from a broad spectrum of disciplines. Undergraduates who received fellowships this year are pursuing concentrations in disciplines including international relations, history, mathematical economics and civil engineering.
Questions of Education
Steven Brownstone ’16, a former Herald contributing writer, said he spent the summer focusing on the “less tangible aspects of education” at middle schools in India, examining issues ranging from differences in gender roles to dropout rates. Working for the Aser Center in New Delhi, India, Brownstone interviewed students and analyzed statistical data as part of an ongoing project that seeks to improve the country’s educational programs.
The results of the research to which he contributed showed that tutoring seems to be highly effective when it comes to learning, he said, while private schools are less effective.
Brownstone also spoke about dropout rates among students. Boys who drop out say they’re looking for work, but in reality a lot of them are spending their time hanging out with friends and watching television, he said. But girls drop out of school to help take care of their families, he added.
When he talked to teachers in India, he also noticed surprising gender biases. When asked about their best students, many teachers responded that “girls are really the smartest and best workers,” he said.
While interviewing students, Brownstone noticed that it was hard to maintain privacy. “One person surrounded by 20 of their closest friends” does not lead to ideal questionnaire-taking situations, he said.
But Brownstone added that his presence was often so distracting to the surrounding children that they did not pay attention to the student taking the survey. This alleviated some of the peer pressure students may have otherwise felt that would have affected their answers, he said.
It was also hard to study more isolated communities in India because the surveyors who were conducting the interviews do not want to spend the night in the village, and transportation between the villages and cities was limited, he said.
Student Revolts
As communist ideology rose in West Bengal, India, during in the 1970s, many students began to leave school and join the communist movement — a moment of student activism that captivated Emilio Leanza ’15, a contributing writer for Post- Magazine.
While student activism in America and Europe is greatly covered in the history books, this activism in India receives little attention from scholars, Leanza said.
“What I find missing from books on student protests is: Who are the Naxalites?” he said. An assortment of communist guerilla groups that sprang up in the late 1960s in India, the Naxalites attracted students who wanted to radically change the government, Leanza said.
“From the beginning it wasn’t about seizure of land but about a movement to seize state power,” that drove the students to activism, he said.
To learn more about this movement, Leanza interviewed activists and other people associated with the movement. He also dug through historical records to string together the narratives he uncovered through his research into a cohesive history.
Many of the one-time student activists whom Leanza interviewed had a family member who was involved in Marxism, he said. “A lot of these students were being inspired by conversation with people next door to them,” he added.
Leanza said that through speaking with family members of some former activists, he discovered that, during the protests, there was a lot of “state oppression” and the police were given the “freedom to execute activists.”
Legacy of Partition
“When you see the words 1947 and South Asia, what do you think of?” asked Ria Mirchandani ’15 during her presentation.
Mirchandani’s question aimed to bring to mind the mass exodus that occurred during the partition of India when the British left and India, Pakistan and Bangladesh split into three separate countries. Hindus from Pakistan and Bangladesh fled to India, while Muslims in India escaped to Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Mirchandani and Rijuta Mehta GS each examined the impact of the partition on individuals and communities — Mirchandani through oral history and Parikh through photography.
Mirchandani interviewed partition survivors from an ethnic group native to Pakistan’s Sindh province that includes both Muslims and Hindus. She uploaded these interviews onto a website to create a public record of their experiences.
In addition to an academic interest in the area, Mirchandani has a personal connection to the region, as her grandparents are Sindhis who fled to India after the partition, Mirchandani said.
As she travelled throughout India and interviewed members of Sindhi communities, Mirchandani said she noticed that in some places hatred was being “inherited by future generations.”
Mehta, a student in Modern Culture and Media, analyzed photographs taken before and after the partition of India in a work she titled “The Partition Photography Project.”
Mehta examined a wide array of photos. “If I found images that were visually similar, I organized them together.”
Through her studies, she noticed how photography played a part in the movement of people at the time as authorities used photographs to identify people.
The photographs could also provide evidence that could either support or counter accepted historical records, she said.
Many of the photographs she analyzed contained captions that counter the photo’s contents, she said, citing as an example a photo of a Mosque after an altercation between armed Indian police and Muslim fighters bearing weapons. The caption noted that the fighters were firing from within the mosque, but in the photo, the mosque clearly remains intact without any hole or damage from a fire fight.
Another photo showed police tossing out people’s belongings as trash, but the caption read that the police were properly storing them.
Preserving the Past
Anar Parikh GS, who studies anthropology, explored urban heritage preservation projects that seek to bridge the gap between the old and the new in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. The city hopes to be recognized by the United Nations as a world heritage city, Parikh said.
Ahmedabad is divided into an old city and a new city. The old city used to be the center of life in Ahmedabad until the 20th century, but “since the mid to late 20th century, there has been a mass exodus ... to the new city,” she said.
Residents want to cultivate a coherent narrative for the city, Parikh said. “Ahmedabad is very interested in preservation,” she said, noting that the Times of India maintains a regular beat in its local edition that explores the city’s heritage preservation efforts.
One project the city is undertaking is a daily heritage walk sponsored by the government. The walk aims to put less emphasis on the bigger, tourist sites and focus more on the city’s less well-known sites, she added.
‘Rainwater for Humanity’
In Kerala, India, there is a lot of polluted water.
To address this problem, Daniella Flores ’15 and Samuel Lee ’15 founded their own NGO — Rainwater for Humanity — that seeks to provide technology to collect rainwater that can be used as a viable alternative to the polluted water, Flores said.
Flores and Lee partnered with an Indian-based NGO because it is hard for foreigners to start an NGO in India, Lee said.
The organization “finances tanks for (water) storage,” Lee said, adding that the government sets up the piping infrastructure to provide clean water.
“Unfortunately, more often than not, they don’t have water coming through them,” he said.
Politicians also use the promise of providing more water as a way to get more votes but do not always fulfill these promises, he said.
“We want to complement the government,” Lee said, adding that Rainwater for Humanity wants to work in concert with local organizations to best help citizens.
Flores’s interest in clean water delivery stem from her personal experience with water scarcity during her childhood in Cuba, according to her biography on Rainwater for Humanity’s website.
Flores and Lee will continue working on issues pertaining to rainwater collection throughout the school year.
Hurling Insults
The upper class in India frequently degrades the lower class purely by mispronouncing their names, said Bhawani Buswala GS, who studies anthropology.
Buswala’s research in India revolves around this phenomenon. He conducted his studies first-hand by living in communities and talking to locals. “This research is the result of my anthropological hangout there,” he said.
Buswala said people may change names by adding syllables but that sometimes this can change a name to have a more degrading meaning, he added, such as mutating a name to mean “begging.”
“Sometimes the names are changed to have no meaning,” he added. “It’s not just a mispronunciation of a name, it has a negative purpose.”
Not all name mispronunciations are insults, he noted. When an older person speaks to a younger person, sometimes the elder uses a different name out of affection, not insult. But when people from different classes communicate with each other, then changing the name becomes an insult, he said.
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