Urban India: Historical Processes and Contemporary Experience
Participants
Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of public space and the cultural poetics of the street in Mumbai. He is a recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation and the American Institute of Indian Studies. His recently co-edited book (with Colin Mcfarlane) is titled Urban Navigations: Politics, Space and the City in South Asia (Routledge, 2010).
Rebecca M. Brown is Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Art and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and curatorial projects focus on colonial and post-1947 South Asian visual culture. Her publications include Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (Routledge, 2010), Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Duke University Press, 2009), Asian Art (coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Blackwell, 2006), and articles in Res, Interventions, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Archives of Asian Art, Journal of Urban History, Screen, and Journal of Asian Studies.
Véronique Dupont is a Senior Research Fellow in demography at the French Institute of Research for Development, and an associated member of the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies (Paris). She was the Director of the Centre de Sciences Humaines of New Delhi from 2003 to 2007. Her main research themes have been the interrelations between the transformations of metropolitan territories, population mobility, and urban policies, including slum policies and the processes of socio-spatial exclusion, with a focus on Delhi. Her recent publications include: La ville en Asie du Sud [Cities in South Asia], edited with J.G. Heuzé, Purushartha 26, EHESS, Paris, 2007.
Tejaswini Ganti is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and its Program in Culture & Media at New York University. Her areas of research expertise include: Indian cinema, South Asia, anthropology of media, visual anthropology/visual culture, popular culture, cultural policy, nationalism, postcolonial theory, diasporas, and theories of globalization. Her most recent book: Producing Bollywood: The Hindi Film Industry in an Era of Neoliberalism is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
Vinay Gidwani is Associate Professor of Geography and Global Studies at University of Minnesota and Adjunct Associate Professor of Geography at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is interested in capitalist transformations of agriculture and agroecologies, and their inter-connections with cities through labor and capital flows. In attempting to understand various spatial resolutions of the ‘agrarian question’ he foregrounds three areas of research: first, the cultural politics and geographies of work; second, the more-than-human constitution of social relations; and third, emergent terrains of injustice and struggle. He is presently working on urban and regional circuits of waste, and the labor processes that emerged around these, in the growth of metropolitan Delhi post-1930. This endeavor is part of a larger project called The Afterlives of Waste that is an investigation into the spatial histories, political uses, and contemporary global political economy of commodity detritus. His analytical approach builds on a range of intellectual currents, most prominently agrarian and urban studies, political ecology, postcolonial theory and various strands of Marxism, particularly Marxist geography. He is the author, most recently, of Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Nandini Gooptu is University Reader in South Asian Studies and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. She is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Unna V. Govindarajan is Research Coordinator at the Janaagraha Applied Research Program (J-ARP). She is co-author of Citizenship Index for Bangalore study (with Chetan B. Singai) and co-author of the article, Revisiting the Urban Electoral Processes (with Anamika Ajay), forthcoming in NIPFP journal, India. She has also conducted laboratory research in the Life Sciences at SRI International; market research at Frost & Sullivan; and pursued entrepreneurship in a software consulting company, GTI. She holds a B.A. in Genetics from UC Berkeley and MBA from Santa Clara University.
Jyoti Hosagrahar is faculty at Columbia University, New York and Director of Sustainable Urbanism International, both at Columbia University and in Bangalore, India. As an architect, planner, and historian, her areas of expertise include urban heritage management and sustainable development. She serves as an expert on cultural heritage and urban sustainability with UNESCO. She is the author of Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (Architext Series, Routledge, 2005), which was awarded a book prize by the International Planning History Society in 2006. She has been the recipient of grants from the Graham Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal on Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, Journal of Planning History, and Buildings and Landscapes and on the board of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. Since 2006 Hosagrahar has been extensively involved in the conservation and sustainable development of historic cities in India in partnership with UNESCO as well as the Government of Karnataka.
Anirudh Krishna is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. His research investigates how poor communities and individuals in developing countries cope with the structural and personal constraints that result in poverty and powerlessness. His recent research projects have examined poverty dynamics at the household level for 35,000 households in India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and North Carolina, USA. A recent book, One Illness Away: How People Escape Poverty and Become Poor (Oxford University Press, 2010) presents these findings. He has authored or co-authored five other books and more than fifty journal articles and book chapters. Before returning to academia, he spent fourteen years managing rural and urban development initiatives of the government of India.
Purnima Mankekar is Associate Professor in the departments of Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her research is in feminist media studies, urban anthropology, South Asian and South Asian American studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript on transnational South Asian public cultures, and is also working on a manuscript on post-9/11 racial violence experienced by Sikhs and Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area. In collaboration with Akhil Gupta, she is also pursuing a long-term ethnographic project on call-center workers in Bangalore.
Ranjani Mazumdar is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender, and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Mazumdar has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and is a founding member of Mediastorm, India’s first women’s film collective, which received the Chameli Devi Jain Award for outstanding media professionals among women. Mazumdar’s documentaries include, Delhi Diary 2001, on violence, memory and the city, The Power of the Image (co-directed) a television series on Bombay cinema and Prisoner of Gender, which won the second prize at an International Television documentary festival. Her current research focuses on the intersection of technology, travel, and cinema in 1960s Bombay cinema, globalization and film culture, and the visual culture of film posters.
Lisa Mitchell is Assistant Professor of anthropology and history in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press, 2009 and Permanent Black, 2010), which was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities by the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is currently working on a new book on the role of public space in the history of Indian democracy, and on a reader on The City in South Asia (Penguin India).
Rakesh Mohan is Professor in the School of Management and Senior Fellow of the Jackson Institute at Yale University. His areas of research and policy expertise include: economic reforms and liberalization, industrial economics, urban economics, infrastructure studies, economic regulation, monetary policy, and the financial sector. He is also Vice Chairman of the Indian Institute of Human Settlements. Prior to assuming his current academic position at Yale University, he served as deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India where he was in charge of monetary policy, financial markets, economic research and statistics. He also served as Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance, Government of India and has recently been appointed Chairman of the high level national transport development policy committee by the Indian Prime Minister with the rank of Minister of State. His most recent books include: Growth With Stability: Central Banking in an Emerging Market Economy (forthcoming from Oxford University Press); The Indian Economy: Performance and Prospects (edited with S. Acharya, Oxford University Press, 2010) and Monetary Policy in a Globalized Economy: A Practitioner’s View (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Vikramāditya Prakāsh received his B. Arch. from the Chandigarh College of Architecture, India (1986), and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University (1989, 1994). He taught at the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, India (1991 - 1993) and Arizona State University, Tempe (1994-1996) before coming to the University of Washington in Fall 1996, where he has served as the Associate Dean, and as Chair of the Department of Architecture. Dr. Prakāsh has published several paper and books including Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (University of Washington Press, 2002); A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010, second edition) and Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (co-edited with Peter Scriver, Routledge, 2007). He is partner in Verge Architecture with Leah C. Martin.
Mrinalini Rajagopalan is currently Postdoctoral Associate in the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. She received her PhD from the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Her areas of research and teaching include: the architecture and urbanism of modern and contemporary South Asia, the visual cultures of development in post-independence India and the history of heritage preservation in colonial and postcolonial India. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled: Building Histories: The Social Lives of Delhi’s Monuments from the Colonial Past to the Postcolonial Present. She is also co-editor (with Madhuri Desai) of the forthcoming book Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Architecture, Identity, and Politics, due to be published by Ashgate later this year.
Ramesh Ramanathan is a social entrepreneur, and works on urban issues in India. He is co-founder of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a non-profit focused on transforming quality of life in urban India. He is also Chairman of Janalakshmi Social Services, a not-for-profit social business holding company that has promoted enterprises in urban financial inclusion and urban affordable housing. He works closely with government on urban issues in a pro-bono capacity. His current positions include being the National Technical Advisor, Government of India for the Jawarharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the country’s flagship urban mission. Prior to his social initiatives, he worked in a leadership position at Citibank, North America. He has an MS in Physics from BITS Pilani, and an MBA from Yale University. He was nominated as one of the Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum in 2007.
Swati Ramanathan is co-founder of Janaagraha, Centre for Citizenship and Democracy (JCCD), a non-profit organization focused on improving quality of urban citizenship and quality of urban infrastructure and services based in Bengaluru, India. She is Chairperson of the India Urban Space (IUSP) Foundation, which works in partnership with the Government of India on two key challenges of modern India—urban planning and land reforms. She was a member of the State Urban Agenda for Rajasthan (SUARAJ), initiated by the Chief Minister, anchoring initiatives in land reform, GIS & Spatial Data Centre for Rajasthan, heritage conservation planning and policy. She was honoured by the Chief Minister with the Rajyotsava Puraskar (Rajasthan’s highest civilian award) for her work on land title and the development of the masterplan for Jaipur. She holds a Master’s degree from the Pratt Institute, N.Y., and prior to returning to India, has worked in the United States (Van Summern Architecture, Planning and Design) and the United Kingdom (Gensler and Associates).
Malini Ranganathan is a post-doctoral research fellow in the new Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy (SDEP) strategic initiative, based both out of the Beckman Institute and Geography department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has a PhD from the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. Her dissertation, drawing extensively upon theoretical and methodological traditions in human geography and cultural anthropology, investigated the political ecology of water in peri-urban Bangalore. In particular, she focused on how practices of collective action among informalized lower middle class groups at the urban fringe encounter and renegotiate the implementation of neoliberal, market-oriented water policies. Her current research interests encompass associationism and the peripheralized middle class; the political ecology of urban flood vulnerability and implications therein for climate change policy; and the anthropology of reforming municipal bureaucracies.
Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. She works on cities after globalization, specifically in the intersections of urban planning, design, art, violence, and speculation in the articulation of the contemporary global city. She is the author of numerous articles on these topics and is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Speculative City.
Aromar Revi is an international researcher, practitioner, and consultant with a quarter century of inter-disciplinary experience in sustainability, public policy and governance, the political economy of reform, development, technology and human settlements. He is the Director of the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS) India’s prospective independent national Innovation University addressing its challenges of urbanisation through an integrated programme of education, research, and advisory services. He has been a senior advisor to various ministries of the Government of India, consulted with a wide range of UN, multilateral and bilateral development institutions and works on economic, environmental, and social change at global, regional, and urban scales. He has led over a hundred major research and consulting assignments in India and abroad; lectured and taught at two dozen universities across four continents; has helped structure, design, and review development investments in excess of $ 4 billion; worked on three of the world’s ten largest cities; with communities across twenty-five of India’s twenty-eight states apart from multiple international projects in nearly a dozen countries.
Rashmi Sadana teaches at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from U.C. Berkeley in 2003, and from 2003-2007 was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, first as part of an NSF project in Anthropology and then on the Committee on Global Thought. In 2008, she received a one-year fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies to carry out research on the Delhi Metro. Her first book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
Karen Seto is Associate Professor in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. Her areas of research expertise include: the human transformation of land and the links between urbanization, global change, and sustainability. Her geographic region of specialization is China, where she has worked on urbanization issues for more than fifteen years. She has also had research projects in India, Vietnam, Qatar, and the US. She is Co-Chair of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project, and a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.
Helen Siu is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. Since the 1970s, she has conducted historical and ethnographic fieldwork in South China and Hong Kong, examining socialist and post-socialist transformations, the revival of market towns, community festivals and rituals, and lately, migration and vernacular modernity. In 2001, she set up the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Institute promotes creative, interdisciplinary research that aims to bond scholars in major universities in North America, Europe, China and Hong Kong. Her recent publications include Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity and Frontier in Early Modern China (University of California Press, 2006, co-editors Pamela K. Crossley and Donald Sutton); SARS: Reception and Interpretation in Three Chinese Cities (Routledge 2007, co-editor Deborah Davis); Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population (Hong Kong University Press 2008, co-editor Agnes Ku); Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce and Regional Culture in South China (Hong Kong University Press 2010).
K. Sivaramakrishnan is Professor of Anthropology and Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He also serves as Chair of the South Asian Studies Council in the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. His areas of research expertise include: environmental history, political anthropology, cultural geography, development studies, and science studies, with a particular focus on the colonial and contemporary history and anthropology of forests and wildlife conservation in eastern India. His recent books include: The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (edited with Akhil Gupta, Routledge 2010); Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (edited with Gunnel Cederlof, University of Washington Press, 2006); Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (edited with Arun Agrawal, Stanford University Press, 2003) and Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford University Press, 1999).