The Maharaj Kaul Memorial Program

Headshot of Maharaj KaulMaharaj Kaul (1940 - 2009), a UC Berkeley alum, was tireless campaigner against injustice and for peace, founder of groups such as India Relief and Education Fund, and Coalition Against Communalism, and long-time supporter of Institute for South Asia Studies (ISAS) at the University of California, Berkeley.P. Sainath, the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts and good friend of Maharaj Kaul wrote the following about him:

... Maharaj, the greatest of the left-wing organizers amongst Indians on the West Coast that people like me ever knew. For the two decades I knew him and for probably twice that time, the home of Maharaj Kaul in Fremont, CA, was sanctuary point for every (mostly broke) progressive author, scholar, poet, journalist, film maker or political activist from India visiting the United States ... The man from Kashmir who took a PhD in civil engineering from Berkeley in 1972 (after being on that campus through historic times), was one of the most indefatigable political activists the Indian community in the United States has ever thrown up. At Berkeley, he helped found the South Asian Students Association and co-edited its monthly publication Spark. From his time in Berkeley till last September 30, there was no major political activity, agitation or movement that he did not engage with, or participate in, or fight for – or against. How he managed, alongside all this, to prepare multiple computer programs, turn out highly technical papers for international journals, write journalistic pieces in community papers, and publish political books, booklets and pamphlets ...

— P. Sainath, "Memories of Maharaj"

With the family of Maharaj Kaul, ISAS established the Maharaj Kaul Memorial Fund at UC Berkeley. This fund provided support for an annual lecture series on social justice, the Maharaj Kaul Memorial Lecture, and a travel award to support graduate research, the Maharaj Kaul Memorial Grant.

Both Programs have now concluded. Past winners of the Maharah Kaul Memorial Grant are:

2024 Research

  • Sophie Regan (Psychology): Multilingual India: Investigating the effects of language diversity on cognitive development 

  • Krishna Shekhawat (History of Art): Shifting Scales: Images of Time at Mehrangarh Fort
2023 Research

  • Aparajita Das (History): The Long Afterlife of Mughal Monuments: Sheesh Mahal, Shah Pir Dargah and Public History in India 

  • Sourav Ghosh (History): Muddle in the Middle? Sovereignty and State Formation in a Mughal Borderland (1652-1750)
2022 Research
  • Akshita Todi (South & Southeast Asian Studies):Generating a Communal Feeling: Marwari Women as Emotional Subjects in Hindu Texts and Ritual Performances

  • Aparajita Das (History): Flows of Change: Historicizing the Mughal Empire from the River Ganges (c.1550--c.1750)
2021 Research
  • Shaivya Mishra (History): The Bomb, the Bullet and the Gandhi Cap: Violent Nationalism and Political Surveillance in Colonial India, 1906-1945
2020 Research
  • Payal Hathi (Demography): Giving birth to death: women's wellbeing and the undercounting of stillbirth
  • Bharat Suri (Education): Learning on/ from a Platform: The (Re)engineering of Indian Education
  Conference
  • Nirvikar Jassal (Political Science): Why Are Female Bureaucrats Marginalized (And What Can Be Done)? Evidence from the Indian Police
2019 Research
  • Not Awarded
Conference
  • Shivani Sud (Art History): Between Ram Raj and British Raj: Tradition and Transformation in Jaipur Court Painting, ca. 1835-1880
2018 Research
  • Ashley Wagner (Public Health): Sanitation and Health Rights in India
  • Radhika Haridas (Urban Design): Designing for (socio-economic) co-existence in cities of high population densities: Reclaiming urban common space in Bandra, Mumbai
Conference
  • Sigrid Luhr (Sociology): Diversity, Identity, and Belonging in the San Francisco Bay Area Tech Industry
  • Thomas Oomen (Architecture):  Rethinking  Aesthetics: Delhi BRT and the Aesthetics of  Infrastructure  
2017 Research
  • Shaivya Mishra (History): “Revolutionary” Lives in Colonial India: Nationalism and Colonial Surveillance in the United Provinces, 1907-1944
  • Vaishnavi Surendra (Agricultural and Resource Economics): Do village moneylenders in rural India adapt to a changing credit landscape?
Conference
  • Mihiri Tillakaratne (Ethnic Studies): “These Moves Are Memories”: Embodied Memory, Sex, and Heteronationalism in Island of a Thousand Mirrors
2016 Research
  • Shivani Sud (Art History): Imag(in)ing Modernity: Artists and Painting Practices in Colonial Jaipur
  • Anustubh Agnihotri (Political Science): Party networks and decentralized governance in West Bengal, India
Conference
  • Sohini Pillai (South and Southeast Asian Studies): Bhakti at the Court: The Presence and Absence of Bhakti in Vernacular Mahābhāratas.
  • Lisa Brooks (South and Southeast Asian Studies): Diagnostics, Senses, and Subjectivities in Transition: Classical Āyurveda and Contemporary Āyurvedic Practice in Kerala
 2015 Research
  • Manaswini Rao (Agricultural Resource Economics): Sakala Sakhis
  • Yasir Hameed (City and Regional Planning): The Deepening Divide: Residential Segregation and Discrimination in the Housing Market of Delhi.
  • Amee Raval (Environmental Health Sciences): Effects of Occupational Heat Exposure on Traffic Police Workers in Ahmedabad, India
Conference
  • Gowri Vijayakumar (Sociology): ‘Why Should I Live?’ Sex Worker Activism and HIV Risk in Kolkata and Bangalore.”
  • Inderjit Kaur (Music): Privileging Sound: Authenticity, Authority, and Aesthetics in Sikh Sacred Music
  • Lauren Bausch (South and Southeast Asian Studies): Karma as Rite and Retribution: The Agnihotra
  • Karin Shankar (Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies): Memory of the Image: ‘Witnessing Inwards’ in Amar Kanwar’s Films
2014  Research
  • Seth Garz (Agricultural and Resource Economics): Does Improving Slum Housing Induce Migration to Cities? A Natural Experiment in Urban India to Address a Theoretical Paradox
  • Vania Wang (Public Health): Quantifying catalase levels in patients with active tuberculosis and type 2 diabetes mellitus in Mysore, India
  • William F Stafford Jr (Anthropology): The Abject of Corruption
  • YiYi Mon Kyo (Art History): Transplantation of Tibetan Sacred Spaces: Qing Dynasty to the Present
Conference
  • David Boyk (History): "Thinking Backwards: Provinciality and Urbanity in Nineteenth-Century North India" to be presented at the Biennial Urban History Association conference in Philadelphia (October 9-12, 2014) and "Capital Flows: City and Region in Bihar" to be presented at the annual South Asia conference in Madison (October 16-19, 2014)
2013  Research
  • Michael Picetti (Public Health): Antimicrobial Resistance Prevalence in Uropathogenic Gram-Negative Bacterial Clonal Groups Associated with Community-Acquired Urinary Tract Infections in Mysore, India.
  • Ishita Ghosh (Information & Communications Technology and Development) Livelihoods and money management in distributed families via mobile phone in India.
  • Katya Cherukumilli (Environmental Engineering): Scaling up low-cost arsenic remediation for South Asia within a sustainable and scalable business model
  • Anoop Muniyappa (UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program): Estimate the cost-effectiveness of the World Health Partners’ (WHP) social franchising and telemedicine program on health outcomes in rural northern India.
Conference
  • Bharat Venkat (Anthropology): "Untimely Morbidities." To be presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia. Madison, Wisconsin, to be held on October 17-20, 2013.
2012 Research
  • Mike Levien (Sociology): Role of land dispossession in India’s neoliberal development model
  • Hannah Archambault (South & Southeast Asian Studies): Eighteenth-century history of Afghan kingdoms in the southern Deccan and northern Carnatic regions of India.
  • Manisha Anantharaman (Environmental Science Policy and Management): Recycling Community or Reinforcing Hegemony? Green Consumption and Citizenship among the New Middle Classes of India.
  • Rajesh Veeraraghavan (School of Information) : The Contradictions of Bureaucratic Self-Monitoring: A study of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme(NREGA) in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India.
  • Kristen Powers (Economics): Role of the media in communal violence in India.
  • Anna Lieb (Mathemtics): Intermittent water supply modeling in urban India
2011 Research
  • Abhijeet Paul (South & Southeast Asian Studies): Spares are not available: Skills, Gender, and the everyday life of labor in Kolkata.
  • Allyson Goldberg (UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program):  Medical Tourism in India.
Conference
  • Josh Williams (Performance Studies): “Spectacular Monstrosity: Abjection and the Carnivalesque in the Plays of Girish Karnad.” To be presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia. Madison, Wisconsin, to be held on October 20-23, 2011.
  • Karin Shankar (Performance Studies): “Being, Becoming, Belonging in Premchand’s Kafan” presented at the South Asia Graduate Student Conference held at the University of Chicago from March 3-4th 2011.
  • Michael Slouber (South & Southeast Asian Studies): “Snakebite Goddesses in the Sakta Traditions.” To be presented at an Oxford conference on Sakta Traditions to be held in Somerville College, Oxford, Sept 10-11, 2011.
  • Gowri Vijayakumar (Sociology): “Mapping Morality in the Knowledge Economy: Small-Town Women and the Rural BPO.” To be presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia. Madison, Wisconsin, to be held on October 20-23, 2011.

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