The program has started! Here is the group posing in front of the beatiful banyan tree at Kalakshetra, the school for Carnatic music and Bharatnatyam dance in Chennai. You can see them all wearing traditional kurtas and salwars to fit in to the traditional feeling of the school.

After a weekend of airport pickups all accomplished with unending cool by our program assistant, Jamie Munro, we gathered in our apartment in Besant Nagar on Sunday for our first get together. It was a great relief to see everyone safe and sound in the same room after numerous delayed flights, missed connections, misplaced passports and the like! Toward the end we watched the Hindi film Lagaan to get some sense of history, music and of course, cricket!

We've been welcomed most warmly by the staff at Kalakshetra and at Women's Christian College, where we are having most of our lectures on religion, history and contemporary issues. Our basic schedule while we are in Chennai is for our WCC lectures to take place on Mondays and Wednesdays, and our time at Kalakshetra to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays are set aside for volunteer work at Aid India, and NGO that supports the Indian public schools. At Kalakshetra we have a routine of morning prayers under the banyan tree, followed by an hour-long Carnatic singing class. From there, the students split into separate lessons on dance, veena or mridangam. After having lunch with the students, they will receive instruction in some of the traditional Indian arts that are being preserved at the school.

On Tuesday night, we gathered at the Woodlands Hotel, our initial home, and saw everyone off to their homestays. The "parents" were all very exciting to meet the students and the students are learning about the diversity of India through the diversity of their individual homestay experiences. This is the first weekend that they get to spend unprogrammed time in their homes, and we look forward to hearing their stories when we all gather again on Monday.

Next week, we spend most of our classroom time on the Ramayana, the great Indian epic, led by Arshia Sattar whose translation we are all busy reading! She is making a special trip in from Bangalore to be with us next week. It will be a great opporunity to get to work with her. Our daily study of the Ramayana culminates with a vist to Pondicherry next Friday and a live performance of scenes from the epic, followed by visits to Auroville, the Sri Aurobindo ashram and, on the way home, the famous shore temple and rock carvings at Mahabalipuram.

All told, it's been a great first week!

Forrest
24 August 8PM

Pre-program travel and set-up

HELLO FROM INDIA!

(This is one of a series of photos we took above Mussoorie when we came across a tribe of Langours living in the trees. Wonderful, amazing creatures.)

Lynnell and I are beginning our fourth week in India. We are here to set up the So. Asia Study Abroad Program '07 and thus far have spent our time in Delhi and Mussoorie, our home bases when we lived here from 1987-1990. After Delhi we will move on to Dharamsala and Chennai.

In Delhi we worked with our overall program coordinator, Padma Swaminathan, on finding lodging for the students and ourselves.. Here we three are after our "power tea" meeting in front of the Taj Mahal Hotel.


After Delhi we took the overnight train to Dehra Dun and a taxi to Mussoorie. To the right is the classic look of the Landour Bazaar as seen from the area around the Landour Language School, where we studied Hindi for two weeks. Mussoorie snakes along a ridgetop of the mountain range that forms the first foothills of the Himalaya. Behind the person taking the picture are the snows of the highpeaks, currently hidden from view by the monsoon clouds. Between the snows and the town are the villages of the Garhwal Himalaya.

The program is coming together very well, all through the help of an ever-widening network of relationships and commitments. The intention of this year's program, broadly speaking, is for the group to touch aspects of the spiritual and artistic heart of "classical" India (still very much alive) while absorbing the realities of India in the 21st Century. To this end, the group will study Carnatic music and dance at Kalakshetra in Chennai, learn of the Ramayana and traditional Hindu belief and practice in the south, travel to ancient South Indian temples, study Buddhist history and practice in Dharamsala and gain experiences related to Islamic, Sufi and Sikh religious beliefs and practices in Dehli. They will also study North Indian music and dance in Delhi, all the while connecting to specific yoga and meditative traditions throughout the course of the program.

This religious and artistic study will live in relationship to study, lectures, visits and presentations by scholars and activists involving areas of contemporary politics, environmentalism, women's studies, caste/reservation, technological change, peace and conflict resolution and social inequalities.

The program will be rounded out with a reading of select novels and a study of aspects of Indian, especially Hindi, cinema, old and new. Students will study Hindi throughout the program and deepen in the language to the extent of their interest.

Thus it is hoped that the students in the group will have as varied an experience of "India" as is reasonable to expect in a 14-week program. We are structuring the program such that the students will gain knowledge that is a combination of spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, emotional and analytical understandings. The students will learn something of India, and also something more about themselves and the extraordinary breadth of the world in which they live.

Lynnell and I are planning to connect in specific ways to the intentions of the program by continuing our practice of yoga, by learning Vedic chanting in Chennai and in Delhi and by deepening our nascent training in Indian forms of musical expression and theory while also studying about and participating in the world of contemporary India. Only by committing to our own inner growth and increasing our own knowledge of India can we expect the students to make a similar commitment to this process.

India, 2007. An amazing place to be.

Forrest Tobey, Earlham College Assistant Professor of Music

Program Blog

This is the blog for the 2007 Earlham College South Asia Study Abroad Program. It will be updated periodically with program news and photos. It will also include a link to a Webshots account (not yet created) that will host more South Asia photos.