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Indian Students: Innovation and Quality of Life Are Still a Draw
Minister of Urban Affairs Jaipal Reddy and Union Minister of Panchayats (district councils) Mani
Shankar Aiyar. A second program in September 2009, will focused on India’s legal and judicial
system and featured leading Indian jurists.
At present, Berkeley funds three academic chairs directly related to India:
• The Chair in Tamil Studies was established in November 1997, with support from the
Tamil-American community, to help preserve Tamil language and literature in the U.S.
• The Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies grew out of a community
initiative in 1990–91 and was inaugurated with guest lecturers Nobel laureate physicist
S. Chandhrasekhar and former U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith. Past
holders of the chair have included economist Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri, political scientist
Subrata Mitra, environmentalist Ramachandhra Guha, and literary critic Meenakshi
Mukherjee. The permanent chair since 2001 has been political science professor Pradeep
Chhibber, who has written extensively on political party structure, property rights, foreign
investment and political participation by women in India.
• The Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies was established in 1996 by Thomas Kailash
with Vinita and Narenda Gupta. Dr. Kailash is Hitachi America Professor of Engineering
at Stanford, and he and Dr. Narenda Gupta founded Santa Clara-based Integrated
Systems, Inc., a design tool and operating system software developer. Vinita Gupta runs
her own telecommunications company, Digital Link, Inc., in Sunnyvale. Sociology professor
Raka Ray, who also heads Berkeley’s Center for South Asia Studies (CSAS),
currently holds the chair.
Berkeley also has multiple privately funded programs related to India:
• The Amrit Kaur Ahluwalia Memorial Grant Program was founded in 2000, with support
from Dr. Joginder Singh Ahluwalia and family, to provide graduate summer research
grants in Sikh studies.
• The Berkeley Bengali Initiative began in 2003 to promote Bengali language and cultural
studies, as well as training for scholars, development experts, and NGO activists to conduct
research in and about West Bengal.
• The Rajendranath Das Lecture in Bengali, an annual lecture by a Bengali scholar, has
been created by retired physicist Dr. Satyendranath Das.
• The Bhandari Program on Indian Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley was launched in
late 2007, with funding from the Bhandari Foundation, to document the achievements
of the Indian diaspora in Silicon Valley. It was initiated in 1994 by Aspen Semiconductor
founder and venture capitalist Narpat Bhandari, and his wife, Chandra, an educator.
• The Berkeley Telugu Initiative, begun in late 2007 with gifts from the community,
launched with a beginner level Telugu language course.
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