South Asian Capitalism(s)

This conference is the second in a sequence of events co-organized by two public universities: the University of California Berkeley and University of Massachusetts, Amherst on the theme of the political economy of South Asia.

Titled South Asian Capitalism(s), this Fall 2025 conference aims to investigate how capitalist accumulation is socially structured across South Asia. For instance, we are keen on exploring the varied emergent and consequential modes in which caste/kinship/ethnicity regulates the economy, polity and material life. These explorations have political urgency: they structure, inter alia, majoritarianism, new forms of social exclusion and inequality, crises of stagnation and unemployment. 

If scholars argue that contract, debt, and private property in the west are the “code of capital” (cf. Pistor 2019), there is a scholarship from South Asia  that shows how kinship networks take the place of contract (cf. Birla 2009). A couple of key animating questions for our conference are: how are social structures of accumulation like caste, biradari, and their other regional variations constitutive of the modern economy rather than being vestiges of the past? How does locating traditional patronage systems and networks at the heart of South Asian capitalisms alter our understanding of these societies beyond phrases like ‘crony capitalism’? These questions are especially urgent in thinking about the trajectories of capitalism and the future of democracy in South Asia.

For this workshop, we want to bring together mid- to advanced-graduate students and early career scholars from the across South Asia, whose work speaks to the following themes, including but not limited to:

  • Postcolonial capitalism 

  • South Asian capitalisms in global comparative perspective

  • New approaches to South Asian capitalism

  • (Comparative) social structures of accumulation across South Asia

  • The impact of kinship/caste/biradari structures on firm-level accumulation strategies

  • Dialectic of contract law and customary norms in governing economic actions/life

  • The role of social structures of accumulation in regulating the informal economy

  • How different markets in specific commodities, land, and credit are governed by social structures

  • How does the family-owned nature of most businesses in the formal sector change the dynamics of South Asian capitalism?

  • Caste, Kinship, and Regional Dynamics of Capitalist Accumulation in South Asia

A G E N D A

Fri, Sept 12, 2025

9:15 AM

Registration

9:45 AM

Opening Remarks

10 AM

Panel I: Informality and Capitalism

  • Discussant: Pranab Bardhan, Professor Emeritus of Economics, UC Berkeley

Speakers:

  • Alessandra Mezzadri, Professor in Global Development and Political, SOAS, University of London
  • Dina Siddiqi, Clinical Professor, Global Liberal Studies, New York University
  • Barbara Harriss-White, Professor Emeritus of Development Studies, University of Oxford

11:30 AM

Panel II: Agriculture production and circulation

  • Discussant: Sharad Chari, Professor of Georgraphy, UC Berkeley

Speakers:

  • Noaman Ali, Lecturer in International Development, University of Bath
  • Tariq Omar Ali, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

1 PM

Lunch

1:45 PM

Early Career Scholars’ Panel 1

  • Discussant: Sai Balakrishnan, Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning, UC Berkeley

Speakers:

  • Abdulla Niruvan Chalil (Assistant Professor, Jamia Millia Islamia): Waqf as a “Non-Charitable” Dedication in the Shariat Application Act: Making of Muslim Personal Laws and Market Ordering in South Asia
  • Taniya Silvapulle (Researcher, Social Scientists' Association, Colombo, Sri Lanka): Market Liberalization and the Tale of Two Trajectories: An Ethnography on Urban Upper-Middle-Class Families in Sri Lanka

2:45 PM

Coffee

3 PM

Early Career Scholars’ Panel 2

Speakers:

  • Mushahid Hussain (Visiting Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, Trinity College): Democracy without Hegemony? Class Formation and Party Politics in the Aftermath of the Bangladesh’s Monsoon Uprising
  • Sampurna Das (PhD Student, University of Delhi): Capitalism’s Kinship Fix: Traditional Authority and Rentier Logics in Northeastern India’s River Islands

4 PM

Break

5 PM

Keynote:Capitalism & Majoritarianism 

  • Katharina Pistor, Edwin B Parker Professor of Comparative Law, Columbia University
  • Thomas Blom Hansen, Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University

Sat, Sept 13, 2025

9:30 AM

Registration

10 AM

Keynote:

Gail Omvedt at Berkeley and Beyond: Caste & Democracy

  • Patrick Heller, Professor of Social Sciences, Brown University
  • Sumeet Mhaskar, Professor of Sociology, O.P. Jindal Global University
  • Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

11:30 AM

 Coffee

11:45 AM

Early Career Scholars’ Panel 3

  • Discussant: Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Speakers:

  • Mishal Khan (Senior Researcher, UC Berkeley Labor Center): Managing Capital’s Disruptions in the Sindhi Countryside
  • Abhishek Dwivedi (PhD Student, South Asian University): Between Consent and Coercion: A Continuum of Unfree Labour in Kanpur’s Leather Industry

12:45 PM

Lunch

1:45 PM

Early Career Scholars’ Panel 4

  • Discussants: Zachary Lamb, Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning, UC Berkeley; Thomas Blom Hansen, Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University; Sumeet Mhaskar, Professor of Sociology, O.P. Jindal Global University

Speakers:

  • Roshini Chattopadhyay (PhD Student, Anthropology, Emory University): Customs in the flux of Capital: Santhal’s Manjhi-Haram and Resource Governance in West Bengal, India
  • Zahid Ali (PhD Student, Anthropology, Rice University): Accumulation by Wastelanding: Postcolonial Dispossession and the Political Economy of Land in South Asia

3 PM

Break

3:15 PM

Panel III: Caste and Class

  • Discussant: Anirban Gupta Nigam, Associate Director, Institute for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley

Speakers:

  • Layli Uddin, Lecturer, Politics of South Asia, Queen Mary University of London
  • Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst

S P O N S O R S

The South Asian Political Economies Initiative

Organizing Committe

Sai Balakrishnan
Vamsi Vakulabharanam
Anirban Gupta-Nigam