India Archives - Public Seminar

Love and Theft in a Drowning City

On Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

February 24, 2026 • by Katya Wack

A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), the new novel by Megha Majumdar, unfolds over a single week in a not-so-distant future. Kolkata has been devastated by flooding and famine; Ma, a middle-class shelter manager, is preparing to flee the city with her father and two-year-old daughter to join her ...

Democracy

What Is Illiberal Democracy?

Scholars discuss Trump, Modi, and Erdoğan

February 20, 2025 • by Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Mark Frazier, Jeffrey C. Isaac and Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In November 2024, the India China Institute at The New School hosted the online panel "Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Democratic Regimes," which featured scholars Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Senem Aydin-Düzgit, and Jeffrey C. Isaac in conversation with moderator Mark W. Frazier about patterns of takeover, decay, and distrust of political institutions ...

South Asia

The Future for India’s Opposition

Democracy remains at risk

June 24, 2024 • by Udeepta Chakravarty

This result is certainly a setback for Modi, the BJP, and the Hindu nationalist Right more broadly; it is certainly a respite for opposition forces. But it would be foolhardy to celebrate this moment as a victory....

South Asia

The World’s “Largest Democracy”?

Modi leads India down a dark path

May 30, 2024 • by Udeepta Chakravarty

Corrosive nationalism and monarchic consciousness have become so normalized that other political forces, including the opposition, are now mimicking Modi’s practices....

COVID-19

Science and the COVID Epidemic in India

“The past as mnemonic and footnote always tempers our sense of innovation in science policy”

May 2, 2023 • by Shiv Visvanathan and Chandrika Parmar

Lockdowns reflect the arbitrariness of the state, an absence of sociological literacy about urban-rural differences, a sense of management as control without the nuances of social science that the diversity of India desperately needs....

Migration

The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self

Mass migrations, language, and the future of identity

November 9, 2022 • by Ken Hu

How can language create such a convoluted way of experiencing the everyday world? We can explore this phenomenon with two linked concepts: the speech act and the discourse community. ...

Colonization

How My Grandmother Ceased to Be African

How East African Asians have been written out of African history

May 11, 2022 • by Shivani Somaiya

And in the pre-independence era, a new racial politics emerged, one that has, for far too long, encapsulated much of East Africa’s postcolonial thought, in which families like ours were increasingly depicted as foreigners to a place that had long been our home....

Climate & Ecology

A Patch of Moonlight

Darwin’s warning

August 25, 2021 • by Ruth Padel

_____ Rustles of the night in the Nilgiri Hills. I sit behind the low wall of a veranda beside Priya who invited me here, her husband Jean Philippe, and her brother Peter. They are scientists and naturalists. This is what they do every night. I am very lucky to be their ...

Democracy

Confronting the World Wide Threat of Right Wing Authoritarianism

If we don’t hang together, we will surely hang separately

February 3, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Our effort to create and nourish a “world-wide committee of democratic correspondence” began long before the coronavirus laid waste to our world. And as a world-wide network, our efforts have always involved a strong online component. For the web affords our far-flung group many opportunities for the sharing of ideas ...

Confronting the World Wide Threat of Right Wing Authoritarianism

Democracy

Political Meaning and Significance of the Farmer’s Protests in India

January 26, 2021 • by Udeepta Chakravarty

The purpose of the article is to elucidate the political meaning and significance of the Kisan Andolan. It is not to evaluate the contents of the new farm laws nor is it to assess the merits and demerits of the counter claims made by farmer unions and organisations. The article is ...

Political Meaning and Significance of the Farmer’s Protests in India

The New School

Albert Mayer’s Urban Village: Between The New School and India

A global conversation about using design to foster community

July 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

The New School does not look like most other universities, even those in large cities. It has no college green around which buildings are situated; no common architectural style; no grand monument-like buildings with Latin phrases carved into granite. Instead, it is a disaggregated collection of buildings, most in the ...

Activism

Protest as a Means of Political Change: An Indian Case Study

How the 2012 gang rape of Jyoti Singh and the protests that followed changed a nation

July 2, 2020 • by Natasha Behl

In this current political moment of mass protests for racial justice across America, many of us are wondering how effective these protests are. Can marching in the streets lead to enduring change? Can dissent and disruption help us achieve a more equal and just society? Consider what happened in India eight ...