Academics are alarmed by changes at the premier Indian Institute of Advanced Study

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The Shimla institution is dedicated mainly to research, and all academic decisions – appointment of fellows, approval of seminars and conferences – are taken by an academic committee, chaired by the director and appointed through a selection committee and ratified by the Central government. At the committee’s last meeting on June 30, a proposal for a collaboration with the Los Angeles-based Dharma Civilisation Foundation was on the agenda. The foundation, with links to Hindutva groups both in America and India, had invited controversy in 2016 by attempting to establish four chairs at the University of California, Irvine. Several academics had resisted the attempt, arguing that these were religious chairs. The foundation’s members have also been involved in an attempt to alter California’s school textbooks to change the way Hindus are represented.
The foundation’s proposal was to “partner with the Indian Institute of Advanced Study to organise a series of workshops, symposia and seminars that will reinvigorate indigenous modes of inquiry and research into the traditions and culture that constitute India’s civilisation”. Its pitch note said the collaboration would also support study of the “ways in which Western frameworks and methods of inquiry limit and distort the understanding of India’s civilisation and culture”, and listed several discourses to be examined – “Enlightenment, Renaissance, Marxist, Freudian, Post-Colonial, Post-Modern, Sub-Altern, Feminist”.  [. . .]


https://scroll.in/article/886715/shimla-research-centres-proposed-collaboration-with-us-based-hindu-group-has-scholars-worried