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CASI Celebrates 20 Years

 

20th Anniversary Events
India: Two Decades of Transformation: CASI's 20th Anniversary Symposium
September 27, 2012

Symposium Agenda

Videos of Symposium

Media Coverage

Visiting Scholar Program Celebration in New Delhi (November 29-30, 2012)

In 2012, the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) celebrated its 20th anniversary! Founded in 1992 by Prof. Francine Frankel a year after India launched its historic economic reforms, CASI was the first academic research center in the United States for the study of contemporary India. Today, CASI is recognized as a national resource, addressing the urgent need for objective knowledge of India’s rapidly changing society, politics and economy, and the forces and processes behind them.

Now under the direction of Prof. Devesh Kapur, CASI further expands the University of Pennsylvania’s leadership on South Asian studies through its research focus on India’s economic transition, governance and politics, security and foreign policy, human capital, and media.

 

Penn’s South Asia Legacy
“We must remember that the students now passing through our educational machinery will live their effective lives during the second half of the twentieth century, and it takes no gift of prophesy to predict that at that time the world will include a vigorous India, possibly politically free, conceivably a dominant power in the Orient, and certainly intellectually vital and productive. How can Americans who have never met India in their educational experience be expected to live intelligently in such a world? Are we to wait until some cataclysm brought about in large part by our own ignorance and misunderstanding forces India on our attention? Or are we to plan our intellectual life so as to foresee the needs of the future?”

-W. Norman Brown, Founder of the first department of South Asian Studies in the U.S. at Penn, “India and Humanistic Studies in America” in American Council of Learned Societies Bulletin, 1939