| Summary/Abstract |
This issue of South Asia Research (SAR) marks and celebrates 40 years of an academic venture that began in very different conditions than one faces in publishing today. Initially, it was quite a modest in-house product, with the first issue of this journal published in May 1981. The decision at SOAS in 1980 to establish a journal run by doctoral students involved a team including the historian Rosalind O’Hanlon, now Professor of Indian History and Culture at Oxford, the historian Vanessa Harvey-Samuel and the anthropologist Catherine Thompson. The moment of taking the initiative to use print to stimulate progress, academically as well as personally, matches remarkably well with the research focus of many South Asianists on the role of the printing press. It appears in the work of O’Hanlon herself on Marathi sources and is still present in recent studies that illustrate, for example, how a Tamil religious leader and his followers ‘used print as a tool to garner religious and textual authority’ (Weiss, 2019: 52). Seen in this light, the creation and production of SAR was a landmark event in the development of South Asian Studies not just at SOAS but globally. Forty years later we are, indeed, a truly global journal, respected (and cited) worldwide.
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