Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India

The Speaker/Author

Shankar Ramaswami is a Professor of Sociology at O. P. Jindal Global University, India. He works on the anthropologies of globalization, migration, urban workers, and religion in South Asia. He completed an A.B. in Economics at Harvard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Prior to coming to Jindal, he was Lecturer on South Asian Studies in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard, where he taught courses on anthropology, literature, cinema, and religion. At Jindal, he teaches courses on global capitalism, autonomous politics, urban ethnography, religion and justice, the Mahabharata, and Indian cinema.

The Roundtable

Discussants: Sruti Bala (University of Amsterdam), Sarah Niazi (IIAS, Leiden), Nafis Hasan (University of Amsterdam), Aditi Saraf (Utrecht)

Moderator: Ajay Gandhi (Leiden University Institute of Area Studies, Leiden)

Scholarly and policy writing generally conjures economic life in detached and quantitative terms. A defining aspect of human existence – how we work – is relegated in public discourse to top-down terms of strategy and productivity. Shankar Ramaswami’s new book takes a different approach: it explores, through years of engagement with workers in Delhi’s industrial factories, how they cultivate justice and solidarity in precarious circumstances. Rather than mere passive subjects, this book shows them to be deliberate agents with complex desires, grounded in ethical and religious worldviews. Moderator: Ajay Gandhi (Leiden) Discussants: Sruti Bala (University of Amsterdam), Sarah Niazi (IIAS Leiden), Nafis Hasan (University of Amsterdam), Aditi Saraf (Utrecht) Respondent: Shankar Ramaswami (O.P. Jindal Global University, India)

Registration (required)

All are welcome, but registration using the web form on this page is required, as seating is limited.