Key takeaways
In Kathmandu, students conducted small-scale independent ethnographic research. They were also taken on guided excursions to interact with experts on themes such as migration and ethnic nationalism, legislation on sex work, urban art-making as political critique, and art in relation to feminism. The experts who guided the group largely came from marginalized communities, which granted the students opportunities to learn from members of these communities in ways that differed from their past academic training – as scholars and experts rather than merely groups or subject positions to be read about and “studied”.
In Kathmandu, students conducted small-scale independent ethnographic research. They were also taken on guided excursions to interact with experts on themes such as migration and ethnic nationalism, legislation on sex work, urban art-making as political critique, and art in relation to feminism. The experts who guided the group largely came from marginalized communities, which granted the students opportunities to learn from members of these communities in ways that differed from their past academic training – as scholars and experts rather than merely groups or subject positions to be read about and “studied”.
South Asian Intersections comprised a week of online workshops followed by a 10-day ethnographic summer school in Kathmandu, Nepal, in June 2022. Bringing together scholars, practitioners, as well as BA and MA students from Switzerland, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and Nepal, the program was designed to counter two tendencies in South Asian Studies: first, a tendency to look at South Asia as a cluster of discrete nation-states, such that striking overlaps –as well as divergences – in the trajectories of caste, religion, gender and feminisms, nationalisms and other social formations across national borders are left underexplored. Second, a tendency to centralize India, with the result that even when academic courses are meant to address “South Asia,” the theoretical and conceptual lenses pertaining to India are applied to the region as a whole.
In this context, the program sought to bring together students and scholars from across South Asian countries to collectively explore parallels and differences in scholarship as well as everyday life experience. The project was particularly invested in bringing together students from South Asia in South Asia for an academic exchange –something that seldom happens due to geopolitical restrictions, whereby Pakistani students, in particular, are restricted from going to India, and vice versa. Through this short-term intellectual engagement, the program sought to have an impact in the longue durée by exposing social science students early in their training to alternative regional models for an ethnographic scholarship, that is, to foster cross-regional (North-South and South-South) perspectives, research projects, networks, and collaborations.
The project was made possible by funding from the Leading House South Asia and Iran, as well as from ISEK -Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zürich. Support from the Leading House was particularly invaluable in enabling the format of the program, which tweaked the format of the more traditional ethnographic summer school, firstly by pairing a multi-generational academic conference with the summer school, and secondly by bringing together students from the global North and South for joint ethnographic explorations, rather than taking students from the global North to “study” the global South.
Originally, South Asian Intersections was set to take place in Colombo, Sri Lanka, not least because Sri Lanka has a special relevance to Switzerland – the latter is home to one of the largest Sri Lankan Tamil diasporas in the world. However, just one month before the program was scheduled to start, an economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka led to political violence, due to which the venue of the summer school was shifted to Nepal –like Sri Lanka, Nepal would grant entry to participants from Pakistan and India both.
The shift involved an array of logistical difficulties; however, ultimately, it offered participants a comparative perspective that was even more enriched and nuanced: Sri Lanka continued to be the geographical fulcrum of the online workshops, and Nepal became the site for the group’s ethnographic training – from an island nation with the longest history of colonization in South Asia to a landlocked, mountainous nation that was not formally colonized, yet experienced the effects of colonization in indirect ways –students were offered two different vantage points from which to consider South Asia, both of which, additionally, de-centered India.
In Kathmandu, students conducted small-scale independent ethnographic research. They were also taken on guided excursions to interact with experts on themes such as migration and ethnic nationalism, legislation on sex work, urban art-making as political critique, and art in relation to feminism. The experts who guided the group largely came from marginalized communities, which granted the students opportunities to learn from members of these communities in ways that differed from their past academic training – as scholars and experts rather than merely groups or subject-positions to be read about and “studied”.
Additionally, the cohort of students learnt from each other – for the Swiss students, exploring South Asia with South Asian students (as opposed to alternative summer school formats where students from Europe are more or less in homogenous groups, studying the destination region) provided exposure to other ways of being curious and posing inquiries about a place than they were inclined to. For example, Swiss students were more interested in Hindu and Buddhist religious practices In contrast, South Asian students raised more questions about labor, migration, and ethnicity, as these religious practices were less of a novelty to them. For South Asian students, the presence of Swiss students meant that comparisons to the Swiss and European contexts often came up, taking the discussion in different directions. Last but not least, by bringing South Asian students together, the summer school provided these students with an unusual academic experience in the context of their usual university training, where national curricula say very little about neighboring countries. These students are usually on a trajectory of going to Europe and America for higher education and then returning as “native” scholars to study their home countries with the tools and lenses provided by the global North. As intended by the organizers, the summer school brought together students early enough in their training to open up the notion of South Asia for them –visible in everyday discussions during the program, for instance, in the parallels that Pakistani and Sri Lankan students made between the political and economic conditions in their home countries.
Students formed close bonds with each other across nationalities and educational backgrounds and described the program as a life-changing experience. The Sinhala and Tamil students from Sri Lanka described speaking about and connecting over issues they had in their home country, due to a protracted political and ethnic conflict. Pakistani and Indian students spoke about connecting closely with each other, despite having been exposed to the other nation primarily through antagonistic and othering discourses based on stereotypes. The program thus succeeded in bringing together students who have been kept apart by legal, political and military regimes in their respective nations and, relatedly, by entrenched academic tendencies that center the nation, generating intellectual shifts for all participants.