Date November 2, 2026

Saxena Center partners with southern Indian institutions to boost research collaboration

By Pete Bilderback

The Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia has formalized partnerships with three leading research institutions in southern India. The partnership will strengthen academic collaboration between researchers in India and at Brown and create new research opportunities for Brown students.

The Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia has established three new partnerships with leading research institutions in southern India: the Madras Institute of Development Studies in Chennai; the National Law School of India University in Bangalore; and the Center for Development Studies in Trivandrum.

Saxena Director Patrick Heller said the center already has long-standing relationships with researchers at these institutions and that formalizing these partnerships will create new opportunities for research and collaboration on issues affecting India’s dynamic, understudied southern region.

“We decided it was time to move forward and to institutionalize these collaborations,” said Heller. “The purpose is to nurture an intellectual community in partnership with Brown, and provide direct support to junior faculty at these institutions, where researchers face real financial and institutional constraints.” He noted that faculty in India are typically overburdened with teaching and administrative responsibilities, which limits their opportunities to present their work to a broader audience.

The agreements include two central components: an annual four-day conference showcasing research from all four institutions, and a visiting scholar program through which Saxena will host four scholars from South Asia each year. “There’s no better way to seed a collaborative research project than to actually interact with faculty who share similar research interests through conferences or by bringing them to Brown,” said Heller.

Heller said Saxena has numerous reasons to expand its research footprint in South India. He noted that the partners in the South all have strong interdisciplinary profiles and that the South’s strong economic and social development progress makes it a particularly fertile space to conduct independent social science research.

“The North’s academic institutions get allocated more federal resources,” said Heller. “Historically, colonial power was more concentrated in the North. The British made Delhi the capital; the organs of the colonial state were mostly located in the North, and the South remains academically understudied to this day.”

There’s no better way to seed a collaborative research project than to actually interact with faculty who share similar research interests through conferences or by bringing them to Brown.

Patrick Heller Director, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia

In recent years, India’s southern region has become one of the country’s strongest economic engines with growth in technology, manufacturing and trade. “For example,” said Heller, “Apple is rapidly expanding its iPhone manufacturing in southern India; more electric vehicles and semiconductors are being produced there. It’s a very dynamic region.” It has also had a much better record of social development than the South.

The partnerships are already creating new opportunities for research and collaboration. The institutions hosted their first annual conference at the National Law School in August. “They picked the theme,” said Heller, “it was a broad social science theme on citizenship and mobilization. We brought 25 junior faculty from across India to Bangalore for the conference. We also brought senior researchers from Brown so that they could give feedback to the junior faculty.”

The conference organizers emphasized addressing issues across traditional academic boundaries. Paper presenters included Ph.D. students in economics, history, anthropology, geography, sociology and political science.

Saxena recently welcomed its first fellow from the collaboration to campus, Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a political scientist from Ashoka University whose research focuses on nationalism and the interplay between religion and politics in South Asia.

Fellows are selected in collaboration with the partner organizations. “When we recruit nominees for the program, we begin with our three partner institutions and ask them for nominations. Saxena faculty can also make nominations,” he said. A steering committee then selects the four fellows.

Heller said that three other fellows will arrive later in the academic year, all of whom will be fully funded for a semester by Saxena. Fellows will participate in the Saxena and Watson communities, give talks, and — critically — have time to finish research and writing they may struggle to complete at their home institutions. Heller said the objective is to foster collaborative research projects and establish deeper intellectual connections between the University and India.

Fellows need not necessarily be academics, according to Heller. Practitioners will also be considered. “They can be academics, or they can be people who play an active role in policy-making or advocacy,” he said. “But we’re largely interested in candidates who are committed to engaging with academic work and reflecting upon their own experiences in a scholarly fashion.”

The collaboration will also benefit Brown students and researchers. The partner institutions in India can host undergraduate and Ph.D. fieldwork. “If a student has a research project they want to pursue in India,” said Heller, “we now have landing spots.” The formal partnerships will reduce administrative burdens and make it easier to obtain research visas.

Heller said these opportunities will be especially useful for students seeking real-world experience. “Indian institutions of higher education are much less like cities on a hill than in the U.S.,” he said. Indian faculty often hold side jobs in government. They sit on commissions. They’re actively in NGOs and in the advocacy sector. It’s rare for a social scientist in India not to have another role elsewhere. They are much more embedded in civil society than academics are here.”

Brown Ph.D. students will also participate in the yearly conferences. “It’s an invaluable opportunity for them,” said Heller. “There is nothing like these conferences available to them in the U.S. Here, if you go to a sociology conference, there will be thousands of people, and maybe only a handful will work on India. At these conferences, they can network with 50 people doing similar research. This is like bringing them to India and dropping them into a ready-made network.”

While the partnership is already benefiting both Brown and partner institutions in India, Heller stressed that, in the long term, it will create durable, ongoing collaborations and deepen Brown’s engagement with India.