South Asian women lag behind men in literacy, workforce participation, reproductive rights and most other areas. Yet the region? March suggests the success of women leaders in India, Pakistan and other South Asian countries may be related to their family lineage. Shikha Bhatnagar, Associate Director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council agrees, saying leaders like the late Pakistani politician, Benazir Bhutto, former Indian prime minister, Indira Ghandi, and the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, are all connected to powerful men and powerful families, which may have helped push them to leadership roles. India, the world's largest democracy and a globalization hub, trails many of its South Asian neighboring in women's political representation, literacy and labor participation. Brandeis University's Harleen Singh, Professor of South Asian Literature, and Women and Gender Studies, says part of the problem is that South Asia women symbolize both a cherished culture and the fear of losing traditional patriarchal controls to modernization.


South Asian Art and Culture



The Indus Civilization: Unfathomed Depths of South Asian Culture
All rights reserved. The stand-up comic Hari Kondabolu, who is Indian American, had just finished telling a joke about being brown in America when the laughter was interrupted. The phrase is instantly recognizable to millions of fans of The Simpsons television show as the signature utterance of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, who is portrayed unabashedly as a racial stereotype: the thrifty, borderline unscrupulous, and somewhat servile Indian convenience store owner. To Kondabolu, those words at a show in October were even more familiar.


What Is South Asia?
Key faculty members with a focus on South Asian art have been integral to building this program. Professor Williams supervised and trained a generation of scholars whose work has focused on a range of topics, from Khmer temples to modernism in Indian art, from stone portrait sculptures of the Pallavas and the Cholas to Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts. During her tenure, Professor Williams was not only conversant with the visual cultures of North and South India and even Sri Lanka , but she was one of the few Asian art historians who was able to link the two vast regions of South and Southeast Asia in her work.

Originally designed in the s to support the New York State 9thth grade Global History requirement, the themes are designed to provide an infrastructure for the myriad facts and dates encountered in studying the long histories of the East Asian countries. The themes are reprinted here for educators seeking new perspectives to bring to bear on the individual histories of each of the East Asian countries — China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam — and of South and Southeast Asia also. These "central themes" are distinctive, and recurrent, so that they are touched on again and again under different categories, until a portrait of cultural difference is accumulated. Of the many possible themes, six are suggested here as illustrative of South Asian culture and its relation to the world:. The ever-evolving South Asian civilization has as its sources indigenous elements of prehistoric origin and elements borrowed from the cultures represented by successive waves of invaders over more than four millennia.