“What is multicultural in Canada pales with what one finds in India where you have so many different languages being spoken; where you have so many different cultures and different religions brought together in a single very populous country,” says Dr. William Coleman, political studies professor at McMaster University. “One comes away from India with so many impressions.”

A fourth year seminar course at Queen’s University was not only an integral part of Deviah Aiama’s undergraduate studies but a pivotal moment that would introduce him to the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute and put him on the course toward his current work.

High school gives many students an inkling of what they want to do with their lives. Dr. Anne Pearson spent those formative years in New Delhi in the early 1970s and began to think that her career path might lead through India.

“It certainly intrigued me,” says Pearson, who now teaches in the department of religious studies at McMaster University. Pearson’s father, Geoffrey, served as Canada’s Deputy High Commissioner to India for three years, and was a big supporter of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute in its early days.

It was the mid-1970s and Dr. Judy Whitehead was working on her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia when a life-long interest began to steer her toward what became the focus of her future research. “I had always been fascinated with Asia growing up on the West Coast, particularly with India,” says Whitehead, currently an associate professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. “And there was a wonderful faculty there [at UBC].

In 1999 when a joint Canadian International Development Agency-Shastri Institute project took her to some isolated forest communities in the southern Indian state of Karnataka Dr. R. Indira found villages that were all but cut off from the outside world. The women residents of these places were just as isolated.