Explore India’s Himalaya: Yoga, Culture, Politics, Environment

This program is co-sponsored by the JSIS-South Asia Center.

The 2016 Autumn Quarter UW India Himalaya Study Abroad Program is a ten-week opportunity for UW students to study and live in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. The academic focus of the program innovatively combines two understandings of “development” that are deeply enmeshed in the history of the Indian Himalayan region. In one course, students will study “development” as a political and economic transformation with a particular emphasis on the Himalayan environment. The Kumaun Himalayan region provides a unique perspective to examine accelerated economic and environmental change in relation to the regional, national, and international contexts driving this change. The second course will add to and complicate standard understandings of development. Students will study the past and present of the region’s cultural, social, and religious life through the prism of yoga specifically as the “development” of the self, soul, and society. Students have the option of daily yoga instruction, taught in the very home of ancient yoga itself, set amid the glorious Himalayan mountains.

Students can then draw on this academic framework to immerse themselves in an internship with one of our regional host organizations: Aarohi, a not-for-profit grassroots organization focused on integrated rural development with emphasis on healthcare, education, livelihoods and preservation of traditional culture and the Gene Campaign, a research and advocacy organization focused on food and livelihood security, agriculture, and climate change. Students develop internships, working directly with senior organization mentors, based on their work assignment determined by the NGO’s current needs. The work assignments foster a richer, contextual understanding of the issues, challenges, and innovations driving "development" in the rural Himalayan villages. Internships immerse students in the practical implementation of the many meanings of the word “development” outlined here.