India Rising: Tradition Meets Modernity
Dilip K. Basu is Founding Director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center and Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches Chinese and Indian history. Dilip K. Basu took his PhD at UC Berkeley. The Archives and Study Center on Satyajit Ray (Ray FASC) is now in its fifteenth year at UC Santa Cruz. He also worked to establish an innovative, culturally focused South Asia Studies Center at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC).
Professor Basu had a moderate role in the international effort that led to the Lifetime Achievement Special Oscar awarded to Satyajit Ray in 1992. With an initial grant from the Academy of Motion Pictures Archives, Basu organized the Ray FASC at UCSC and the Ray Society in Calcutta. With the cooperation of the two organizations, Basu coordinates the restoration and preservation of Ray's films at the Academy of Motion Pictures Archives in Los Angeles.
To date, out of Ray's 37-film oeuvre, 13 have been fully restored. The Academy will pay for the restoration costs of the rest of the Ray films. Restored film elements are preserved at the Academy's vault (a vault in Calcutta is yet to be built). Professor Basu’s publications include Women in Satyajit Ray's Cinema. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming; Satyajit Ray: The Oscar Story, ed. Santa Cruz: University of California, Ray Film and Study Collection, 1998; A Troubled Vision: Satyajit Ray's India, 1997 (video). Satyajit Ray: Preserving a Luminous Legacy, 1996. (video).
Santhi Kavuri-Bauer is Assistant Professor of Art History in the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. Her PhD is from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarly research focuses on the preservation and representation of South Asian architectural monuments, on issues of artistic agency, the intersection of modernist aesthetics in the colonial and postcolonial world, and the visual culture of contemporary Asia. She teaches the arts of Asia (India, China, and Japan), the Islamic world, as well as Asian American Art, focusing on the relationship of art to the social, political, and religious contexts that lend it meaning.
Born and raised in New Delhi, Vikram Chandra attended Film School at Columbia University in New York, where he was inspired to write his first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain; it won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize. He has also written the short story collection Love and Longing in Bombay, for which he won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His most recent book, the celebrated Sacred Games (2007), has been called "a great novel, perhaps the greatest book on Bombay ever written" (Hindustan Times). His work has been translated into 15 languages. He is also the winner of the Hutch Crossword Prize, a Salon.com Book Award, and the Paris Review Discovery Prize. He currently divides his time between Mumbai (Bombay) and Berkeley, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.
Dard Neuman, Kamil and Talat Hasan Endowed Chair in
Classical Indian Music at University of California Santa Cruz, specializes in North Indian Classical music and is
traditionally trained as a performer on the sitar. As an anthropologist-ethnomusicologist
he is interested in colonialism, nationalism, and technology and performance. He
teaches sitar as well as a survey course on Indian music (both South and North
Indian). He received his PhD in North Indian Classical music from Columbia
University in 2004.
Raka Ray, Sarah Kailath Chair in Indian Studies, is Associate Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asia Studies, and Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She grew up in Calcutta, India, but has moved steadily west since then, receiving her AB from Bryn Mawr College, and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has been at Berkeley since 1993. Her areas of specialization are gender and feminist theory, domination and inequality, cultures of servitude and social movements. Publications on social movements include Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India (University of Minnesota, 1999; and in India, Kali for Women, 2000), "Women's Movements in the Third World: Identity, Mobilization and Autonomy" with Anna Korteweg (Annual Review of Sociology, 1999) and Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics, co-edited with Mary Katzenstein (Rowman and Littlefeld, 2005). She is at present writing a book titled Cultures of Servitude: The Making of a Middle Class in Calcutta and New York with co-author Seemin Qayum.
Diplomat, Writer, and Chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Shashi Tharoor was the official candidate of India for the succession to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006. He served at the UN from 1978 to 2007, initially on the staff of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. He had key responsibilities in peace-keeping after the Cold War and as a senior adviser to the Secretary-General as well as the UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information.
He is an award-winning author of ten books and hundreds of articles, op-eds and book reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek and The Times of India among others. He is a Contributing Editor and occasional columnist for Newsweek International and has regular columns in The Hindu and The Times of India. His non-fiction books include Reasons of State (1981); India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997); Kerala: God’s Own Country (2002) with text by Tharoor and paintings by M.F. Husain; Nehru: The Invention of India (2003); Bookless in Baghdad (2005); The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century (2007). His fiction includes The Great Indian Novel (1989), Riot (2001), Show Business (1992) (since made into the movie "Bollywood"), and a collection of short stories, The Five-Dollar Smile (1990). His books have been widely translated.
Born in London, he was educated in India and the US, completing a PhD at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he received the Robert B. Stewart Prize for Best Student. There he helped found and was the first Editor of the Fletcher Forum of International Affairs. He awards include an honorary D.Litt. from the University of Puget Sound, a 1998 "Global Leader of Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and India’s highest honor for Overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, in 2004. He serves on the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the Board of Trustees of the Aspen Institute, and the Advisory Boards of the Indo-American Arts Council, the American India Foundation, the World Policy Journal, the Virtue Foundation and the human rights organization Breakthrough. Dr Tharoor has been appointed as an International Adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (2008-2011) and is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities and Patron of the Modern School, Dubai.
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