Kamran Asdar Ali

I was first introduced to IIAS as a program during a research visit to the Netherlands in 1996. At that time, I was researching the labor and communist history of Pakistan. During that time, I was looking at archives at the International Institute of Social History (IISH Amsterdam). The senior scholars at IISH encouraged me to apply for a IIAS fellowship. I successfully received the fellowship and spent the summer of 1998 attached to the IIAS Amsterdam office (it was then located near Spinhuis (Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam). The founding director of the IIAS Amsterdam Office was the late Professor Mario Rutten, a scholar of South Asia. 

I was very well looked after during my stay and was offered a very comfortable apartment on the Prinsengracht. Once a week I would travel to Leiden to the IIAS main office to meet other fellows and attend seminars. 

This fellowship helped me to delve into the newly acquired archives on Pakistan’s progressive history at IISH. I was supervised during this process by Professor Jan Breman (University of Amsterdam). Professor Willem Van Schendel (University of Amsterdam) and Professor Marcel van der Linden (IISH and University of Amsterdam). This was a very productive time for me in terms of my scholarship and my future articles and eventual book on the communist movement in Pakistan started to take shape. It also gave me the opportunity to work with colleagues in the department of anthropology (University of Amsterdam) as I was incorporated into the teaching and supervision of graduate students (MA and PhD) who were working on the Middle East and South Asia). 

While attached to IIAS’ Amsterdam office, I was introduced to the SEPHIS program (South- South Research Linkage) and encouraged to apply for funds to organize two workshops in Pakistan, one in 1999 on labor history in Karachi and the second one was a more ambitious project of organizing a workshop on urban issues with scholars from the Middle East and South Asia (Lahore, 2004). The workshop on comparative urbanisms led to a series of other meetings and eventually my colleague, Martina Riker (American University in Cairo) and I edited three volumes on comparting the urban landscapes in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Hence the scholarship at IIAS led to a pioneering series of discussions on urbanism in the global south. Further, based on my research on labor, I also published an essay in the IIAS newsletter (#21) in November 1999. The article on a labor movement in Karachi (1972) was later published as a longer essay in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (2004).

For the calendar year 2005, I received a fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (Leiden) along with a Fulbright Fellowship. This enabled me to be based in Leiden and I again benefitted from the proximity to IIAS’ main office. During this fellowship year, I continued my research on Left politics in South Asia and the IIAS library was an immense resource for me as was the presence of researchers and scholars at IIAS. This research eventually led to my single authored monograph (Communism in Pakistan, 2015) and several articles in journals like Modern Asian Studies and Social Text.

In more recent years due to my election as the Vice President and then President of the Association of Asian Studies (2021-2023), I re-connected with colleagues at IIAS to discuss various collaborative projects. As a sister organizations focused on research in Asia, I have visited the IIAS offices in Leiden twice in the past 2-3 years to discuss programmatic initiatives and to hold joint international conferences. One concrete outcome of the meetings was the invitation to Dr. Paul Rabe (Urban Knowledge Network Asia, IIAS) to a workshop on urban issues held in Cairo in May-June 2023. This has led to a proposed edited volume in the series on Asian Cities sponsored by IIAS in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam Press.

By narrating the above I have shared my own scholarly journey related to IIAS. Over the years, IIAS has made it possible for me not only to make progress in my own research but also provided the opportunity to create linkages with other colleagues in Europe and in various parts of the Global South. IIAS as an institution and organization is vital to the academic and research landscape in the Netherlands as by bringing scholars from across the globe who work on Asia together, it encourages fresh scholarly approaches of the past and present and opens new areas of research for the future.