Thursday March 6th, 2025

9:30-10:00 am   Breakfast at Swift Lecture Hall (Swift 310)

10:10-10:20 am      Introduction at Swift Lecture Hall (Swift 310)
Opening Remarks: Professor Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Director, Pozen Center for Human Rights

Conference and Keynote Introduction: Ashima Mittal and Jyotishman Mudiar

10:30-12:00 am (Swift 310)

State, Technology, and Capital
Chair: Gary Herrigel, Paul Klapper Professor, the College and Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago

Chipping In: India and Notions of Skill in the Semiconductor Supply Chain
Jai Vipra, PhD Candidate, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University

Appropriate Technologies of Development: Histories of Industrial Work and the Making of the Techno-Capitalist Present in Bangalore (1960s-2000s)
Aditi Dey, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, New School for Social Research

Modernity of Planning in Fisheries: Forms of Coastal Accumulation in India
Muthuvel Deivendran, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Houston 

12:00-1:00 pm     Lunch  Break (Swift Common Room – First Floor)

1:00-2:30 pm (Swift 310)
Resistance, Caste, and Class
Chair: Eléonore Rimbault, Harper-Schmidt Fellow & Collegiate Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago

The Other Side of Global: Transnational Avant-Gardes and Capitalism in India, c.1970s
Suchismito Khatua, PhD Candidate, Department of Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University

Workers, Unions, and Capital at Bombay’s Docks (1930-1970)
Jibran Anand, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Yale University

Sanitation Labour and Capitalistic Expansion in Colonial Bombay
Meera Panicker, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Shiv Nadar University

2:30-2:45 pm       Break

2:45-4:15 pm
Markets and State
Chair: Constantine Nakassis, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago

Dravidianism and the Crisis of Quasi-Federalism
Srihari Nageswaran, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of California – Berkeley

Indian State Capitalism and the Techno-Entrepreneur
Raman Singh Chhina, PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, The University of Chicago 

False Starts: How Anti-Corruptionism Helped the Illiberal Turn in India
Hera Shakil, Urban Doctoral Fellow and PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Human Development, The University of Chicago

4:15-4:30 pm     Coffee Break (Swift 310)

4:30-5:30 pm (Swift 310)
Keynote Address
“On the Political Economy of Neo-liberal Capitalism,”
Prabhat Patnaik, Professor Emeritus, The Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Friday, March 7, 2025

9:00-9:30 am       Breakfast (Swift 310)

9:30-11:00 am (Swift 310)
Infrastructure and Capitalism
Chair: Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Former Global Distinguished Professor, Department of English, New York University

Accumulation Through Electrification: Energy, Sovereignty, and Resistance in Pakistan
Asad Abbasi, PhD Candidate, School of Global Students, University of Sussex 

Madurai-yin Mobile Maadhargal: The Women of Madurai
Nirumpama Jayaraman, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois – Chicago

Periphery as the New Core: Education at the Crossroads Between the Production of Capital and Urbanism
Shehana Sajad, PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University

11:00-12:30 pm (Swift 310)
New Frontiers of Capital
Chair: Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Director, Pozen Center for Human Rights 

Rethinking the Public: Digital Public Goods and Capitalism in Contemporary India
Snigdha Kumar, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Re-Enchanting Disintermediation: Tokens, Fetishism and the Spirit of Crypto in ‘Digital India’
Vinay Brandon, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

‘Smart’ Futures: Temporality and Speculative Development in the ‘Smart’ City of Pune, India
Arushi Sharan, PhD Candidate, Department of International Development, University of Oxford

12:30-1:30 pm  Lunch Break (The Joseph Regenstein Library 122A/B)

1:30-3:00 pm (Swift 310)
Contradictions of Development

Chair: Omar Kutty, Instructional Professor and Lecturer, Social Sciences Collegiate Division, The University of Chicago

“Planning for Overdevelopment, Producing Underdevelopment? Post-Colonial Economic and Regional Planning in the Chota Nagpur Plateau Region,”
Neel Thakkar, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Princeton University

Contextualizing the Emergence of a Coastal Protection Movement Through the Production of Coastal Hazard in a Village in Central Kerala
Nihal Hasan Nishad Azhivelikkakath, Graduate Student, Georg-August Universitat Göttingenn

Coaching Conundrum: The Role of State-Private Collaborations in Shaping India’s Educational Landscape
Prafulkumar Dhawale, PhD, Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University

3:00-3:15 pm       Coffee Break (Swift 310)

3:15-4:30 pm (Swift 310)
Ecology and Capital
Chair: David Eric Silverberg, PhD Candidate, Department of Religion,  Columbia University

Tear of Tea: The Sri Lankan Tea Plantation Sector as a Racial Capitalist Construction.
Harshani Fernando, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut 

Glacial Encounters: Scientific Knowledge and Local Practice in the Karakoram Region
Ihsan Arsalan, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, Rice University

River, Land, and More-Than-Human Subjects in the Himalayas
Himani Rathore, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, Emory University  

From Green Revolution to Gene Revolution: The Rise of Transnational, Swadeshi and Crony Capitalism in India Agriculture
Jawhar Cholakkathodi, PhD, Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad

4:30- 5:30 pm Keynote Address (Swift 310)
The New Imperialism:  Neo-Liberalism and the Rise of Poverty and the Global South
Utsa Patnaik, Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics, The Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

6:00-8:00 pm  Closing Dinner Reception (The Joseph Regenstein Library 122A/B)

Thursday March 6, 2025

10:30-12:00 pm
State, Technology, and Capital
Chair: Dr. Gary Herrigel, University of Chicago

Chipping In: India and Notions of Skill in the Semiconductor Supply Chain
Jai Vipra, PhD Candidate, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University

Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University
Abstract for SAGSC XXII, University of Chicago

The history of technology in the 21st century is also the history of capitalism, and technological development in India helps us understand the evolution of capitalism as a global system dependent upon unequal trade systems and super-exploitation in the periphery.¹ This article uses a case study of a technology considered strategic for different reasons since the 1940s — semiconductors — to understand the evolution of capitalism and the response of the Indian state to this evolution.

In 1976, the Cabinet of India approved the establishment of Semiconductor Complex Limited, now called Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL). The SCL, one among a handful of public sector semiconductor companies in the world, has had a chequered history that is yet to be systematically written. It was at the forefront of semiconductor technology before a controversial fire in 1989 obliterated its march towards global technological leadership. Post the fire, the Indian state did not actively pursue the restoration of SCL. However, the SCL has continued to be useful particularly for India’s space missions and artificial intelligence model training.

What can the history of SCL tell us about the history of capitalism viewed from South Asia? In particular, through archival sources related to SCL, this article outlines the changing class character of the Indian state from the 1970s to the present: its evolving relationship with labor and capital, the transformation in the nature of domestic capital and the organization of domestic capitalists in the lead up to and after liberalization, and the present government’s drive for the “revitalization” of SCL as a step towards global supremacy in artificial intelligence. In the process, the article argues that the changing relationship of the Indian state to technological production is reflective of and co-produced with the changing relationship of the Indian state to international finance capital. It also argues that this history is important to understand the changing nature of international finance capital with the rise of Big Tech.

Appropriate Technologies of Development: Histories of Industrial Work and the Making of the Techno-Capitalist Present in Bangalore (1960s-2000s)
Aditi Dey, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, New School for Social Research

Aditi Dey
PhD Candidate
Department of Politics
New School for Social Research

Narendra Modi’s reliance on the booming high-tech sector of Bangalore to provide innovative tech solutions to what his regime repeatedly frames as the social problems and corruption of the ‘old India’ is well documented. The ‘old India,’ in Modi’s techno-capitalist imagination, was Jawaharlal Nehru’s supposedly failed postcolonial project of state-led developmentalism and ‘mixed’ economy. This image of ‘new India,’ however, is a fantasy, on two counts. First, the emerging technocratic order itself has deep connections with the political economy of state capital that took shape under Nehruvian developmentalism. Second, the euphoria over high-tech innovation obscures the historical development of precariat labor in India, (especially in contemporary IT cities like Bangalore) whose ‘low-tech’ and vernacular practices have powered these high-tech ‘ecosystems.’ My doctoral research examines historical political economy of state led technological industrialisation from 1960s to 2000s, which was pegged to realize India’s ambitious goals of ‘self-reliance’, but executed within financial constraints of the Cold War era political economy. Focusing on the city of Bangalore, wherein public sector industries, many of which were previously set up in World War II efforts, produced machinery for development, such as aeroplanes, tractors, telephones, wristwatches and so on. For the SAGSC conference, I will present a dissertation chapter examining the 1970s shift within industrial policy, to make way for ‘appropriate technologies’, within a global context of the oil crisis and severe restrictions on importing technological aid. My paper will examine how such a shift, rooted in the promises of ‘small is beautiful’(Schumacher 1973), reshaped labor politics, created a new class of tech-entrepreneurs and introduced an official policy of decentralisation and deregulation, shaping emblematic features of contemporary neoliberal capitalism in India.

Modernity of Planning in Fisheries: Forms of Coastal Accumulation in India
Muthuvel Deivendran, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Houston

Abstract: Fisheries sector deemed a significant role in India among other emerging south Asian nation-states during the 1950s for its potential for food security and foreign product trade. Focusing on the planning moments, the paper delves into the interactions of the visions from the colonial and national planners, and its counteractions in the postcolonial economy. Since the colonial establishment of the sector, fish workers were perceived as pre-modern and needing technological interventions. Aided by the colonial experts in fisheries, oceanography, and marine sciences from both colonies and metropoles, fisheries knowledge production in colonial south Asia strongly established this lack of modernity. The paper delves into the particularity of the Indian fisheries program, its visions, and revisions for the fishing communities and workers. Alongside the global context of collectivization and industrialization in the 1930s, and the postwar reconstruction, Industrialization remained the instrumental imperative for the new nations like India. At the same time, the factors of the productivity revolutions in the making of ‘modern’ India involved multiple and complex influences from the industrial West and the East. By historicizing the planning and global market relations, the paper attempts to show how colonial planning re-emerges as the modernization programs in India and other south Asian countries. With showcasing how this fueled capitalist extraction of the coast through industrialization and mechanization, the paper also attempts to connect how this history is being rewritten from the turn of 21st century coastal south Asia and the emerging Blue Economy.

Bio: Muthuvel Deivendran is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Houston. He holds a master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Madras, India. He is the recipient of the NEH Cullen Chair in History of Science and Medicine Scholarship at the University of Houston and also works as a Research Assistant for the Project on ‘Health is Politics.’

1:00-2:30 pm
Resistance, Caste, and Class
Chair: Eléonore Rimbault, Harper-Schmidt Fellow & Collegiate Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago

The Other Side of Global: Transnational Avant-Gardes and Capitalism in India, c.1970s
Suchismito Khatua, PhD Candidate, Department of Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University

This paper examines a pivotal juncture in the complex evolution of capitalism in  postcolonial India, by analyzing the work of an avant-garde writers’ collective called the Neem  Sahityo Group. Founded in 1970 by a group of six ex-Naxalite, lower-caste factory workers in  the industrial city of Durgapur in West Bengal, the Neem Sahityo writers drew inspiration from  the Bauhaus movement in Germany and Productivism in Soviet Russia. They started a “little  magazine” and released several manifestos to inaugurate what they called a form of “anti literature.” As their manifestos proclaimed, this literature would not only convey the crude  realities of their proletarian experience but also advance their political agenda: to create a more  worker-oriented industrial model, grant workers greater control over industrial capital and  entrepreneurial agency, and ultimately precipitate the dissolution of the state-endorsed bourgeois  classes.

If the socialist 1970s in India were marked by new strides towards private capital, achieved, among other things, through new negotiations with the “global” (involving a policy of  non-alignment with either side of the Iron Curtain and multinational collaborations in heavy  industry and infrastructure), movements like that of the Neem Sahityo Group assert that anti capitalist resistance of the time also emerged with a distinctly far-left “international” impulse,  drawing their imaginaries from diverse political and artistic avant-gardes from East Asia, Europe,  and America. By studying the work of the Neem Sahityo Group, this paper seeks to provide a  literary-artistic supplement to theories of South Asian capitalisms, asking: How does the South  Asian trajectory of “global” capitalism relate to its dialectical other, an anti-capitalist avant-garde  sustained by transnational solidarities?

Workers, Unions, and Capital at Bombay’s Docks (1930-1970)
Jibran Anand, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Yale University

Bombay’s labouring history has been told as one of deindustrialization, militant resistance and textile mills. A different narrative emerges if we foreground the docks. Like in most port cities across the globe, Bombay’s docks were a central node of commerce, industry and itinerant labor in the 20th century. Located at the nexus of global shipping and local capital, the docks also had ancillary industries that radiated from them. The docks, situated on the precipice of land and sea, are ideally situated to tell the larger story of boundary making that transformed labor relations in 20th century South Asia.

Across theoretical paradigms, from global labour history focused on itinerant labor to a renewed interest in the logistics revolution, dock work as a part of interstitial capitalism is once again returning to scholars’ imaginaries. While there has been a rich global historiography on dock work in the paradigm of social history, this has recently been accompanied by work that explores maritime factors as key to changing dynamics of capitalism.¹ More specifically, there is also renewed attention to shipping infrastructure and how it undergirds capital accumulation.

This paper explores the changing contours of the labour regime at Bombay’s docks in the mid 20th century. It traces how growing labour militancy at the docks led to one solution to the labour question by independent India’s law-makers – expanding the scope of the employment

¹ A collection of dock work from global labour history can be found here: Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790-1970. Vol. I. Routledge, 2017. Meanwhile, this is a classic work of labour history of the docks: Frederick Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, CT, 1987. For newer work that historicises the “logistical revolution” in a Marxian paradigm see : Campling, Liam, and Alejandro Colás.

Sanitation Labour and Capitalistic Expansion in Colonial Bombay
Meera Panicker, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Shiv Nadar University

This paper examines the historical constitution of sanitation work in South Asia, focusing on its role in urban capitalist accumulation in colonial Bombay. In the context of South Asia, sanitation work continues to be manually performed and caste presents the most dominant factor in the creation of a sanitation work force. However, the links between caste and labour tend to be isolated without accounting for the historical exigencies of capital accumulation that institutionalised sanitation work under the requisites of municipal governance. Nineteenth and early twentieth century cities were marked by steep increases in mortality rates owing to dense concentrations of people, increasing commercial and trading activities and the lack of commensurate public health infrastructures. The clearance of filth on a daily basis was indispensable to maintaining a productive and healthy workforce. By analysing sanitation work through the lens of social reproduction theory, this paper attempts to unravel the political economy of caste in urban capitalistic growth. It offers a critique of the traditional focus within labour historiography on industrial labour and commodity production and uses social reproduction theory as a methodological apparatus to appraise the historical limitations placed on Dalit labour by the operations of capital expansion. The municipal sanitary corps appears to be one of the few arenas where women constituted a major share of the workforce and this paper accounts for sanitation work as a form of gendered labour, conforming to the arguments put forth by feminist scholars that the social reproduction of labour power disproportionately depends on women’s unpaid/underpaid labour and care work.

2:45-4:15 pm
Markets and State
Chair: Constantine Nakassis, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago

Dravidianism and the Crisis of Quasi-Federalism
Srihari Nageswaran, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of California – Berkeley

Dominant trends in the historical and anthropological scholarship of Tamil Nadu have traditionally interpreted the state’s mainstream Dravidian political parties to articulate a primarily identitarian Tamil cultural or ethnic nationalism. However, recent political demands associated with the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Naam Tamilar Katchi urge either a separate state of Kongu Nadu from the state’s northwestern region or a Tamil Nadu government liberated from “Telugu rule,” and both are explicitly antagonistic to the state’s Dravidianist political consensus. This emergence of far-right Tamil nationalism urges a reappraisal of Dravidian politics, which my paper seeks to do in light of both parties’ seemingly incongruous embrace of neoliberal reforms and state-mandated social welfare. My guiding question is as follows: how has India’s post-liberalization economic trajectory qualitatively shifted regionalist political demands on the ground and in what ways have the two mainstream Dravidian parties contributed to and opposed this shift? My paper makes two suggestions for the existing scholarship on regionalism in southern India: first, that the concomitant centralization of economic authority above the state level and devolution of political responsibilities below the state level might best be described as a macroeconomic regime of “provincialization,” which in turn encourages the provincialization of regionalist politics, and second, that the Dravidian model of regional development contradictorily relies on foreign capital to pursue social welfare initiatives otherwise disabled by India’s quasi-federalist model and now further destabilized by the current right-wing central government.

Indian State Capitalism and the Techno-Entrepreneur
Raman Singh Chhina, PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, The University of Chicago

“In this paper, I examine the productivist role of the Indian state in the ongoing techno-entrepreneurial transformation of the Indian economy. I argue that while the Indian state was instrumental in the first IT boom of the 1990s, it now plays a much larger interventionist role in the contemporary transition. For instance, the Department of Industrial Policy has been revived after two decades of dormancy, and the Indian state is actively involved in directly targeting startups, granting exemptions, promoting strategic sectors, acting as a financier, and opening its scientific and research infrastructure to boost entrepreneurial activity. This stylized fact, however, gives rise to two paradoxes. First, the state’s large interventionist role directly contrasts with the ruling political party’s rhetoric of “minimum government” and the California Ideology underpinnings of the new entrepreneurial elite. Second, entrepreneurial policy making also conflicts with the oligarchic system, in which the state’s favored incumbent conglomerates have steadily concentrated large portions of economic activity since 2014. While the first contradiction can be explained by the global resurgence of industrial policy making and state capitalism, I make sense of the second by highlighting the role of the state as a coordinator. Greater control over entrepreneurial activity through industrial policy making allows the state to delineate the spheres of creative destruction within the startup economy while maintaining its mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships with large business groups.”

False Starts: How Anti-Corruptionism Helped the Illiberal Turn in India
Hera Shakil, Urban Doctoral Fellow and PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Human Development, The University of Chicago

Following the culturalist-constructionist tradition of studying corruption as an effort to understand the discrepancies of what constitutes as the social practice of corruption, this paper focuses on the connection between anti-corruptionism and illiberality post 2014 in the BJP regime in India, to illuminate the changing nature of what is considered corruption from rent-seeking to crony capitalism. The paper begins with recounting the presence of the Hindu-Right at each juncture of anti-corruption sentiments erupting in the Indian democracy to highlight the long history of their involvement in using anti-corruptionism as a tactic. Amidst a plethora of examples of this connection, the paper focuses on two important ones to make its case, first the use of anti-corruption rhetoric to monopolize on campaign finance resources through the Electoral Bonds scheme and second the weaponization of anti-corruption bodies to weaken and suppress the opposition. These examples highlight a total capture of the state’s anti-corruption activities by the BJP government and elaborate on the changing shape of corruption that helps maintain a popular discourse of BJP as non-corrupt in the eyes of its supporters. Further I use ethnographic data to showcase how this evolution of anti-corruption sentiments in India has made Electoral Bonds and election tampering fall out of the traditional logic of corruption as bribery and rent seeking in public infrastructure creation, leading to a phenomenon where BJP’s activities are very much viewed by its supporting publics as a crusade against corruption. Through the case of India the paper sheds light on how anti-corruptionism feeds into illiberalism, a phenomenon that is currently being observed across the globe.

Friday March 7, 2025

9:30-11:00 am
Infrastructure and Capitalism
Chair: Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Former Global Distinguished Professor, Department of English, New York University

Accumulation Through Electrification: Energy, Sovereignty, and Resistance in Pakistan
Asad Abbasi, PhD Candidate, School of Global Students, University of Sussex

Looking at the ‘energyscape’ (Strauss et al., 2013) in Pakistan, the paper conceptualises the specific form of extraction which occurs through electrification.  Arrival of electricity is the sign of progress and modernity (White, 1943). However, the privatisation of the energy sector in the 1990s in Pakistan, and in the global south, has turned electrification into a tool through which the global and local capital extracts rents. This paper looks at two things. First, how electrification extracts rents. Second, how to conceptualise the resistance to this exploitation. This rent seeking takes place through high tariff prices and paraphernalia of taxation, which are underlined by the long-term contracts with private power generators. Borrowing from David Harvey’s concept, this super-exploitation is conceptualised in the paper as ‘accumulation by electrification’. Against the constant blackouts and high tariff prices, periodic and disparate protests take place in Pakistan. The paper theorises these protests as ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott, 1985) from the bill-paying consumers. The resistance is either the refusal to pay the bills or to install ‘direct lines’. The installing of ‘direct lines’, colloquially termed ‘stealing electricity’ is deemed illegal by the state. The paper looks at how the electricity workers and ‘consumers’ often engage through favours and gifts to subvert, create and benefit from the system which everyone understands to be exploitative. In doing so, this paper brings back the process of exploitation back into the energy system and moves beyond the current lens of ‘corruption’ and ‘patronage’, often used to explain the faltering system.

Madurai-yin Mobile Maadhargal: The Women of Madurai
Nirumpama Jayaraman, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois – Chicago

This project investigates the daily commuting experiences of female travelers utilizing public transport networks in Madurai, India, with a particular emphasis on young female college students. I aim to shed light on how these women navigate their mobile citizenship within the intricate social landscape of a mid-sized city and explore how the interplay of class, caste, and gender influences their everyday travel experiences. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with 50 female undergraduates, I argue that while the notion of mobile citizenship that the state produces often overlaps with the on-ground realities of access and mobility available to women, it also overlooks certain important preconditions infrastructurally and socially. Through the examination of the “Free Bus policy” introduced in Tamil Nadu in the aftermath of COVID-19 to herald a new political era, I explore how movement is embodied through gender, caste, and class even as definitions of mobility get re-defined by local spaces through political, cultural and economic factors.

Drawing from phenomenological evidence of gendered mobilities, this paper will examine how the Indian developmental state, located within networks of global capital accumulation that thrust a notion of urban-led development, fails to capture the entirety of lived everyday conditions. (Kohli 2004; Benjamin 2008). The ‘mobile citizen’ that I focus on straddles the developmentalist logics of a welfare state that promises free bus services, with the lived realities of gender inequalities that impede them from taking advantage of their promised services. Set against the backdrop of caste-empowerment politics in Tamil Nadu, my work explores the cultural and political realities of a neo-liberal developmentalist state that defines a mobile citizen without quite understanding the mobility or the citizen.

Periphery as the New Core: Education at the Crossroads Between the Production of Capital and Urbanism
Shehana Sajad, PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University

The paper attempts to understand the emergence of a global education city embedded in new forms of urbanism in the peripheries of New Delhi. In the last decade, state-led collaboration with private partners-led infrastructure and educational projects has expanded unprecedentedly in India. Based on the recommendations of neoliberal national higher education policies (public-private partnerships), state governments have targeted SEZs (Special Economic Zones), peri-urban regions to boost FDI (Foreign Direct Investment), financialization and commercialization of higher education. Consequently, urban peripheries are becoming major centers for real estate, land acquisition and accumulation, labor migration flows, enclaved spaces, and capital expansion of private lobbies. These expeditious material transformations have led to uneven developments, gentrification, and rentier capitalism in the region, exemplifying the linkages between education and circuits of capital.

This paper is part of the ongoing doctoral project on the production of capital and urbanism broadly in Delhi NCR (National Capital Region), focusing on the education city in Sonipat, Haryana. The paper will engage with emerging sociological imaginaries of state-led capital expansion, new forms of economic life, and inequalities in urban peripheries, furthering the caste-class and socio-spatial divides. The arguments have been articulated based on fieldwork that includes ethnographic observation and focuses on qualitative semi-structured interviews. By employing a theoretical and conceptual framework that interacts with critical theory, political economy and spatial theory of education inspired by Lefebvre, Harvey and Bourdieu, this paper will contribute to the emerging discussions on capitalism in the context of peripheralization, education and urbanization processes in South Asia.

11:00-12:30 pm
New Frontiers of Capital
Chair: Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Director, Pozen Center for Human Rights

Rethinking the Public: Digital Public Goods and Capitalism in Contemporary India
Snigdha Kumar, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

A movement to build, promote, and use “digital public goods” is spreading globally. While  international development organizations (e.g. World Bank) are part of this movement, India enjoys a unique position as its discursive and material creator because of “India Stack.” India Stack is a  constellation of software tools — including Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital ID project and UPI,  a leading digital payment platform — that has been credited with catapulting India to new heights in  the global digital economy. Concretely, India Stack is a data creation and consolidation infrastructure that has enabled the transformation of non-computing industries such as finance into digital  platform industries. Importantly, India Stack’s institutional origins lie across the public and private  sectors. While state and quasi state institutions own, fund, and manage the infrastructure, software  industry professionals conceptualized and promoted the infrastructure. Although scholars have  theorized Aadhaar as a case of neoliberal governmentality, India Stack’s origins and development  into a “digital public good” necessitate a retheorization of the state/market relationship. This is  because capitalism, specifically in its neoliberal moment, is known to shrink the state, privatize the  public, and decimate public goods. How, then, do we make sense of digital public goods? This paper  argues that in blending open-source technology’s ethics of anti-proprietary ownership with free market ideas of the state inducing market competition, digital public goods reveal a reformulation of the category of the “public” — both the political collectivity and its embodiment in the state — in a  way that challenging theorizations of state/market as distinct or blurred

Re-Enchanting Disintermediation: Tokens, Fetishism and the Spirit of Crypto in ‘Digital India
Vinay Brandon, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Abstract

Given the socio-economic contradictions spurring from contemporary Neoliberal Capitalism, dominant scholarly engagement with Crypto as an alternative global financial system tends to draw an intellectual perimeter around a critique of its moneyness. The speculative frenzy among cryptocurrency promoters and investors is commonly assumed to be an agonistic extension of neoliberal greed, financial anxiety, and market positionality. Dominant cultural-economic analysis on Crypto thus usually conflates the micro-politics of Bitcoin’s currency potential with the polysemic narratives of other Crypto tokens, reproducing a commodity view inhering in Bitcoin’s monetary pragmatics, that undermines its potential to engage with the generative potential of the blockchain to spatialize digital democracy in the distinct digital media geographies and political-economic context of the Global South. Thus, existing critical literature on the global diffusion of Crypto-assets mainly ends up reifying a disenchanted critique of the fetish character of all Crypto tokens – critiquing Blockchain’s techno-economic imaginaries in light of its this worldly effects.

This paper will seek to ground India’s trajectory of global leadership in grassroots crypto adoption, usually explained through calculative predictors such as “on-chain transactions”, through the ethnographic case of Satyug’s religious metaverse game, which has been made publicly available at http://www.digitalrammandir.com. Contrary to the institutional disintermediation ideal of Blockchain imaginaries in the Global North, my aim is to illustrate that the magic of nationalism, central authority, and religious cosmologies may be key to the concreteness and articulation of ‘Hindu cybernetic’ ideals of disintermediated digital trust – gaining traction, social validity and recognition within developer communities, startup forums and tinkering guilds in India’s enterprise ecosystem for Crypto and Blockchain. Utilizing a Durkheimian reading of money as a form of religious life conceptually bridging the known and the unknown, anthropological readings of the socially productive fetishism Morris 2017; Pietz 1985, 1987; Pietz et al 2021, 2022, 2023) of digitally issued memecoins and non-fungible tokens, and John Tresch’s (2012) idea of the Cosmogram as a “platform for utopian practice”, my ethnographic paper will illustrate how religious, techno-magical and cosmological narratives can shape, re-temporalize and vivify the techno-political disintermediation ideals of Crypto and Blockchain.

My argument intends to center the “social creativity” of the fetish-character (Graeber, 2005) of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as they permit the circulation of privately issued special-purpose monies to become indexed to cosmological ‘idea futures’, while retaining a financial potentiality through the articulation of disruptive” models of religious markets which present a “Hindu cybernetic” vision of network centrality and magical singularity within ‘Digital India’. Through a grounded theory emerging from this case of Satyug Metaverse and its Digital Temple Cosmogram, I will argue that the dominant cyberlibertarian and cypherpunk ideologies of privacy, individuality, and libertarianism associated with Crypto’s ‘disenchanted’ political disintermediation model of the Global North needs to be revisited when analyzing the growth, imaginaries and models of ascendent Crypto Capitalism in the networked geographies of the Global South.

‘Smart’ Futures: Temporality and Speculative Development in the ‘Smart’ City of Pune, India
Arushi Sharan, PhD Candidate, Department of International Development, University of Oxford

Abstract 

The Smart Cities Mission (SCM), an urban development programme, was launched in India  in 2015, with the vision of creating 100, ‘expertise’ driven, ‘smart’ cities that would be akin  to ‘world cities.’ A key feature of this programme is its ‘lighthouse’ approach, whereby a  majority of the ‘smart’ city projects are concentrated in a small, designated area within the  city limits.

Drawing from literature that argues that space is not just created geographically, but co constituted temporally (Addie et. al., 2024; Datta, 2024; Ghertner, 2017; Kitchin, 2024,  Lefevbre, 1974), I examine the case of Pune ‘smart’ city, using a combination of fieldwork  data and documentary analysis.

I argue that through its ‘lighthouse’ approach, the SCM creates what I call ‘time enclaves’  within geographically contiguous spaces; spatialising time in a way that disassociates the  selected areas from the rest of the city. These enclaves operate in a future time, ‘ahead’ of the  rest of the city, representing progress and wealth that is always imminent, but never  reachable. These enclaves, operating in a future with an undefined (and therefore unlimited)  potentiality for prosperity, are lucrative zones, facilitating speculation for profit.

In Pune, the material manifestation of this vision, mediated through the present, has resulted  in the appropriation of the ‘smart city’ tag by local real estate developers and political elites  for their own gain. Thus, unravelling the garb of futurism of ‘smart’ city, reveals another  dimension of the working of ‘the anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson, 1994), and the  consequences it holds for widening urban inequalities and development.

1:30-3:00 pm
Contradictions of Development
Chair: Omar Kutty, Instructional Professor and Lecturer, Social Sciences Collegiate Division, The University of Chicago

Planning for Overdevelopment, Producing Underdevelopment? Post-Colonial Economic and Regional Planning in the Chota Nagpur Plateau Region
Neel Thakkar, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Princeton University

Abstract: What was the relationship between economic planning and social transformation in early post-colonial India? Existing scholarship on economic planning has been abstract, centered on questions of ideology or technique, while work on social transformation has focused on law and social movements, rather than economic policy. This paper recovers how a range of planners from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s thought of translating economic plans into physical space. I do so by unpacking the professional-academic discipline of regional planning, specifically as it was applied to one area: the Chota Nagpur plateau region in eastern India. This region received more than half India’s total public sector investment in the quarter-century following independence, rendering it India’s ‘crucible’ of development. I argue that while planners had an immense faith in their ability to render nature economically productive through technology, they also had a deep fear of transforming society and politics. The tension between these two imperatives – economic modernization and socio-political conservatism – contributed to the contradictions that, by the 1970s, became so readily apparent, among elite technocrats as well as ground-up people’s movements. The paper is organized in three sections: the first, on river valley projects, highlights how the technological determinism of Indian planners in the 1940s and 1950s sidelined the social question; the second, on urbanization, focuses on how anxieties about political and social revolt shaped the form of new industrial cities like Bhilai; and the third spotlights contemporaneous critiques of the socio-political philosophy and consequences of Indian development planning.

Contextualizing the Emergence of a Coastal Protection Movement Through the Production of Coastal Hazard in a Village in Central Kerala
Nihal Hasan Nishad Azhivelikkakath, Graduate Student, Georg-August Universitat Göttingen

The paper will focus on the emergence of a coastal protection movement in Chellanam located in the state of Kerala in India through a historical contextualisation of how coastal morphology has been appropriated to produce sea erosion in that space. The period of  focus is from 2017, which is when Chellanam as a space got increased attention for its vulnerable geography and seasonal displacement because of sea erosion and it is in 2019 that the movement started its protest in full swing,  continuing till date against the Kerala state.

This paper does not eliminate the historical contingencies and processes of colonialism that paved the way for certain infrastructures to develop in the formation and understanding of making Cochin into a nation-state. The consistent dredging of the Cochin estuary for port development which continues till this date directly aligns with the political economy of Cochin which transformed from a deep sea harbour to the transnational shipment port it is today , called Dubai Port World. The paper thereby locates colonial and post colonial appropriation of the coastal morphology in relation with Cochins emergance as a central node, resulting in Chellanam becoming   environmentally vulnerable to disaster over the years.

Along with port dredging, construction of structures along the coast become contingent on how a littoral flow in Chellanams oceanographic pattern gets appropriated to restrict natural sedimentation patterns that thereby increase the sea level anthropogenically. What emerges through the paper are viewpoints from the bottom-up and top-down on the structures present along the coastline, particularly coastal protection and development policies in the form of sea walls, harbours, groynes, and how their construction become factors that further aggravates coastal erosion in certain spaces causing a spatial production of social inequalities that can be mapped over the years, along the lines of class, caste, and gender. In this manner the paper addresses the emergance of the movement not in a homogenous manner but taking into consideration the aspect of identity and heirarchy which also plays into the larger context on how a coastal fishing village and coastal protection movement align in protesting against the state.

Coaching Conundrum: The Role of State-Private Collaborations in Shaping India’s Educational Landscape
Prafulkumar Dhawale, PhD, Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Abstract- This paper examines the largely overlooked intersection of state-sponsored coaching programs and neoliberal policies in India, with a particular focus on Maharashtra as a case study. The collaboration between the state and private coaching institutions has become a defining feature of various social justice schemes aimed at improving educational access for marginalized communities. By analyzing state initiatives such as BARTI, Mahajyoti, Saarthi, and TRTI, which finance social groups like Scheduled Castes (SC), Other Backward Classes (OBC), Maratha kunbi and Scheduled Tribes (ST), this paper examines how these programs exemplify the broader shift towards privatized, market-driven approaches in India’s educational policy.

The study raises critical questions: How do marginalized communities engage with the state through social justice schemes, and what political divisions emerge in this process? To what extent do these schemes reconcile social justice initiatives with the neoliberal emphasis on market-driven policies? Additionally, how does the collaboration between the state and private institutions influence the allocation of resources and fiscal responsibility?

By situating Maharashtra within the broader framework of India’s neoliberal educational policies, this paper challenges prevailing assumptions that market-driven approaches foster social mobility. Instead, it argues that such collaborations often exacerbate systemic inequalities while diverting public resources to private entities. This analysis highlights the limitations of these partnerships in addressing structural disparities and questions their sustainability as a strategy for fostering long-term human capital development. Ultimately, it will provide valuable insights into broader educational trends across India and South Asia.

3:15-4:30pm
Ecology and Capital
Chair: David Eric Silverberg, PhD Candidate, Department of Religion, Columbia University

Tear of Tea: The Sri Lankan Tea Plantation Sector as a Racial Capitalist Construction
Harshani Fernando, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut

Eurocentric capitalist narratives normally emphasize that the western world introduced the progressive, liberal values to “uncivilized Asians” through colonialism and capitalist values. However, former colonial nations developed a racial capitalism system based on caste structures, gender differentiations and race in countries they colonized. In this paper, I focus on the Malaiyaha Tamil community in Sri Lanka, previously known as the Indian Tamil community.

The Malaiyaha Tamils migrated from India to Sri Lanka over 200 years ago under British rule as laborers to work in coffee and tea plantations. This migration facilitated by the British can be viewed as a system of slavery under the guise of “free labor”. I argue that the British utilized racial identities to establish the plantation system in Sri Lanka and examine the lasting impact of racial capitalism on this community, both historically and in contemporary times. I focus on the concept of “making them coolies”, a racial construction by the British comparable to the term “Negro”, in order to understand how racial capitalism operates. By using Cedric Robinson’s (2020) “Racial Capitalism” as the main theoretical framework, this research deciphers the racialized mechanisms that shaped Sri Lanka’s plantation economy and its continuing effects on the Malaiyaha Tamil community. This research was conducted using a desk review method to refer to secondary sources on this topic. The study of these sources was connected to the framework of racial capitalism. This research offers a new perspective through which we can critique the global structures of racial capitalism and colonialism using the case of the Malaiyaha Tamil community.

Key Terms: Malaiyaha Community, coolie, racial capitalism, colonialism

Glacial Encounters: Scientific Knowledge and Local Practice in the Karakoram Region
Ihsan Arsalan, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, Rice University

This paper examines glaciers as a space of encounter between technoscientic research under capitalism and Indigenous knowledge in the Karakoram Mountains situated in Pakistan. These glaciers are heavily researched by glaciologists and climatologists because of their anomalous growth and surge (Hewitt 2005) patterns as opposed to other glaciers of the world. Scientists make use of on-ground sensors and other data collection devices to record patterns. The paper, using an STS approach, attempts to highlight the unexpected aects and potentialities that these sensors and reports produce using Eleana Kim’s framework (2016) about materials embedded within societies. It also foregrounds how climatological knowledge about glaciers gains dominancy over alternative modes of knowledge because of capitalist structures. The paper will demonstrate points of convergence and divergence between local knowledge about glaciers and scientic research to emphasize the limitations of technoscience by employing a Latourian framework. Through an exploration of local practices around glacial ice and glacier stories (Cruikshank 2005), it will trace means of local resistance in the face of hegemonic technoscientic research conducted under a capitalist paradigm. In doing so, the paper also questions the limits of STS and its inadequacy in understanding alternative knowledge systems. The critical examination of Karakoram Glaciers as spaces of contesting knowledge systems allows us to comprehend the ways in which capitalism sustains itself through technoscience and the ways through which it is resisted by local people.

River, Land, and More-Than-Human Subjects in the Himalayas
Himani Rathore, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, Emory University

In the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, rivers flowing through the Himalayan mountains are a prominent site for state infrastructure including dams for hydroelectric power generation. The state generates 25% of the national share of hydropower from several nationally and World Bank funded projects and is touted as the “renewable energy” hub for northern India (World Bank, 2024). Almost every year, during monsoon rains, mountain land impacted by developmental extraction gives way to water, leading to deaths and material destruction by landslides. During fieldwork in summer 2024, I heard stories of mad nullahs (drains), angry cloudbursts, punishing boulders, and land that had gone bad in the Himalayas. In state reports and news, these events are labelled as – “unprecedented”, “sudden”, “nature’s anger”, and “fragile Himalayan ecology”. In my graduate research project, I analyze these accounts of the processes of landscape destruction and rebuilding to understand their impact on human-landscape relationships in the Himalayas.

Water and landscapes have historically been central to human and more-than-human subjectivation in South Asia. Studying neoliberal Anthropocene ecologies would be incomplete without an assessment of social, political and environmental value creation processes that entangle human subjecthood with more-than-human relationality. In this paper I aim to develop a framework bringing together more-than-human material and affective intimacies, labor of inhabiting and maintaining landscapes, and how these shape ethical being, action, and value. This paper employs a critical environmental anthropology and feminist perspective to understand the presents and desired futures of more-than-human relationality and what it contributes to both a material and symbolic contextualization of environmental change in South Asia.

From Green Revolution to Gene Revolution: The Rise of Transnational, Swadeshi, and Crony Capitalism in India Agriculture
Jawhar Cholakkathodi, PhD, Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad

Indian social and economic fabrics have been shaped and reshaped by agriculture and related practices. Thus, any intervention in the field of agriculture affects the political and governance architecture of the country. The Green Revolution of the 1960s and subsequent developments (during the Cold War) in the agricultural sector marked a drastic shift in the traditional agricultural practices in the country. In the 1990s and during the period of Gene Revolution we witnessed a proliferation of U.S. business interests in agri-business sector. And the convergence of agro-business/capitalism and neo-liberal political economy for the development of agriculture. This international corporate interest not only influenced the economic sector it also influenced the politics of the country at large. This new agrarian capitalism helped to the development of domestic and multinational agribusinesses in Indian subcontinent. As a result, with the collaboration and active engagement of local research institutions, and companies, multinational companies started their operation in India.

In the 1990s, the new economic policies and international strategies facilitated Monsanto (now Bayer) for the commencement of their operation in India. They collaborated with Indian Universities, Indian agri-business firms, distributors and farmers for expanding their market. As we know, any changes whether it’s technical, political or economic in the field of agriculture challenge the social fabric of Indian society. These developments triggered responses from civil society and activists.  They played a key role in drawing public attention to different issues related with the corporate practices. They challenged corporate strategies and highlighted the importance of incorporating societal and environmental concerns in corporate practices. Here I identified three wider groups, such as activists, judiciary and desi agri-business companies’. All these engagements have different modes of actions and strategies for demanding justice for the negative effects associated with the global food system.

Monsanto responded to these challenges through the adaptation, partnership and dialogue. They changed their business strategies and mode of operation according to the socio, political and legal context of India.  The company transformed from a seeds and Biotechnology Company into one which provides different services such as weather information, farming and seed support to farmers. Through providing these kinds of agronomic solutions Monsanto tried to address different environmental catastrophies and ecological issues.

The confluence of agrarian capitalism or corporate capital interest, the nativist (swadeshi) capital interest and recent crony capitalist take over changed the nature of agriculture in the post LPG regime. Exploring the nature and the contours of these changes helps us to understand the new dimension of capitalism in a neo-liberal political sphere. So this paper explore the history and transformation of globalized capitalism, including its regional variants in global south. This paper use historical perspective to understand this transition of agrarian capitalism from the green revolution to the gene revolution.