See details of the full CSAS Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference on South Asia here: https://ii.umich.edu/csas/news-events/events.detail.html/65329-16571523.html

In this talk Professor Harriss will reflect on the ways in which patterns of political mobilization and participation in India over the period since Independence have been understood, drawing on the work of historians and anthropologists, as well of political scientists. How has democracy worked in practice in a context in which, as Barrington Moore argued, there had been no ‘bourgeois revolution’? Is India still to be understood as a ‘patronage democracy’? Has the significance of ideological cleavages emphatically replaced that of social cleavages? Is Indian politics best understood through specifically Indian concepts? He will consider these and other questions about knowledge of Indian politics.

John Harriss, now Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and formerly of the the London School of Economics, began studies of South Asia after driving overland from England to India in 1969. His research has ranged widely from work on agrarian change and labour studies to recent work on business and politics. He is the author (with Stuart Corbridge) of "Reinventing India," among other books.

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