The First Triple Alliance Young Scholars Workshops co-launched by Peking University (PKU), the University of Tübingen (UT) and Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) for the promotion of area studies was held on October 28, 2022.

Rajashree Raju, a PhD candidate from the Department of Indology at UT made a presentation titled “Culture, Youth and Nation-Region Building: History of the Kerala State School Youth Festival.”

Raju introduced her research which examines the history of the government-sponsored Youth Festival, an event that has been held yearly for schoolchildren in Kerala, South India, since 1957. She sought to better understand the processes of construction and evolution of a regional identity born in a society that was directly influenced by colonialism by researching the history of the School Youth Festival in Kerala State.

She said that the national youth festival was created in newly independent India as an official site for the construction of a national culture that is deemed worthy of representing a modern sovereign nation state. On a political level, the goal of the national youth festival was to develop “modern” Indian citizens with a certain aesthetic sense and a degree of cultural literacy that would allow them to be identified as “Indian.” In addition to the national youth festival, the Indian government encouraged the regional governments to organize their own youth festivals as a way to introduce  regional cultures to adolescents and support nationalism and sub-nationalism, respectively. Due to these factors, the Kerala State Youth Festival was born.

After introducing the context of Kerala State Youth Festival, Raju raised a number of questions for her research, including “what role did the youth festival play in region building from the 1950s to the 1970s?”, “what can we infer about the sub-nationalist regional culture fostered in and through the youth festival?” and “what is the regional culture’s connection with Indian national culture and how has it changed over the years? ”

She came to the final conclusion that, in comparison to other Indian regions, Kerala State has a general dearth of historical and sociological research on regional identity or culture. She therefore believed that her research on the Kerala State Youth Festival will close this scholarly gap. Raju responded to questions from the audience after the presentation.