Harsha V. Dehejia

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Harsha Venilal Dehejia (born 1938) is an Indo-Canadian allergologist, author, radio host, and Professor of Indian Studies at Carleton University. He won the 2003 Raja Rao Award for Literature for his contributions to the literature and culture of the South Asian Diaspora and hosted the radio show An Indian Morning for over 40 years.

Born and raised in Malabar Hill, South Mumbai, Dehejia earned his medical doctorate from Bombay University, where he won six gold medals, and then studied allergy and respiratory diseases at Cambridge University. He moved to Canada and began practicing medicine in Ottawa around 1968.

In 1975, Dehejia helped CKCU-FM get its first broadcast license and started hosting An Indian Morning in November of that year. He wrote I Can Cope With Allergy in 1976 and The Allergy Book in 1980. In 1984, he spoke out against the myths surrounding allergies, noting that an allergy is an abnormal reaction to substances that are harmless to most people.

Dehejia has stayed active in civic and cultural life as well. A 2003 Ottawa Citizen piece described him as a leading allergist who also wrote about Indian poetry, painting, and gods, hosted a radio program, and taught a Carleton University course on Hinduism and classical Indian intellectual traditions. By then, he was often traveling to India to pursue further study in religion at the University of Bombay and to participate in seminars.

Awards and later work highlight his diverse interests. He received the Raja Rao Award for Literature in 2003, and in 2008 was one of five recipients recognized for community leadership by the Indo-Canada Ottawa Business Chamber. In 2014 he published Parul: A Love Story, his only work of fiction, about a man who comes to accept the beauty of the world. In 2015 he marked the 40th anniversary of An Indian Morning, the longest-running show on CKCU-FM. In 2017 he published Walk With Me On Mumbai Footpaths, followed by Radhayan in 2018, which explores the stories of the Hindu goddess Radha.

In 2019, Dehejia contributed a chapter, “The heart-throb of Chaitanya,” to Finding Radha: The Quest for Love, and contributed to the edited collection Radha: From Gopi to Goddess. His son, Vivek Harsha Dehejia, is also a Carleton University professor, teaching philosophy and economics.