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Professor Anthony D’Costa is an experienced scholar of contemporary India. After more than 18 years with the University of Washington, Copenhagen Business School can now benefit from his competences. He is expected to play a very significant role in the upcoming Indian Studies programme due in 2010. I sat down with Professor D’Costa to talk about his views on ASP and the new Indian line. He also shared some of his extensive knowledge on contemporary India.

Professor D’Costa, could you tell us about what your role is at ASP and what your background is?

Okay, let me start with the second question. I will be completing one year at CBS just next month. So I have been here just about a year now. Prior to that I was with the University of Washington, in the Seattle area for 18 years teaching and researching, and I was a professor there as well. Of course I decided to move to Copenhagen for professional and family reasons. We had been to Scandinavia before and we liked the general environment and the very comfortable setting for raising children. So we thought that if we had to move, then Scandinavia would probably be one place that we would like to consider and it turned out that way when the opportunity came up. I obliviously have been fortunate to hold the first chair in Indian Studies at CBS, which of course did not exist before and it was the first sign also that CBS was serious about promoting Indian studies. So then I took up the challenge. I was also looking into some interesting things in a professional sense, so I thought this was the best sort of opportunity.
That is sort of my background in terms of were I’m coming from. Basically I am a scholar of contemporary India. My work has largely focused on India although I also look at India from a larger, global and Asian Perspective. So I have done work on Korea, I have done work on Japan, to some extent perhaps other Asian countries. And now I’m also, if not very seriously, but certainly looking into China as well – because the India-China discussion always comes up together. Most of my work has largely been on industrial development in India, industrial change and development, that is my main area of focus and there are obviously a lot of different kinds of projects I have been engaged with but mainly with these kinds of topics in mind.

As to what I am doing at ASP at the current moment of course I have to say that I’m not doing anything yet. In part because first in talking to my colleagues involved with the ASP programme, including the current and new director Michael Jacobsen, there is going to be a revamping of the ASP in terms of the structure of the programme. This will then allow us to insert the India track into the ASP programme. Of course right now we do not have an India track, right now there is a China and a Japan track and we are thinking of adding in an India track. We have been thinking about it, we have been working with some documents and of course we have been talking to the various people at CBS as to how to go about doing it. So at the moment my links with the ASP are extremely limited. We are working in such a way that my link with ASP will obviously become more direct and more immediate. There are plans in place in terms of course, in terms of study abroad programmes in India itself for which I have already done some research on this. The earliest I would like for the India track to be introduced is the fall of this year. But I think there are some CBS bureaucratic kinds of issues in terms of if they want to move this fast or not. But if it does not start this fall then we will definitely start in 2010 and then this India track would be very closely allied with the China and the Japan track. All three tracks would then have a new look to them because we are changing the structure of the programme, the ASP programme itself.

What do you think ASP graduates do better than graduates from an ordinary economics programme?

You see, here is the very sort of traditional debate that has gone in lots of different places, including the United States where I have been. It is the question of area studies versus some kind of discipline based training. In a business school, because the thing we study is business, it is difficult to take a purely discipline approach. Because we are basically studying something that is in real life, and no thing in real life comes only in the form of a discipline, but as a total package. So either there is an economic element to is, there is cultural element to it or there is a political element to it – they all come together. Even from a pragmatic point of view obviously a purely discipline based approach will have its limits in studying business. That is the first thing I will say. The second is that when you talk about business units, entities or organizations; they are not independent of society to which they belong. When you put business in a societal context then you have to know that you don’t have only business, but, you have business in China, business in India and you have business Sri Lanka and wherever that might be. So you have a context, a social and a political and an economic context which very is specific. So how do you know the specifics then? In order to know the specifics better, in which say business are linked to, then you have to know those countries, those cultures, those economies - for which you need a programme like ASP. So the ASP programme, what I hope it will do, is to provide students who would not only know, say the Chinese economy and Chinese society but would also know about Chinese businesses in those places, and perhaps even to the point of saying how might Chinese businesses operate outside of China. I think these are the sorts of links one has to sort of build up through coursework and thesis or project work and also through language training as well. What I hope it would do is that the students would be very well grounded in that particular area in which they are interested in.

What connection do you see between the Asia Research Centre and the ASP?

Well, the thing is that one level I think that the connections seems very straight forward, in a pedagogical way. Since the Asia Research Centre is precisely an organization that is engaged in the study of Asia or research of Asia in its comprehensive sort of sense, that is, we study the contexts. We have political scientists who can talk about Chinese politics at the domestic level, but also in terms of international relations. We have economists who look at China and India and so on. So from that point of view we are already researching what might be taught at the ASP.
Now, the teaching part of course is a slightly different thing, partly because CBS is sort of structured that way. To me this is all very new. Everywhere I have been there was no question about teaching what you were researching and that teaching opportunities always existed. So it was not like you had to create new courses and fight for the courses to teach, it was given that if you were a faculty member in a university – you taught. Here it’s a little different in the sense that when you come here there are already mandatory courses and if your course is not a mandatory one then it’s an elective course. The elective courses may get offered or may not get offered because it depends on minimum enrollments. So it is an irony that I have come as a professor of Indian studies and I have not yet been able to offer a class on India. That’s quite strange, but that’s how it works in this place. So one of the things that I hope that I will be doing once the ASP programme is revamped and the Indian track is added – then of course I will be offering India related courses in the ASP programme. Just like my colleagues would for China and Japan and so on.

Why do you think it’s important to have an Indian line?

Well, the interesting thing is that’s its not because India has suddenly become an emerging economy. India, considering its sheer size, demands an examination no matter what. The reason is again very straightforward, India is a very large country, it is also a very multinational society and by multinational I mean it is internally very very heterogeneous. So it’s not good enough to know about India, in fact one might even question if there is such a thing as India. It’s always about a particular city, a particular region, a particular social community and so on, it’s very very specific. I think to understand that complexity you really need to have a serious investigation. So the thing is: It’s not only knowing about India, but how you study India. And how you study India can also help in asking questions about how to study China or Japan. So what we need to look is that studying India and being a specialist in India is one thing, but, also how you approach studying India is something that you can use for studying any other place. Because there are lots of interesting questions that come up, in part because India’s diversity offers that. From that point of view, purely from an intellectual point of view, I think studying India is of course very very important. Not only that, if you look at the study of India, at least outside of India, it has been very strong. Perhaps in Denmark not so, in part because it is such a small place. But we if look at the US, the US has had very strong, they don’t call it Indian studies; they call it South Asian studies. India has virtually dominated the Southeast Asian studies. It has been very strong in the United States and continues to be very strong. What they have been studying, traditionally, are the classics. India has a very long rich history, which makes it very useful for studying one of their historians, social commentators, sociologists, culturalist and linguists. In fact India has so many other languages too. So from that point of view India has been a very important player in academia. But having said that, what has also happened is that India has also been able to make itself very very visible more recently, especially in the economic, business and technological fields. So once that has happened then obvious it becomes almost per dentition an important place to know about. In part because India is becoming important. Not only in the asian context, but also globally at large.
We have something we call the Indian Diasporas, which means that there are people of Indian origin or with Indian citizenship that are living abroad. It’s a very strong presence. If look at the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore there is very visible presence of Indians. And these are Indians that are professionally very successful. They are decision makers in lots of different fields, whether in politics, whether in business and cooperation and so on. So what that means is that, in some ways, Indians around the world are also making decisions that are very influential as far as the global economy is concerned. So when we have a combination of both a very rich history and its phenomenal rise in the more recent years it’s a perfect case for study. China in that sense is in a very similar situation, but I think a lot of interest in China has been driven very much by the economic opportunities rather than anything else.
I think India is one of those places where there are perhaps not as strong economic opportunities as in China, but they are still very very strong. It has been growing very rapidly in the last few years. It has been growing at 7-8%, even this year it’s expected to grow 7% in spite of the financial crisis. So I think from those points of view I think its well knowing of a place in the world which is very important.

Next month, we will bring the last part of the interview with Anthony D’Costa. There, the interview will bring focus to India as a rising power in South East Asia and globally.