About the Talk:

The National Capital Region of Delhi (NCR) is a diverse and unequal space. Its more than 30 million people are sharply differentiated by economic class, religion, caste, education, language, and migration status. In some ways, it is a dynamic society aspiring to global city grandeur; in other ways, it is a bastion of tradition, sectarianism, and hierarchy. To grapple with these matters, Colossus: The Anatomy of Delhi (Cambridge University Press, 2021) provides a detailed analysis of the CASI-NCR Survey, a wide-ranging social survey of 5,500 households, alongside comments from scholars with specialized knowledge of NCR. The book, which is co-edited by Sanjoy Chakravorty & Neelanjan Sircar) details three themes: social change, community and state, and inequality. From the material condition of the metropolis (its housing, services, crime, and pollution) to its social organization (of who marries whom, who eats with whom, and who votes for whom), this book unpacks the complex reality of a metropolitan region that is emblematic of India’s aspirations and contradictions.

About the Speaker:

Neelanjan Sircar is a Senior Visiting Fellow at CPR and Assistant Professor at Ashoka University. His research interests include Indian political economy and comparative political behavior with an eye to Bayesian statistics, causal inference, social network analysis, and game theory. He also works on projects characterising the social connections between citizens in India and their local brokers and leaders, as well as how these local brokers and leaders, both rural and urban, make decisions. Mr. Sircar is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.