Indira Gandhi at La Trobe University Library in 1968

The La Trobe Institute for India and South Asia (LIISA) provides a focus for the various activities undertaken by La Trobe University that relate to India and its South Asian neighbours – Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. At its birth in 1967, La Trobe University decided to make a commitment to the study of India and its neighbours. This was reflected in staff appointments and in purchases for the Borchardt Library. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited La Trobe University during her Australian tour in 1968.

The Department of History in the 1970s and early 1980s had three scholars teaching about India , and the Department of Politics has taught and researched about India since the 1970s. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences has supported Hindi and Sanskrit for 15 years.

The Borchardt Library has the best recent collection on India in Australia . Its holdings of government publications and periodicals draw admiring remarks even from scholars from India . With Curtin University , La Trobe was instrumental in creating the South Asian Resources Database (SARD – http://recall.curtin.edu.au/Data/saru/sard.htm ) and initiating study tours of librarians between India and Australia in the mid-1990s. Dr Muttayya Kogunaramath, chief librarian of Jawaharlal Nehru University and President of the Indian Library Association is one of the friends made during those visits ( http://www.jnu.ac.in/Library/Muttayya/mmkcv.htm ).

La Trobe has more than 15 scholars in three Faculties who teach and write about India . There are about a dozen PhD students who work on India .

La Trobe has increasingly proved its attractiveness to students from South Asia , particularly in engineering, computer and business studies. A mark of this attractiveness is to be seen in the choice of La Trobe as the setting for scenes in the feature film, Salaam Namaste , released in September 2005 starring Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta ( http://www1.yashrajfilms.com/ ).

Connections with South Asia

• a student exchange program, originated in 1996, with Lady Shri Ram College of Delhi University (pronounced the best college in India by India Today magazine in June 2005), which has brought 10 students to study at La Trobe and sent 10 La Trobe students to LSR ( http://www.lsrcollege.org/home.htm ).

• Memorandums of Understanding with the Apollo Hospitals Group, Teri School of Advanced Studies, and Hyderabad ( Sind ) National Collegiate Board.

• the Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering each year enrols around 200 students from India to do Master by Coursework in Computer Science, Information Technology, Electronic Engineering, or Telecommunication Engineering.

• The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences supports the India Association for the Study of Australia (IASA), and the Australian Studies programs at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Indira Gandhi National Open University. It has donated books to the new Australian Studies Centre in the JNU library, and it provides video lectures to the IGNOU program. Dr Brian Furze (Sociology, Albury-Wodonga Campus) will be the first visiting fellow at IGNOU in December 2005. In addition, La Trobe has initiated and developed the Australia-India Council (AIC) Visiting Fellow in Australian Studies, JNU to commence in 2006. This merit-based award is a short-term teaching position in Australian Studies and enables one scholar working in an Australian university to conduct research and to teach in their graduate programs for 4 to 6 weeks.

• In December 2004, 18 academics and postgraduate students from Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences went to Delhi and presented papers in three public lectures, three seminars and a 2-day research colloquium. This was the largest Australian social sciences delegation in 20 years and involved Jawaharlal Nehru University , Delhi University , SARAI at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Indira Gandhi National Open University ; and two publishers: Sage India and OUP . The project was funded by the Australia-India Council, LTU School of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

• the Thesis Eleven Journal has appointed an AIC fellow, Dr Priti Singh from Jawaharlal Nehru University , to its journal editorial advisory board.

• literature in English. Since 2003, La Trobe has conducted seminars with like-minded English departments in New Delhi on themes of mutual interest and maintained a liaison officer, Dr Ira Raja, who holds a La Trobe doctorate and who now teaches in the English department at Delhi University .

South Asia projects and programs in Australia

• the Digital Colonial Documents project and website ( http://www.chaf.lib.latrobe.edu.au/dcd/ ). Developed by Peter Friedlander of Asian Studies since 2003, this project was funded by an ARC Linkage grant, in partnership with the Borchardt Library and Curtin University , Sydney University and the University of New England . Designed to expand as resources permit, the project has digitized more than 10 rare documents of colonial India and put them on the Web. These materials previously could be seen only in a few libraries in the world; they are now globally available and in an easy-to-search form.

• teaching and research programs in both Sanskrit (Dr Greg Bailey, Dr Anita Ray, Dr Adam Bowles) and Hindi (Dr Peter Friedlander). Dr Friedlander's Open Learning Australia program in Hindi makes the language available worldwide and complements the face-to-face Hindi program on campus at Bundoora ( http://www.open.edu.au/ ).

• a North East Indian Linguistics Society, run collaboratively by La Trobe's Research Centre for Linguistic Typology and Gauhati University in Assam.

• the Henry Martell-DK Prize, awarded annually to the undergraduate who writes the best essay on a South Asia topic. The Prize honours Henry Martell, a fine teacher of Indian history, and is partly sponsored by DK Agencies, New Delhi , one of India 's largest book distributors

• in 2004, La Trobe was designated that “ South Asia node” of the Asia-Pacific Futures Research Network (APFRN), funded by the Australian Research Council. La Trobe has responsibility for mobilizing scholarship on South Asia around Australia and networking with other researchers of Asia ( www.sueztosuva.org ).

• negotiations are advanced for provision of up to six AusAID PhD scholarships for South Asia , which would La Trobe would administer in its role in the APFRN.

• since 2003, La Trobe has worked with Curtin, Monash and Queensland universities to conduct the Australia-India Council's Australian Studies Fellowships scheme which has brought more than a dozen Indian scholars of Australia on study programs to Australia ( http://www.dfat.gov.au/aic/ ).