This year, I joined IGI as the first Faculty Director of South Asian Studies (SAS). Since 1983, South Asian studies has been housed within the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (CSAMES). Recently, interest and capacity on campus has grown in both regions. My job, therefore, consists of two equally important parts: increasing South Asian visibility and engagement on campus and working towards creating a Center for South Asian Studies.

For several decades now, the time has been ripe for a forceful effort behind the formation of a Center for South Asian Studies. In terms of campus population, South Asian presence is substantial. Between 2000 and 2023, the South Asian student population on the Urbana-Champaign campus has increased 6.5 times, from less than 400 to 2600. (See figure 1.) Three South Asian nations—India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—have featured consistently in the top 10 for all international students. India alone occupies the second position, behind China. And this does not even include American students of South Asian origin. There are half a dozen RSOs directly associated with South Asian cultures, and a few among them hold raucously popular events every year. South Asian alumni form a veritable list of who’s who. The combined contribution of South Asian faculty and alumni to various fields of knowledge—ranging from agriculture and computer science to economics, literature, or cinema—would be the envy of any institution.

All the above could help build an area studies center only when complemented by a robust network of courses directly related to South Asia. It is to the benefit of the university to add more humanities and social sciences courses, specifically in South Asian languages and literature, which we hope to do. South Asia is not only a region of strategic importance, but also home to a quarter of the world population, the world’s most populous democracy, and possessing incomparable diversity in terms of language, religion, and every other aspect of culture. The flagship university campus of Illinois has the capacity to attract more faculty and offer more courses related to South Asia. As someone who teaches the largest undergraduate course on Indian cinema in North America—CWL/MACS 207, enrolling 300 students every Spring—I can confidently say that “If we build it, they will come!”

With that in mind, I am assembling a plan to lay the foundations for teaching more South Asian languages in addition to the ones already offered, Hindi and Urdu. We will begin with Sanskrit and Bengali (Bangla), where I plan on building an infrastructure for these languages, with the help of computational tool and methods. My interest and training in computer science—as a second discipline—is helping me guide the process. One of the projects begun this year is South Asian Languages, Images, and Data Lab (SALIDlab, see figure 2.), which will work as an overarching structure for various computational and critical research. I am also collaborating with Dr. Mithilesh Mishra, the director of Hindi Studies, to extend the reach of Hindi-Urdu training beyond the semesters’ structure. With time and resources, it will be possible to make Illinois the hub of training and research in Sanskrit, Hindi/Urdu, and Bangla. Once that goal is achieved, our methods could be repurposed to encompass a wider variety of languages, such as Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, etc. The strategy behind using a laboratory-like structure is to pull together interdisciplinary resources for the purpose of innovation in language instruction.

Along with offering the SALIDlab, we have a full calendar of events this year. We have introduced Friday Talks @11 (link), with four scheduled talks in fall ’24 and spring ’25, a comics drawing workshop by an award-winning artist on November 6, the Tagore Festival on December 7, and an India Studies Lecture in spring.

Please check the CSAMES website (tab to South Asian Studies Initiative) frequently, and feel free to reach out to me (rbhttchr@illinois.edu) or my graduate assistant Ragini Chakraborty (raginic2@illinois.edu). We are looking forward to an exciting future for South Asian Studies at Illinois. We hope to see you at our events!

Rini Mehta