Meeto Memorial AwardMeeto (Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik) was a scholar, activist and dancer. She studied at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, New Delhi and Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh.
She graduated with first class honours in History from Stephen’s College. She won the Radhakrishnan-British Chevening Scholarship to study history at St Hilda’s College in Oxford University and graduated from there also with first class honours.
Between 2001 and 2004, Meeto researched and wrote on projects ranging from the refugee problem in post-Partition Punjab to the role of parliamentarians in Indian democracy and the role of the colonial census in creating monolithic identities in Sri Lanka (research that led her to spend three months with the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo).
She was the first primary coordinator of SAHR (South Asians for Human Rights) and helped organize the first general convention of SAHR in Neemrana, Rajasthan in 2002 and in Delhi the year after. Between 2003 and mid-2004, she worked as a programme associate at the Ford Foundation in Delhi working on human rights and development issues.
In 2004, Meeto won the Clarendon fellowship and returned to Oxford University. Her pre-doctoral research was tragically interrupted by her passing away in 2006. The essays and articls she wrote while at Oxford hav been published under the title Making: Identity Formation in South Asia by the Three Essays Collective.
As a dancer, Meeto performed with Leela Samson’s dance production Spanda across India and in Bangladesh.
Meeto’s academic and professional interests were at one with the way she lived. She revelled in the aesthetic traditions of the multiple religious and cultural traditions to which she was an heir as a South Asian citizen.
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