“The View from the Islamic Port-City: Mercantile Disputes and Scribal Encounters in the Early Modern World”
Did the empires of the eastern Islamic world—the Mughals and Safavids—care about the seas, and how might we imagine the Indian Ocean from the vantage point of these agrarian-bureaucratic states? Historians often argue that these empires lacked maritime archives, especially when compared to their extensive agrarian records. This talk challenges this assumption by foregrounding problems
Reflections on Flood Risk and Climate Action Planning in Urban India
Urban flooding is increasingly reshaping everyday life and governance in rapidly growing cities in South Asia. This talk draws on research in Bengaluru, India, where recurring monsoon floods and a recent climate action plan highlight flood management as an interconnected technical, social, and political challenge. It explores how flood risk is negotiated through tensions between
“Reflections on the Reign of Technocracy” with Navyug Gill
This talk is a critical engagement with Prakash Kumar’s A History of India’s Green Revolution: Reign of Technocracy (Cambridge, 2025). It explores the major contributions and arguments of the book, situating them within the wider world of agrarian studies, postcolonial development and global capitalism. It concludes by considering the possibilities and limitations of the reign
“Living with Gandhi: Experiments in Utopia” with Karline McLain
Abstract: Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) was an Indian anticolonial activist, lawyer, and politician. Less famously, but no less importantly, Gandhi was also a back-to-the-land farmer, a founder of communes, and a seeker of utopia. This talk tells the story of everyday life at the four residential communities Gandhi founded in South Africa and India, drawing out
“Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire” with SherAli Tareen
Abstract: Perilous Intimacies explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Based on the close reading of an expansive and multifaceted archive of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu sources, this book tries to illuminate the depth, complexity, and profound divisions of the Muslim intellectual traditions
“Seeing Like a Hydrocrat: Wading through the Backwaters of Power” with Prakriti Prajapati
Abstract: For over a century, state water engineers—hydrocrats—have shaped water governance through large-scale water infrastructure. In India, as elsewhere, they are trained as engineers, reinforcing a technocratic worldview that prioritizes technical solutions to water problems over socio-environmental considerations. Yet, little is understood about how hydrocrats make sense of their work and agency as experts, navigate
“Taste for Risk: Elite Risk Preferences in Developing Country Democracies” with Vineeta Yadav
How do politicians make risky choices? What shapes their taste for political risk? Do their risk preferences influence their political and policy choices? These are the questions we address in this paper. While two recent studies of MPs in four rich, established democracies find their MPs are not expected utility maximizing (EUT) rational actors, there
“Muscular Nationalism in Contemporary India” with Sikata Banerjee
“#GandhiMustFall: The Dilemmas of Being Turned into Statue” with Sumathi Ramaswamy
“#GandhiMustFall: The Dilemmas of Being Turned into Statue” Using a material culture approach, I reflect on the overwhelming penchant for the creation of statues of Gandhi, the most among India’s political leaders to be so “honored” both at home and overseas, where many a statue has been installed as the official government gift. It is
“Universalizing Broadband: State Legitimation and Policy-Making in China and India” with Krishna Jayakar
Universalizing access to telecommunications and broadband has been a priority for nations around the world. Developing countries too sought to achieve this goal, despite limited finances and technical difficulties. This presentation will discuss how two leading Asian nations, China and India, have implemented universal broadband programs. Despite similarities in objectives and economic circumstances, the experiences of
“How Does Religiosity Affect Fertility? A Tale of Two Bengals” with Mary Shenk
Mary Shenk (Department of Anthropology, Penn State) Demographic research on South Asia often finds that Muslims have higher fertility (family size) than Hindus, a relationship generally ascribed to either ideological or socioeconomic differences between these communities. Yet literature from the study of religion suggests that belief systems may be less important than religiosity, the intensity
“The Climate of Infrastructure: Desiccation and Dispossession of Littoral Worlds” with Nikhil Anand
In this talk I draw attention to the ways that indigenous Koli fishers in Mumbai read climate change as the outcome of a centuries long process of intervening in, and “improving” the city with the infrastructures of desiccation. I show how these civilizational projects constitute the climate of infrastructure. Staged on extant ecologies and polities, these