Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6:30-8:30 PM from January 7-16
As of 2019, India’s top 9 billionaires hold as much wealth as the country’s bottom 50% – more than 680 million people combined. This course will explore the processes that have made poverty and inequality particularly intractable in the Indian subcontinent. Focusing on the 20th century, we will examine crises in agriculture, the cooptation of labor movements by nationalist and religious reactionaries, and postcolonial imperatives of privatization. While most of our readings will be about India, we will draw parallels to other South Asian countries as well as larger dynamics across the Global South.
Day 1 Colonial Famines, Caste, and Impoverishment
Day 2 The Rise and Fall of the Left in India’s 20th Century
Day 3 Postcolonial Failures & Neocolonialism
Day 4 Privatization & the Present
Sheetal Chhabria is Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College and the author of Making the Modern Slum: the Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington Press 2019).