 This is an edited excerpt from an interview conducted by Vishwabandhu of Prof. Uma Dasgupta based on her recent book “History of Santiniketan: Rabindranath Tagore and His Life’s Work, 1861-1941.” The full interview can be found on Youtube. Q: In trying to find studies of Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati, I was not able to find so many. You would think that given the enormity and the importance of the project there would be a lot of work done on it. It seems it has not been given enough attention, and I wanted to ask you if you agree with this? A: Yes, I do very much so. I mean, Tagore was obviously a great writer, a great poet, and that goes without saying, but he was also a very committed educator, that is hardly known. And there have been, so far as I saw from my research, and this is probably quite factual, no histories of Santiniketan. There have been contemporary tracts. When I was looking at the archives, I was asking the archivists and the librarians at Santiniketan, in the Rabindra Bhavana repository, which is the major repository of Tagore’s works. And they said there are teachers’ pamphlets. Teachers who taught at the time wrote little pamphlets about their own experience, and that we do call contemporary tracts in historical research. So I could use them, but there were just a very few, not even a handful, but no connected history of either Santiniketan or Sriniketan or Visva-Bharati. Q: I know you’ve had a very long association with Santiniketan. Maybe you could just talk about that a little bit. A: I had a strong family connection because my mother’s mother lived her widowed years in Santiniketan. She was a lady from Dhaka. When her husband died, who was a lawyer in Dhaka, she had four children who were still growing up, it was a family of sixteen children, but four were still in the age of ten to fifteen, sixteen. And Tagore used to go to Dhaka, of course, and as was the tradition in those times, he was obviously by then quite a celebrity by the time he was going to Dhaka. And the ladies would get together and cook a wonderful meal for him each day of his stay. And one of them was my grandmother, my father’s mother. So there was a connection. There was also another connection which was my grandfather’s youngest sister was a child widow, like so many were at that time. And the two child widows, I mean two remarriages of child widows that Tagore actually was present for—one was his own son, I won’t go into that, but the second was a teacher of the Santiniketan school who was married to my pishima, my mother’s father’s sister, who grew up in their household—they were like one family. And so Tagore wrote to my grandmother saying, “Why are you raising these little children in Dhaka all on your own? Just come to Santiniketan. We’ll have a house ready for you.” That was the kind of place Santiniketan was. How did I come to this work? Because in 1973, when my husband was teaching at Presidency College and I was teaching at Jadavpur University, our son was born. And we were then in Oxford on two fellowships, each of us. And our son was born in Oxford. And my husband’s teacher, who was then the Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, an eminent historian called Pratul Chandra Gupta, wrote to my husband saying, “Why don’t you come to Santiniketan and help us improve the history department?” Earlier vice-chancellors always did this because they knew what Santiniketan was about. And so my husband said to me, “If you agree, we can give up our Kolkata jobs and take our little boy, raise him there, and serve Santiniketan.” And that sort of answered something of a question that we all should have, which is how were we so indifferent to Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan? Because I began by saying in response to your first question that he was hardly known as an educator. Everyone knew that Santiniketan was there. Everyone thought it must be a great institution. But Bengali intellectuals didn’t come forward to help. Bengali intellectuals, Bengali academics somehow treated it as a rural institution, which it was, but which it was meant to be as well. Not for the sake of it being rural, but he wanted a close connection between Santiniketan and the city. In other words, between the village and the city. And so when I came I was looking for a post-doctoral research project because once you start research you don’t want to stop it. And nor did my husband want me to stop my research. And that’s why he said, “Look, try and find something close by to Santiniketan to work on. Then we can all be together as a family without you having to go anywhere because the child is so small.” And I completely agreed with him. And so we came, and I began to look at the Rabindra archives, which we always knew to be literary archives, which it is, but that it had so many letters—thousands of letters—from all over the world to Tagore. And he also answered letters. And that, I think, we never factored in. And so when I found nothing written on Santiniketan as a history, and the archivist also didn’t know that there was anything, quite rightly, except those tracts, I said, “What about the letters?” They said, “Yes, the letters are there. They’re still being hand-listed. We don’t have a catalogue.” And I said, “Okay, never mind. Can you still let me read those letters and I’ll be very careful?” And I did. And I just—I didn’t know who had come, who had gone, how Santiniketan had come up. So I just started from A because it was alphabetical. Their hand-listing was alphabetical, and although it was incomplete, I started from A and went through the files. And there was so much that he wrote on Santiniketan. There was so much that he wrote about what he wanted of Santiniketan as the years passed, and what were his disappointments, what were his hopes. So that’s how I actually wrote a history of Santiniketan and a history of Sriniketan. That was my research, which went on for years, because Tagore needs time to really understand. Q: You use the term “the Santiniketan quest” in your book, and you connect it to Rabindranath’s philosophy, and what I found particularly striking was that you connected it to his approach to Indian history. And so I just wondered if you could expand on that a little bit—what the Santiniketan quest was and how it was connected to his philosophy. A: Tagore wrote essays on India’s history, and Jadunath Sarkar, who was a grounded historian unlike Tagore, in fact, translated one of them into English because Tagore wrote all of those five, six essays on India’s history in Bangla. He thought this is a very important history. And yet, as you know, Tagore was not reading in the archives. Now he did actually believe that we were not, in that sense, a nation because we were not a state. That’s one thing. And therefore that sense of nation hadn’t come because after all we were colonized earlier and, you know, close to Tagore’s life and in Tagore’s life a second time. We don’t always talk of the Mughal period as a colony, but it definitely was because there was a lot of merging of cultures, right? But the British was a different issue because after all they were in all senses foreign, whereas, of course, in some senses the Mughals were also foreign, but that’s not how we treated it. Because what Tagore believed—and what is, I think, historically proven—that India, not being for ages a nation-state as it is now, was a civilization, a social civilization, where many other streams of cultures were coming in. And this is why there has been a race problem, which he never denied. He said there is a race problem and there has been a race problem. It is a race problem to the end of his life. He said it hadn’t been resolved. But what had happened—he completely believed in that and he documented it in his own way in his essays—was that there was a continuous attempt to bring the Hindus and Muslims together. But the conflict part was very—was obviously getting a bit sometimes out of hand for various reasons, for religious reasons. However, what gave him so much hope was that although it hasn’t been resolved, there is a continuous attempt. This was because of two things. One was—where was the problem? The problem was they lived next to one another, Hindus and Muslims. Santiniketan was an ideal site for an alternative education because there were Hindus, Muslims and tribals living in the same area. So they were staying next to one another but they wouldn’t marry, they wouldn’t eat with one another. That was the basic thing, or if you call it race. They wouldn’t, you know, this thing of touch, which as you know is very endemic to orthodox Hinduism and also orthodox Islam. So therefore how is it being resolved? At least, you know, they were staying next to one another physically, although there were these differences. Secondly, he believed very much—he was actually devoted to the medieval saints whom he called the people’s saints. Nanak was one of them, his great hero. He wrote on the Sikh gurus. And then there was Chaitanya who brought this great movement of love and mingling with one another. And actually almost teaching the people that there is no other preacher greater than man. So, you know, that whole thing of humanism, human—it’s all related to this. So man is the most—there is no other greater than man. So don’t fight as man and man. Come together. Q: I’m very moved by what you’re saying, the emphasis on the human. And I mean you see it all over Santiniketan. You see it not only in his own writings but, for example, in Kala Bhavana and all of these great artists that come out of Kala Bhavana. Because really, when I say emphasis on the human, I’m pointing to your comment that he didn’t think about inter-civilizational dialogue as something between governments but really between men, you know, people knowing each other. Basically the idea that man must know man, and woman must know woman, but man in the very general—mankind. And I really see that kind of flowering in the experiment of Kala Bhavana. And to me it seems like the artwork and the Santiniketan school of art is something that is of historic importance for all of mankind. And it’s really—I see it as an achievement of human beings, but really again understudied, I feel. So I was hoping you could say something about this: what made all this outburst of creativity possible. A: Yes, because you know this entire experiment of forming a different education, a new education, which is what Santiniketan is about—I remember I started by saying bring the city and the village close—it had nothing to do with colonial education, which was the only other thing there was. However, what did we want at that time? Even Nehru has written about this, leave alone Tagore. We wanted English education because we knew that the only way to get jobs from the government was—and indeed colonial education was aiming at that—they were creating clerks, doctors. And the middle-class Indians were lending themselves to this. So this whole thing of being indifferent to Tagore’s institutions, which you asked in the beginning—why didn’t we serve more, why didn’t Bengali intellectuals serve Santiniketan, as of course some of them did, but a very few—he had more Western human support, I don’t mean money. Artists came from the West. They loved Santiniketan. Tagore announced, “Anyone who likes my idea, come to Santiniketan.” Kshitimohan Sen said to him—one of the core people there—Amartya Sen’s grandfather, incidentally, “You are inviting all these people. How will we look after them?” And Tagore said, “Look, I can only play the flute at the gate and invite people. You will have to do the looking after. Don’t worry. You have only to give them your love. They will be happy.” So therefore, yes, one other element in this whole experiment was that he did not of course join the Pan-Asian movement of Okakura, but Okakura was one of his closest friends, although Okakura died young. If anything could be put up as a contrast between Western colonialism and our larger identity, not just as Indian identity, was our Asian identity. So Asian unity meant a lot to him. And indeed Visva-Bharati’s early name, the early name that he thought of for a larger university, was an Eastern University. In fact, there is a whole long essay that he wrote which is called “An Eastern University.” And then there is this very moving and historically important correspondence with C. F. Andrews, saying, “You know, Charlie, you thought I belong only to Asia, but I’ve been now to the world.” He said, “I can’t just call it an Eastern University. It must be an international university. So that’s how Visva-Bharati got its name. No, Charlie, please understand, I belong to the world. The world has accepted me.” So all these things were coming together. It was becoming larger and larger, I think, and the concept was growing. Kala Bhavana actually started before Visva-Bharati was institutionalized, in 1919. Kala Bhavana meant so much to Tagore. For Kala Bhavan, Tagore was writing to Abanindranath, who was a swadeshi and remained a swadeshi for a very long time. Tagore leapt out of it, but not Abanindranath. And the Bengal School of Art, which Abanindranath founded, of course a very remarkable school of art and has been recognized to be so, was entirely a swadeshi based art movement. Tagore said, “Please, uncle and nephew, please go to Japan. Look at their art. It’s very important for us to know Japan’s art.” A (continuing): I just want to say one thing about the—because it was so important to your intellectual—about your question why Bengali intellectuals, which you started with—why was Tagore’s experiment marginalized, why wasn’t it taken up. Because I think of what I was saying then, that middle-class education was very important to the Bengali psyche and to the Indian psyche. I think it was also the Punjabi psyche, if one reads Tandon’s book. In other words, they wanted to be professionals. And one can’t quite blame them for it because new ideas were coming into it. But then one has to understand therefore they had no time for an alternative education, which was the Santiniketan/Sriniketan/Viswabharati experiment. In one phrase, one must say this: that it was an alternative education where no degrees were ever given. And the students came to Tagore in his time and said, “Look, where will we go? You are not giving us any degrees.” He understood. He was not at all an unsympathetic man. This is important for us to understand this. He said, “However, I cannot have Visva-Bharati give degrees, but I will arrange for you. I understand your need for it.” He tied up with the University of Calcutta that their syllabus would be taught as a parallel course to the Visva-Bharati course in Santiniketan for those students who wanted it. And some students did, and they took their exams at the University of Calcutta and their degrees from the University of Calcutta. And Ashutosh Mukherjee, who was also a great intellectual and greatly understood Tagore at his core, said, “Yes, of course, let that be done.” And this is why Visva-Bharati also actually had graduates who were Visva-Bharati graduates not by degree but Calcutta University graduates by degree, because they did two parallel courses. So in other words, what I’m trying to say was that it was alternative education absolutely from A to Z, because Tagore did not give degrees. That has all changed. You said very beautifully that it is a futuristic thing, and I hope, and it must be, philosophically it is, but I don’t see any hope for it as something that will completely reverse itself. He didn’t think Visva-Bharati would survive. And that was why he said to Gandhi—his last letter to Gandhi was this—“Will you take it as a trust? Will you be its trustee if you believe this is an institution of national importance, if you believe it is an institution of international importance, then I hope my country will believe the same and preserve it. And I leave it to you.” I won’t go into Gandhi’s answer. But why did he say this? He was anxious that this institution would not survive. So I think you have to connect all this in your understanding of the experiment, why in a sense it failed. You could call it a failure. How many people are following this? It’s a central government university. The University Grants Commission has to follow their syllabus, has to follow their degree, absolutely from bottom up and up down all the way. So it can’t survive as it was conceptualized. Q: Maybe in the future, you know. I mean, you’re right, Umadi, that, you know, in one sense it has been a failure, but I hope that in the future it can be taken up. A: Indeed, so do I. I join you in that hope. Professor Uma Das Gupta is a historian and a renowned Tagore biographer. She is the author of many books and articles on Tagore.
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by Supriya Roychowdhury  I’m absolutely delighted to be given a chance to pay my personal tribute to Shripad Dange. Part of my PhD thesis was on the textile industry in Maharashtra, and I was doing fieldwork in Mumbai in the ’90s, when Shripad Dange was no longer alive. But his name was a vibrant presence in the industry to all whom I spoke to.
And he actually wrote the first report on the rights of textile workers, which anyone who studies the textile industry in India views almost as a bible. Dange was one of the founders of the Communist Party of India (CPI), and he was a typical politician of those times. He joined the nationalist movement with Gandhi, but he later turned to leftist organizations. And his long political career—he had thirteen years as a political prisoner—and, particularly the last few decades, were marked by many vicissitudes. Unfortunately, towards the end, he actually had to leave the CPI, of which he was the founder and one of the foremost leaders. For me, what is represented through Dange’s life is that he actually represented the quintessential left politician of those times, moving very effectively between the trade union movement and the political party, that is, the CPI, of which he was a leader. But he was also the foremost founder of the trade union movement in the Maharashtra textile industry before he formed the CPI. And in fact, two of his most successful elections to the Lok Sabha, from the Bombay Central constituency, was the direct effect of his work amongst textile workers. Why is this important? Because this movement from trade unionism to political parties is something which seems to have almost disappeared from our political world today. Political party leaders can no longer think of the working class as a constituency since they must speak to wider audiences. And in the process, any discourse or narrative on the working class is obviously dissolved to a great extent. We don’t really have the construction, or the political construction, of a working-class narrative. Several of us are trying—academics, trade unionists, politicians on the ground. But at the level of the nation, there isn’t a working-class narrative anymore. On their part, this vacuum has also affected trade unions, because trade unions speak for a smaller constituency now, that is, the organized working class. And they don’t therefore have a political platform on which they can stand. And many trade unions have actually moved from being ideologically inspired organizations to very professional outfits who are pursuing very specific, limited objectives within the framework of workers’ rights. As things are, the platform from which they are speaking gives them no scope to talk about the larger working class as such. So the trade union movement is localized in space and time. This brings me to the topic which is industrialization in India and the future of the working class. And I think one has to remind oneself of the deceleration of the communist movement, which can be a starting point actually for looking at the process of industrialization in India. As of the 2024 elections, the parliamentary seats for both the CPI and the CPM have been reduced to, I think, two and four respectively. And there has been a steady deceleration of this. Of course there is a groundswell of ideology and activism inspired by socialist ideas, but we’re not going into that. We’re looking at more national figures—in that sense, if you look at the performance of the CPI and the CPM, they are not anymore national players. Historically, communist or leftist parties have been closely aligned to industrial working classes through a network of trade unions. So one way of looking at the deceleration of the communist parties and at the decline of leftist ideas and ideologies in India is to look at what has happened to the industrial working class itself. Borrowing from the experience of industrially developed countries, the genesis of the modern industrial class happens through the transfers of large numbers of people from farms to factories. And in economics, this is known as structural transformation: that is, the shift from farms to factories, from country or rural areas to urban areas, from informal work to formal work. This is the standard trajectory that the developed countries have followed, and even late developers like Japan, South Korea, etc., i.e. East Asian countries have followed this trajectory. Now, in India, it’s a very stark and staring feature of our development that this expected transfer from agriculture to industry, from farm to factory, has not really happened. It is true that since economic liberalization, there is fast growth in GDP, there is industrial development, and there is a lot of wealth generation. We are going to be the third largest economy very soon. We are going to be the economic powerhouse of the future. However, we need to remind ourselves that the largest number of working people are still in the agricultural sector despite the fact that agriculture’s share in GDP has declined systematically. It is now only 14 percent. There are successive agrarian crises reflected in rural indebtedness, farmer suicides, lack of public investment in agriculture, and very low and very slow development of large swathes of the country’s rural areas. About 44 to 46 percent of the working population is still employed in agriculture. Now it is expected that in the course of development, industry’s share in GDP will exceed that of agriculture because of higher productivity. And this has actually happened in India. So industry’s share in GDP is 25 percent as compared to agriculture’s 14 percent. But the percentage of people who find employment in industry is actually very low. It is 25 percent. If you leave out the construction sector and you look only at manufacturing—construction is non-manufacturing—then it is only 11 percent. And there have been steady decline in the number of people who can find jobs in the manufacturing sector, particularly in organized manufacturing. On the other hand, there is, of course, the service sector. The service sector now leads development and economic growth. Fifty-five percent of GDP is accounted for by the service sector. But the growth of employment in services has been quite low in proportion. It is now only 31 percent, having risen from about 20–23 percent in 2013. There is obviously a great disjuncture between output and generation of employment. In 2009, when the first Urban Poverty Report came out, one of our leading economists, S. A. Hashim said that the reason that agriculture continues to harbour large numbers of people, despite the fact that it does not have the space to do so, is a very complex problem, but one that is closely related to the kind of urban and industrial development that has happened in cities. We therefore need to look at what the service sector offers. The service sector offers highly paid jobs to technically qualified people. And there has been a spillover into other service sectors like hospitality, maintenance, security, housekeeping, and so on and so forth.There has been a huge boom in employment in all of these sectors. But these jobs are all typically unprotected and unregulated. They hover around the minimum wage. There is no security of tenure. So the attraction of those in rural areas seeking jobs in urban areas for the service sector is actually very limited. This is part of the reason why we are not seeing a major transfer of the job-seeking population from rural to urban areas. Mainly what I wanted to emphasize is that in the process of economic growth and development, typically large numbers of unskilled or even semi-skilled labour look for factory jobs. And that is where the Indian economy has, to a certain extent, failed these job seekers. There are a large number of surveys but just taking one particular survey, the Enterprise and Establishment survey during the period 2017–18 to 2022–23, the loss of jobs in manufacturing was in the order of four million. The policy response to this seeming crisis in jobs has been that governments have come up repeatedly with industrial policies with a focus on creating employment. When the UPA government was there, we had the National Manufacturing Policy of 2011, which aimed to create 100 million jobs in the sector by 2022. It didn’t happen. The NDA government, as we all know, has this paradigm of Make in India. Very recently, in 2025, the National Manufacturing Mission has re-emphasized the goal of boosting the sector with a projected outlay of almost 200 lakh crores in sectors like automobiles, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and so on and so forth. Now making policy is one thing. Policies, as we know, are often driven by political imperatives. Often it is a reaction or a response to data coming out on joblessness. As distinguished from policies, there is the question of a policy paradigm. I want to emphasize that the overall policy paradigm post–economic liberalization continues to be marked by features which are not necessarily conducive to creating jobs in the organized factory sector. Essentially, liberalization, which came in the 1990s, meant that the state was withdrawing from its role as leading industrial development through large public sectors and would increasingly depend on private capital as the driver of investment in the industrialization project. So the state facilitated both domestic and foreign direct investment such that private capital could become the main driver of industrial development. The overall aim was to make Indian industry competitive at the global level. If this was the aim—that is, globally competitive industry—obviously the shift to capital-intensive and technology-intensive industrialization, rather than labour-intensive, was the way to go. One can see this reflected in particular policies. Every policy is accompanied by an announcement that it will lead to greater employment. However, when you see what is happening to specific sectors, it’s a different story. So, this is a context where jobs are disappearing because of automation, because of increasing capital intensity and knowledge and technology intensity. Here, the ready-made garment export industry, connected to global players, large global companies, multinational companies which have invested in India for the production of ready-made garments, stands out because it is predominantly labour intensive and is offering employment to unskilled, semi-skilled job seekers, particularly to women. Many of the women employed in this sector are rural, semi-rural, unskilled women with barely high school education, who are looking for employment because their sources of income in the agricultural sector have all but dried up. We have been studying the ready-made garment industry for many years, particularly in Karnataka, through successive surveys. Around four to five lakh women employed in the garment sector in Bangalore. We have found low wages and very harsh working conditions. There is some social insurance, but no tenure security. There is no written job contract. Loss of jobs can happen any time. These features have become the main instrument in the hands of management and shop-floor supervisors in garment factories in Bangalore, who use coercion as an instrument of production. These industries are also very valued in the eyes of the state as major foreign exchange earners. However, in terms of the workforce, they have created a footloose workforce, who move in and out of the industry or in and out of different factories in the industry itself in search of better working conditions or even in search of just 500 rupees more. If another factory or another sector pays more, they move out. We found that the only option actually available for garment-sector workers is domestic work, which is not much better. But many move out to domestic service because it offers them a more relaxed way of making less money. So this footloose workforce actually offers a very fragile and unstable basis on which to organize trade union activities. This is also a workforce which, because of very low salaries, has a lot of indebtedness. We found that after working for 15 years women are getting as low as 10,000 or 12,000 per month, so there are no savings. We also found that after retirement a large majority of the women are forced to go back to their rural areas of origin. And so this industry, in a sense, questions the whole idea of urbanization. Because what is happening is that through foreign investment in garment exports these women are brought out of rural and semi-rural areas to provide labour for this highly profit-making industry. This is what we call the informal in the formal, particularly in the garment sector. This is factory employment and there is a salaried wage and some social insurance. But as I have tried to explain, the basic parameters of formal employment are not there. And this particular sector, being part of the organized sector, bears some of the classic features of informal employment. I now come to the question of how you represent workers’ rights, or who represents workers’ rights. In terms of a collective voice or collective organization, the problems which trade unions face is the shrinking of the organized sector. To mobilize and organize informal workers presents one of the most difficult and challenging tasks for trade unionists, because workers who do not have permanent or regular jobs fear termination if they engage with trade unions or in trade union activities. Hence, there is a low level of unionization in most sectors today. There is also a disconnect at the local level. Local-level trade unions are disconnected from larger national trade union federations. State governments have responded with a whole range of welfare measures. You get free rations, free bus passes, free electricity, cash transfers to women, old-age widow pensions, and so on and so forth. Every government in every state has come up, almost competitively, with these welfare measures. And in a sense what these have done, these welfare provisions or social policies, is to dull the edge of want. In the process, what has happened is that the question of work, employment, livelihood, and income has even more receded into the background for the working class itself. So the demand is not for work and more income. The demand, or the expectation and the claim, is for social policies. I would say at the end that the future possibly lies in organizations like the GATWU (Garment and Textile Workers Union). I have seen these kinds of grassroots trade unions struggling for over three decades in Bangalore and in other states. The script is written against them, but the struggle is very real and significant. In the struggle, one can actually see the opposed binaries of capital and labour working out. Furthermore, the challenge is often put forward by these trade unions to the state, because the state is a major stakeholder in industries like the garment industry. So they’re negotiating not only with capital—that is, the owners of the factories—but also in a very substantive way with the state, which is an important creator and participant in the minimum wage board. I want to end this by going back to one of the lines which I read from a text of Shripad Dange, which is that when we think of labour, we have to think not only of the yesterday and of the today, but we have to think of the tomorrow. To think significantly of the tomorrow in India’s larger framework of industrialization and of the working class, I think there are two points which stand out. One is that the state is obviously pursuing a model of economic growth which is based on the growth of the services sector. And one of the main questions which needs to be asked is: can the services sector lead development where the largest number of job seekers are unskilled or semi-skilled? And if indeed the service sector is leading economic growth, then what kind of regulations does the state need to put forward to protect those who are employed in the services sector? The other important question is: can the state in a democratic framework be persuaded, or perhaps even forced, to provide a more substantive, a stronger regulatory framework as far as industry is concerned, or as far as the services are concerned? On many of these points—whether we’re looking at the service sector or whether we’re looking at the governance system, the labour governance system—there is enormous scope for activism to work itself out. Because we cannot at the same time be talking about macro policies. Macro policies are not framed at the local level. Macro policies are framed in New Delhi, where larger economic interests are driving policy. These interests are international. These are large economic and industrial interests of industrialists who are deeply vested in a globally competitive economic policy regime. So those are not changes that, you know, local trade unions or even academics like us can be talking about. But we can certainly be talking about changes at these micro levels, where pressure can be brought about on states to provide a more supportive regulatory regime within the framework that exists. This is a shortened and lightly edited version of a transcript from a talk given at Indian Institute of World Culture, Bangalore. Supriya Roychowdhury is Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. Her book, “City of Shadows: Slums and Informal Work in Bangalore”, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. |
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