The Harvard–Bhubaneswar, India Project

This paper briefly outlines the 12-year research project that Professor Cora Du Bois of Harvard University undertook, from 1961 to 1973, in Bhubaneswar, Orissa. It was an interdisciplinary project, involving Indian and American graduate students, to study different aspects of post-World War II, post-independence change in this region of India. The different kinds of projects are outlined with some of the ways that socio-cultural change was addressed. During the course of the Harvard-Bhubaneswar Project, Professor Du Bois became a critic of large American modernisation projects. Although the Bhubaneswar project was distinct from these, her disenchantment with American social science during that era affected her motivation to write a synthesis of her own project. Du Bois’ critiques of modernisation theories were prescient and anticipated contemporary discussions by historians of that era.