Chapter 32 - Scholarship in and on South Asia

Summary

The primary objective of this article is to outline scenario(s) of South Asian scholarship in the next half a century. It is a challenging task in many ways; two deserve special mention: first, forecasting is a perilous business, particularly on social and political issues. Secondly, my effort involves a region with eight countries, each of which is not only diverse on many counts but has also previously defied almost all predictions. There are several methods for forecasting, each has its own merits but none can be appropriate for all situations. However, in social sciences there is a proclivity towards quantitative method. When quantitative data is either unavailable or unreliable, and qualitative information can be gleaned from various sources to increase accuracy, relevance, or acceptability of forecasts, the preferred option among researchers has been to adopt the judgmental method (Makridakis, Wheelwright and Hyndman 1998; Adler and Ziglio 1996; Lawrence, Goodwin, O'Connor and Onkal 2006; and Surowiecki 2004). In this exercise, a simple trend-line extrapolation is neither expected nor helpful as scholarship is a precursor to imaginative innovation and by definition expected to influence trends in the future that are yet to exist. Inherent elements of the judgmental methods are based on certain assumptions and subjective bias. My approach in this paper is not devoid of these elements; I have adopted the subjective approach within the judgmental-qualitative method.