November
19, 2004
Indira
Peterson Comes Home
 Photo
by: Todd M. LeMieux
Indira Peterson |
Two years ago, Indira Peterson, professor
of Asian studies, left Mount Holyoke to take a prestigious senior position
at Columbia University in New York City. She fully enjoyed the opportunity
to work with graduate students in such a high-powered university environment.
But after two years, she followed her heart back to Mount Holyoke. College
Street Journal writer Mickey Rathbun asked her about her life in the
United States, her experience at Columbia, and her decision to return to
the College.
When did you first come to the United States, and what was it like?
I came as an AFS [American Field Service] exchange student for my senior year
of high school. It was a defining year for me—1967–1968—a tremendously interesting time. I came from Bombay, a sophisticated city,
and I had a wide knowledge of the West, mostly of Europe. I was one of very few
South Asians in the United States back then. I had an interesting lens on what
was happening: Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam war, the Beatles. I thought
of myself as someone with serious intellectual interests. I came to live in Concord,
Massachusetts, with a family that was steeped in New England intellectual traditions.
It was a good fit for me. I fell in love with New England. I have more or less
been here ever since.
Where did you pursue your graduate studies?
I got my B.A. in English literature at Bombay University. I always thought
that I would come back to the U.S. for graduate school, to study world and
comparative literature, Russian literature in particular. Very few people
had thought of Indian literature in a serious way. It was a fresh field,
a whole literary horizon that could speak to us in a contemporary way. Daniel
Ingalls was a renowned Sanskrit scholar at Harvard. I had read his work and
admired it; I decided I wanted to work with him. So I came to Harvard and
got an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sanskrit. I finished in 1976.
How did you originally find your way to Mount Holyoke?
My first teaching job after graduate school was a three-year position as a
professor at the Five Colleges teaching Sanskrit and Indian literature courses.
Then Mount Holyoke advertised a job for a professor of South Asian humanities
with a focus on literature. The job seemed to be written for me. I got the
job and started teaching at the College in 1982. One of the best things that
came out of coming to the Pioneer Valley was meeting Mark [Peterson’s
husband, now a physics and mathematics professor at Mount Holyoke] at Amherst
College. We were married in 1979, and our daughter Maya was born in 1980.
After teaching here for 20 years, what opportunities at Columbia University
lured you away?
There are few academic positions for graduate-level teaching in Sanskrit and
the modern and classical Indian languages. Columbia offered that. I enjoyed
teaching at all levels—undergraduates as well as Ph.D. theses. It was
a wonderful job with wonderful colleagues. Columbia is also one of the leading
centers for South Asian studies, with its nucleus at the Southern Asian Institute.
The eminent South Asianist scholars at Columbia were colleagues I had known
before, and the many lectures and events at the Southern Asian Institute, not
to mention its connection with the thriving South Asian community in New York
City, were very stimulating.
What are the most significant differences between your work at Mount Holyoke
and at Columbia?
I really enjoy teaching undergraduates at a liberal arts college, and I can
focus on that goal at Mount Holyoke. Also, there is a more interactive model
of teaching at Mount Holyoke. We think of curriculum in a collegewide way,
not just as a department. Recently I went to a dinner with older faculty and
new faculty. The dean of faculty and the president were interacting with the
new faculty and speaking seriously and informally about the work we do here.
Mount Holyoke has a genius for facilitating this kind of discussion. It’s
in the culture. Also, at Columbia I was heavily involved in guiding graduate
students, mostly from other departments, and so, strange as it may seem, I
was increasingly left with less time for my own work, which is at a very exciting
point right now, with a number of projects maturing.
Why did you come back to South Hadley and Mount Holyoke?
I came back because I like the wholeness of living in a community of scholars
and students. Being in a small residential college is a real treat. I love
it. I wanted to be in one place, working deeply on one thing.
My home, family, community, and life are still here.
Was it a difficult decision to make?
Yes. I enjoyed my time at Columbia, and I don’t regret having gone there.
Was the weekly commute a
factor in your decision?
Yes. The commute was hard. My work goes better if I live a holistic life. Columbia
was not my world. I was teaching there but my heart was here.
How does it feel to be back at Mount Holyoke?
It was very easy to come back here. It’s not lesser in any way. It’s
comfortable, but at the same time very exciting and challenging. Teaching something
complex to undergraduates sharpens my thinking and helps my professional writing.
It makes you clearer. There’s a stimulating connection between teaching
and research.
What are you working on at the moment?
My first two books examined literature and culture of India in the sixth to
eighth centuries, in Sanskrit, the pan-Indian language of classical literature,
and in Tamil, a major classical and modern language of South India. The book
I’m writing now, Imagining the World in Eighteenth-Century
India: The Kuravanci Fortune-Teller Dramas of Tamilnadu, looks at the changes that took
place in South Indian literature—internal and external—in the
early modern era, just prior to the entrenchment of British colonial rule
in India. South Indian culture at this time was hybrid, a result of the circulation
of many languages and subcultures within India in the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries, and European influence is one of many cultural “spices.” I
am looking at cultural connections between the old and the new that took
place in public forums, especially through courtly dramatic performance.
Like the Medici court in Renaissance Italy, or the Elizabethan court, these
performances of theatre, drama, and dance connected the royal courts to the
people “out there.” I chose to focus my book on the themes of
change on the Kuravanci fortune-teller drama, a multilingual dance-theatre
genre that features a wandering fortune-teller woman as its central character.
In many ways the drama epitomizes the global world and imagination of the
eighteenth century in India. It also speaks to my own experience and fascination
with pluralist cultures and polyglot worlds.
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