The political lives, identities, and influence of the Indian diaspora have been much discussed in recent years. This paper will contextualise current political trends within a longer historical trajectory, and explore the genealogies of contemporary mobilisations, tensions, and transnational networks.

The talk analyses civil rights activism in Indian politics. It traces the path taken by voluntary and independent citizen groups to secure civil rights. In that backdrop the talk proposes some analytical insights to show how such activism was recieved, re-worked, and deployed to create a particular ethical practice of civil rights activism in a postcolonial context.

In the past decades, India and other emerging developing economies have been playing a growing role in global development, mostly through what is known as South-South Cooperation (SSC). This presentation explores some of the ways accountability has been understood, disputed and negotiated within India in the context of country's growing development cooperation role. Looking at accountability politics in the context of India's SSC can reveal ongoing disputes over India's international identity as both a 'Southern/developing country' as well as a 'rising power'.

Book Launch - Seeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan

Ersama block in coastal Odisha, India, was devastated in the supercyclone of October 1999, an event that marked a turning point in the disaster mitigation and management approach for the state. Through research spanning over a decade, I observed how post-supercyclone Ersama has undergone significant transformation in the way its lands are imagined and used, through the introduction of a new form of shrimp aquaculture as the principal livelihood. At the heart of this imagination is a powerful notion of the landscape rendered as 'empty' and 'unproductive' by the supercyclone.

The talk will scrutinise theories on the emergence of a vernacular literary tradition in the “Hindi Belt” (Madhyadeśa) and examine the earliest extant works coming from the region. While both Hindi and Urdu have produced literary histories that extend for a millennium or more, most early claims are untenable in the light of later philological research. The talk will examine the role of Jain stories and of a primarily Jain literary idiom rooted in Apabhramsha and originating in Gujarat in setting examples for later works.

This talk asks what it takes to belong among the “cosmopolitan elite” in international society. With a reflexive sociological sensibility, it examines the ways in which the career diplomats of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) have sought to secure recognition and equal standing in international society by inhabiting a cosmopolitan habitus. Instead of analysing cosmopolitanism in the conventional register of political theory, as an egalitarian ethic, the article considers “actually existing cosmopolitanism” as an elite aesthetic.

During the 1980s, the Indian electorate was characterized by a rise in partisan de-alignment and an increased volatility in its voting intensions. How did India’s political elites respond to the challenge posed by the changing landscape of voters? This paper explores how an approach of technologism and a recourse to political marketing emerged as the principal solutions to this problem.

This talk will look at the years 1940–42 in Bengal with a view to analyse the social fuel that made the Quit India Movement possible in the province. War-time colonial policies created multiple disruptions and intrusions in the lives of the people of Bengal, building up anxieties and mass discontent. Coupled with widespread rumours, this profoundly reconfigured the image of the colonial state. This paper attempts to tap into the psyche of colonised minds in Bengal in the early stages of the war, which began to question British invincibility in the face of serious reverses in Southeast Asia.