King’s India Institute and the Royal Anthropological Institute cordially invite you to the
First M. N. Srinivas Memorial Lecture
‘An Anthropologist’s View of India after Liberalisation’
Speaker: Professor Akhil Gupta (Department of Anthropology, UCLA)
26 March 2012, 18.00
Room S-3.20, King’s College London, Strand Campus
Please note that Room S-3.20 is in Basement 3 of the Strand building.
The Lecture will be followed by a wine reception at ‘Chapters’, King’s College London, from 19.30 – 21.00
For inquiries and RSVP, please contact: india-institute@kcl.ac.uk
This lecture offers some anthropological reflections on India after liberalization. Despite high growth rates, social tensions seem to be rising in India. Uneven growth has led to increasing disparities between urban and rural areas, and between different regions of the country. I tentatively forward a theory that connects a series of phenomena that have largely been analyzed in isolation: conflicts over land in the urban periphery; an armed uprising in areas of the country inhabited primarily by indigenous groups; a middle-class movement over political corruption; the rise of the service-sector economy; the entrenchment of mass popular democracy and decentralized governance; the increased influence of industrial capitalists on the state; and the renewed investments in welfare programs. I will argue that all these components of India’s political economy are tightly interconnected, and that understanding these interconnections helps explain why terms such as ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘market-friendly reforms’ are inadequate descriptors of what is happening in India today.
Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for India and South Asia (CISA) at UCLA. He is the author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (1998), and editor of Culture, Power, Place (with James Ferguson; 1997), Anthropological Locations (with James Ferguson; 1997), Caste and Outcast (2002), The Anthropology of the State (with Aradhana Sharma; 2006), and The State in India After Liberalization (with K. Sivaramakrishnan; 2010). His forthcoming book, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India will be published in May 2012. His areas of interest are ethnography of information technology, the state and development, anthropology of food, environmental anthropology, animality, space and place, history of anthropology, applied anthropology in India and South Asia, and he is currently doing a long-term field project on call centers in Bangalore.
King’s India Institute
King’s College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
