Tourist eyes, Harvard ties
By Ellen Gordon Reeves ’83, Ed.M ’86, HAA President 2011-2012

One of the things I try hard to do in life is to keep my tourist eyes wherever I am, at home as well as abroad. This week my tourist eyes have been wide open, traveling in India for alumni events marking Harvard’s 375th birthday and President Drew Faust’s inaugural visit to India.

I’ve seen elephants and camels alongside cars and scooters, trucks overflowing with hay hurtling at us head-on in the wrong lane, then somehow disappearing with the honking of many horns. I have ridden rickshaws in a melee of human and animal traffic as thick and fluid as a school of fish — flowing around water buffalo, goats, cows and wild dogs —  while monkeys leap overhead. I have seen palaces and temples, met a Maharana, and witnessed the cliché of wealth and poverty of extraordinary proportions. 

I have seen many things being made, from papadums and sandals, to dhurries being woven in the dust of the desert. A lot of work is done in India; work we hear about when we glibly talk about globalization, but work we never see. Once you glimpse mounds of pen cartridges being stripped and recycled in the astonishing ecosystem that is the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, you will never hold a pen the same way again.

Through it all, I have never been prouder to be associated with Harvard, as I have begun to learn how much our alumni, faculty, and students across the University are doing in India, in arts and education, public health, entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, from the South Asian Initiative to students from the Graduate School of Design, who do projects ranging from redeveloping Mumbai’s port to creating text messaging systems that help expectant mothers remember doctors’ appointments.

These are but some of the examples President Faust shared as she addressed alumni in Mumbai and New Delhi, and here’s where my tourist eyes turned “homeward,” suddenly able to see something familiar in an entirely new light. I frequently have the opportunity to hear President Faust speak at home, and I hear about things Harvard is doing on a daily basis, but I have never heard the president speak abroad. Like so many of our alumni in India, I, too, was able to re-experience her vision, intelligence, warmth, and eloquence as if for the first time, as she outlined Harvard’s role in India as well as India’s presence at Harvard.

It’s easy to forget what an extraordinary influence Harvard and its president have on the world until you see it first-hand and far away from home. President Faust shared some numbers and history: I never knew we have 225 students enrolled from India, apparently the fourth-largest national contingent surpassing the U.K., a fact that elicited Harvard-beats-Yale-type applause from alumni in Mumbai and Delhi. I learned that of the seven presidents who have served Harvard over the past century, four of them visited India, including Charles Elliot, who managed to leave not his heart but his appendix there in 1912. I learned that Harvard’s first course in Sanskrit was introduced in 1872, that we have a concentration in South Asian studies, and that thanks to the generosity of the Murty family, Harvard University Press will be publishing some of the classics of Indian literature in nine Indian languages with English translation. The list goes on and on. Of course the most stunning and least surprising aspect was the generosity and hospitality of the Harvard Clubs and alumni who hosted the two events. I haven’t even left the country and I already can’t wait to go back. It seems India is alive and well at Harvard and Harvard is alive and well in India; I just never knew. 

Literature celebrated, history recalled
By Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of History

Winter is the season for celebrating literature, art, and music in India. There are fairs and festivals galore taking place across various cities. Of these, the five-day Jaipur Literature Festival that closed today has attracted a great deal of media attention. Salman Rushdie’s non-attendance and Oprah Winfrey’s appearance have grabbed the headlines. But much else happened at this literary and cultural extravaganza.

Harvard was well-represented at the festival. Steven Pinker expounded on his argument about the twentieth century being the least violent in history. Sharmila Sen was busy shepherding current and potential HUP authors as they navigated their way through the crowds that thronged the festival venue. The festival co-director William Dalrymple engaged Ayesha Jalal in a conversation on her book Partisans of Allah, published by Harvard University Press. I spoke about my new book, His Majesty’s Opponent, on a panel with Joseph Lelyveld, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Peter Popham, and David Remnick. The connection between private and public lives as well as the differences between historians’ and journalists’ biographies formed the subject matter of discussion among the biographers of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, Josef Stalin, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Barack Obama.

Indian audiences responded warmly to Pakistani authors. In fact, a panel on Pakistan drew as large a response as a parallel session featuring Oprah. At the Kolkata Literary Festival that preceded the one in Jaipur, Pakistani and Chinese literature featured prominently. The Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah recited the poetry of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose birth centenary was celebrated with great fanfare in Kolkata’s town hall. I held a public conversation with the Chinese novelist Bi Feiyu, who had won the Man Asian Literary Prize for his book Three Sisters.

After taking part in festivities in Kolkata, I arrived in Delhi to spend a memorable morning with Drew Faust, the historian. We visited the Red Fort Complex, the ultimate symbol of sovereignty in India since the time of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. It was here that the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was put on trial after the British had crushed the 1857 rebellion. He was deported to Burma, where he spent the last few years of his life. At a second Red Fort trial in 1945, three officers of the Indian National Army — a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh — were charged with waging war against the British king-emperor. They too were sentenced to deportation for life, but were released immediately under intense public pressure. A monument to the rise and fall of empires, the Red Fort continues to be an important part of the symbolism associated with the Indian republic — another republic of suffering, but also of immense hope for a better future.

Faust talks public health

In 2006, Harvard University and the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), a public-private initiative created to improve public health capacity, signed an agreement to encourage the cultivation of educational and research collaborations and programs.

President Faust spent Monday morning meeting with Srinath Reddy, president of PHFI and the Bernard Lown Visiting Professor of Cardiovascular Health in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), as well as N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder-chairman of Infosys and newly elected chairman of the PHFI board, and other senior PHFI leadership. 

The discussion focused on the continuing challenges to meeting India’s health care needs related to financing, information systems, infrastructure, and governance. Reddy presented data on India’s health indicators, showing that India remained behind the other BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, and China) in several categories, including immunization rates and infant and maternal mortality rates.

Faust noted that areas of public health and global health are nodes of activity that involve faculty from across the University — HSPH, Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard Global Health Institute. She also noted the growing interest from Harvard students in these fields.

The conversation concluded with a dialogue about ways to strengthen the existing relationship between Harvard and PHFI and a discussion of the upcoming visit to India later this spring by HSPH Dean Julio Frenk.