2023/2024 ANNUAL REPORT
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
University of Pennsylvania
133 South 36th Street, Suite 230
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215
Telephone: +1 (215) 898-6247
Website: casi.sas.upenn.edu
Founded in 1992, the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania is the first research institution in the United States dedicated to the study of contemporary India. A national resource, it fills an urgent need for objective knowledge of India’s politics, rapidly changing economy, and social transformations.
The Center seeks to enrich our understanding of contemporary India by conducting datadriven, policy-oriented research on India’s most pressing challenges, convening discussions with scholars, policymakers, and practitioners on key issues, hosting distinguished and new voices from India at Penn, and providing opportunities for new generations of students and scholars to conduct research and hold internships in India.
Tariq Thachil
CASI Director, Professor of Political Science Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India, University of Pennsylvania
We are delighted to present this Annual Report to you, the third since we restarted this tradition. This past year, the Center’s 31st, was marked by several highlights.
First and foremost, we inaugurated the position of an Associate Faculty Director, and are delighted to welcome Professor Nikhil Anand, an Associate Professor in Penn’s Anthropology Department, to serve in this role. Nikhil’s research on cities and infrastructure deepens areas of longstanding interest to CASI, while his work on climate change extends the Center’s work into new areas of vital importance. Nikhil has already become an active member of CASI and has worked on building our research agenda on climate change, including hosting two research workshops, two Visiting Fellows from India working on this topic (one of whom will join Penn for a full year as a Fulbright Fellow next year), securing a grant from Penn Global for his ongoing work, and convening a Penn faculty working group to discuss research in progress at CASI.
Our goal in adding this position to our ranks is to continue the growth of CASI’s interdisciplinary research program since 2020, complementing the Center’s expansion of its postdoctoral fellowship program (from one to three fellows), launch of a postdoctoral fellowship program at CASI’s New Delhi counterpart institution, UPIASI, and initiation of a new predoctoral program. This expanded research team has worked on a rich array of projects, including a multiyear assessment of small town governance, a new project probing public apathy toward the issue of air pollution, alongside work on agricultural commodity markets, transformations in the delivery of welfare benefits, regulatory policies in higher education, and the history of federalism and federal thought in India.
Our research activities were energized by the presence of several Visiting Fellows from India, including fellowships with economist Suraj Jacob (Azim Premji University) on a book on India’s policy processes, sociologist Ranjini Basu (UPIASI) on agrarian markets in Punjab, and urbanist Lalitha Kamath (TISS Mumbai) and planner and architect Rohit Majumdar (School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai) on the impact of climate change in Mumbai.
We enjoyed a busy events calendar, hosting 39 events. Our talks included distinguished speakers, including filmmaker Mira Nair, who we hosted on campus for three days as our third Saluja Global Fellow. Her visit, which included intimate sessions with students and a packed public lecture, helped CASI build its engagement with scholars and students from Penn’s fine arts community.
We continued our commitment to collaborative outreach, working with 16 departments, centers, and schools to put on these events. This collaborative approach has helped us enjoy unprecedented levels of engagement from
our campus community. Indeed, our flagship academic seminar series now averages a turnout that is 40% higher than pre-pandemic levels, a testimony to this increased engagement. Finally, we completed our popular 2023 Data Seminar Series—a practitioner-focused virtual series aimed to help researchers, journalists, and policymakers discover and use important social science datasets in India, hosted by the data journalist (and former CASI Visiting Fellow) Rukmini S. Finally, in addition to our regular slate of academic speakers, CASI hosted or co-hosted a number of research gatherings on varied policy-relevant themes, including an interdisciplinary conference on “Cultures of Datafication,” a grant-funded workshop on “Stories of Climate Action,” and our Annual Indian Political Economy workshop. These workshops drew participants from over 14 departments and 3 schools at Penn, and from dozens of universities across the U.S., Europe, and India.
None of CASI’s research or programming would have been feasible without our terrific CASI staff. Their tireless efforts were justly rewarded this year, with CASI’s lynchpin Juliana Di Giustini’s promotion to Executive Director, and CASI stalwart Alan Atchison’s promotion to Head of Communications. Congratulations to them both! We also were pleased to welcome Rachael Dougherty into the role of Administrative Coordinator, and delighted to welcome journalist Rohan Venkat as Consulting Editor for India in Transition.
We are already well underway in planning next year’s research and programming. We will welcome three new postdoctoral fellows to our Center. We will also hold our Khemka Annual Lecture on campus next Fall, which will be delivered by Dr. Gagandeep Kang, one of India’s foremost virologists and vaccine scientists. Our next Saluja Global Fellow will be the renowned singer and composer, Shubha Mudgal.
We hope you will engage with CASI’s offerings in any way you can, and please feel free to subscribe to our newsletter, visit our website for updates on our activities and opportunities, and attend our events or visit our Center if you are in Philadelphia!
Nikhil Anand
Associate Faculty Director, CASI
Daniel Braun Silvers and Robert Peter Silvers Family Presidential Professor of Anthropology; Director, EnviroLab
It has been an honor and privilege to serve as CASI’s first Associate Faculty Director this past year. And what a year it’s been! While I previously participated in some of its seminars, the depth and breadth of CASI’s engagements—both at Penn and in India—truly took me by surprise.
A year-long seminar series featuring some of the most cutting edge and energized scholars in the United States and India, distinguished lecture series featuring artists and foreign policy experts, research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, a dynamic visiting fellows program, an active postdoctoral program and an active multilingual online news and research portal today constitute what I believe to be the leading academic research center on India in the United States.
In taking on the role of Associate Faculty Director, I seek to make it a key center to understand and address India’s environmental challenges. CASI has both deepened and widened its rich and diverse interdisciplinary research environment in recent years. It is an extraordinary place, both at Penn and in the world, where Political Scientists, Sociologists, Economists, Historians, policy experts and Anthropologists work together to understand the changing shape of politics, economics and society in contemporary India.
Yet, development in these domains in India is contingent on a stable environment. The recent heat waves, floods, landslides and cyclones that have affected the wellbeing of millions in India this past year alone, however, demand a more sustained accounting. These human designed disasters demonstrate, more than ever before, that the wellbeing and flourishing of India’s communities (particularly its more marginalized residents) as well as its institutions, depends on how they ameliorate, address and adapt to the climate crisis. Or put differently, the intersecting environmental crises in India have shown that the environment is not a luxury good that can be addressed after economic growth. A stable environment is the very precondition of possibility for a flourishing economy and society, both in India and globally.
As such, in the past year, I have sought to extend CASI’s engagement with environmental researchers, policy makers and planners working across India and the United States. This has included bringing a major collaborative research project, Stories of Climate Action, to CASI. The project (for which Rohit Mujumdar and Lalitha Kamath also serve as Co-PIs), is sponsored in part by Penn Global, and supports a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at CASI as well as eight India-based research fellows that are currently researching the ways that marginalized populations live in climate-changed Indian cities. As part of this project, CASI hosted an international conference on Urban Climates in
“I have found CASI to be a beacon of what is possible when people work together”
April 2024. Cosponsored by EnviroLab and the South Asia Center at Penn, over eighty scholars based in four continents took part in the 2-day event. The public facing research products scheduled for the coming year—community-based workshops, an online multimedia exhibition, op-eds in mass-media outlets, and three modules of a teaching course—will engage researchers, policy makers and urban publics in India, toward framing better and more just policies centered on climate mitigation and adaptation.
CASI has been a particularly hospitable environment for this work. In this past year, for instance, CASI organized or co-sponsored seminars on waste, air pollution, flooding and the ecologies of the Sundarbans. In January 2025, CASI will co-host a workshop in India co-sponsored by its sister center, UPIASI, and Oxford University. The workshop, which follows the first workshop in 2023, will bring together India-based researchers, international scholars of the environment and policy experts to focus on issues and new approaches to address climate in the Indian city. These events have both crystallized and promise to deepen the Center’s engagements with environmental research and policy-making in India.
Over the last three decades, CASI has built an enviable, outward facing fellows program. This past year, we continued to extend and strengthen these ties, through co-sponsorships and collaborations. We also initiated a new works-inprogress seminar for Faculty and Postdoctoral Fellows based at Penn in January 2024. Called Chai pe Charcha, the workshop pulls faculty out of their disciplinary silos and substantively builds a strong India-focused research community across different schools at Penn. We anticipate this workshop to support faculty to bring their work to the public sooner, as well as create grounds for new collaborations and research initiatives in India.
To conclude, I have found CASI to be a beacon of what is possible when people work together. Despite the extraordinarily challenging environment this past year, CASI’s director, fellows, postdocs, and its staff have sustained policy engagement and research activities at the very highest levels, and with a passion and joy that has been powerful and infectious. I look forward to spending the next years participating and building what is truly a very special place.
CASI generates high-quality empirical research and analyses, builds rigorous and innovative data sets, and creates long-term collaborations with academics, policymakers, and practitioners working in India and the US. Our research focuses on critical and understudied areas of India’s economy, politics, and society.
Major current themes include:
Economic Transition
Urbanization
Agriculture
Air Pollution
Governance
Welfare Programs
Migration
Federalism
Climate Change
3
NEW RESEARCH GRANTS
4
ARTICLES PUBLISHED BY CASI POSTDOCS, 3 SUBMITTED FOR PEER REVIEW
1
NEW RESEARCH AGENDA ON CLIMATE CHANGE HEADED BY ASSOCIATE FACULTY DIRECTOR NIKHIL ANAND
Across India, air pollution offers a stark example of environmental degradation. Large portions of the country, including many major cities, are consistently ranked as having the most polluted air in the world. Such toxic air has been widely shown to have deleterious effects on human health and well-being. Existing scholarship often expects citizen support for environmental protection to be highest in such settings. Yet despite its adverse consequences for public health, opinion surveys suggest air pollution is not prioritized as an important election issue by Indian citizens, even within highly impacted areas like the national capital of Delhi. Yet no prior study has explained why air pollution lacks political importance. We test several potential explanations through a major household survey of over 3000 residents across Delhi-NCR. In doing so, we provide some of the first rigorous data on how residents of Delhi view the problem of air pollution and how they evaluate potential policy solutions. We plan to continue collecting systematic evidence on this important public health question. This project was recently awarded two grants: from Penn’s OVPR’s University Research Grant and Penn Global’s India Research and Engagement Fund Grant.
An initial working paper from this project is available here .
RESEARCH AFFILIATES
What is the urban sea made of? And how might those working in the urban sea provide new modes and idioms for living in cities with sea level rise? This project provincializes the grounds of urban planning and urban theory by attending to the ways in which fishers living in the city in the sea are already organizing their livelihoods and social worlds with anthropogenic climate change and coastal pollution. Their changing practices may reveal new ways to live in cities in the sea in the future.
This recently completed book by Nikhil Anand focuses on the work of fishers, scientists and city planners as they work to understand, inhabit and settle the turbid relationships of the city in the sea. Most of the ethnographic research of Urban Sea was gathered between June 2018 and August 2019. Owing to a series of transportation infrastructure projects being staged in the sea during this time, the relationships between urban government, citizen scientists, fishers, environmental activists, and concerned citizens were (and continue to be) especially fraught.
In the materials presented online , Anand shows how the Urban Sea is a deeply contested, amphibious space. On one hand, the municipal government continues to colonize the edges of the terrestrial city, filling these regions with the profits and prerogatives of real estate. On the other, fishers negotiate the dynamic qualities of the sea even as it is increasingly made of warmer waters, concrete, sewage and more unpredictable ecologies.
The photographs and the two video presentations online stage this tension. The first video presentation dwells in the ongoing histories and processes of land expropriation that make Mumbai at considerable cost to its indigenous fishers and non-human residents. Massive coastal infrastructure projects seek progress by flattening, straightening and drying the city. The second video explores how Koli fishers deploy linear and cyclical spacetimes to reveal fish. Fisheries are the spaces that become and move with the festivals and the tides, with prayers and the sun.
Fish, fishers and fisheries, however, are not outside of the city’s history. They continue to be affected what Amitav Ghosh has called, “the great derangement”– in this case, largescale landfill and infrastructure modernization projects. This is not a one-way process. Amidst the restive monsoons and seas of climate change, some engineers are increasingly concerned that these massive infrastructures, like fishers and ecologies themselves, can only be as tenuous and impermanent as the urban sea in which they are staged.
Amidst calls for urgent climate adaptation, this project dwells in the everyday stories of development, infrastructure and dwelling of marginalized urban residents in Mumbai that are often drowned out by the formalized procedures of expert knowledges of climate change action. The stories gathered in this project will describe subordinated modalities of praxis; of how urban residents understand climate change and act amidst climate and ecological uncertainty. The PIs propose to put these stories in conversation with ongoing official climate planning processes underway in India and diversely situated publics through several community engagement workshops, an online multimedia exhibition, op-eds and a policy brief, taught course, peer-reviewed articles, conference, and book publication. Together with official, more formalized initiatives, “Stories of Climate Action” promises to produce new paradigms of how the most catastrophic effects of climate change might be mitigated and adapted to in Indian cities in the near future.
This past year, the project received major funding from Penn Global for a new project: Mumbai Climate Stories. The grant supports 3 co-PIs and 8 fellows conducting research in Mumbai, documenting the nuanced ways in which marginalized populations in Mumbai live in climate changed environments.
In Spring 2024, CASI and EnviroLab hosted a 2-day conference at the University of Pennsylvania. Titled “Stories of Climate Action,” the first day of the event was held at the Kleinman Center and featured research presentations and a discussion of the Mumbai-based research, and drew approximately 80 participants from the University and beyond. The second day featured a workshop, where researchers from ten universities across four continents shared their work on the topic. Papers presented at this conference will be key to the production of an edited volume, as well as a special issue submission in FY25.
Led by Tariq Thachil , Adam Michael Auerbach and CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow Shikhar Singh (Ph.D. in Political Science, 2022, Yale).
CASI has launched the first systematic set of studies on the political economy of “small-scale urbanization” in India. A significant percentage of urban residents across the Global South live in small towns. In India, the percentage of citizens living in cities with populations less than 100,000 residents equals those living in million-plus cities. Indeed, 85% of India’s towns have less than 100,000 people. Yet little is known about the political economy of these urban local bodies. What governance challenges do small towns face? Why are small towns so unsuccessful in raising tax revenues? Why do they often fail to spend the funds provided to them by central and state governments?
CASI is conducting the first ever large-scale surveys of small-town bureaucrats and politicians, as well as ordinary citizens. This research is supported by an India Research and Engagement Fund (IREF) grant awarded to CASI by Penn Global for 2022-2024. This project takes place in collaboration with the Directorate of Local Bodies in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Project findings will be disseminated to a group of scholars and policymakers at a major workshop hosted by CASI and UPIASI in New Delhi. The first paper from this project was published in the American Political Science Review, and is accessible here.
AUTHORS
This research agenda is led by CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow Amrita Kurian (Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology, 2020, UC-San Diego). Dr. Amrita Kurian works on expertise and agrarian geographies in rural Andhra Pradesh. Her research provides a humanistic critique of state experts’ technical interventions to address emergent problems that threaten the sustainability of agriculture and agrarian livelihoods. It explains how, faced with such formidable challenges, the experts’ pursuit of quality frequently fails and faces increasing contention from farmers and traders on the ground. Her ethnographic study of the cigarette tobacco sector also exposes the increasing burden placed on rural environments and agrarian producers in the Global South today as they simultaneously cope with the adverse ecological effects of commercial agriculture and the increasing pressure on their incomes from constantly evolving standards imposed by agricultural commodity markets.
Dr. Kurian has secured a research grant from Garware Technical Fibres for two subsequent projects that bring everyday practices of dignity among oppressed caste laborers from Andhra Pradesh into debates on agricultural sustainability and climate migration. The first is a collaborative oral history project highlighting the neglected voices of women laborers whose partners have migrated in search of seasonal work. A parallel project will assess the value chain of Guntur chilies as a commercial cash crop and its rise as a coveted spice of the middle class in coastal Andhra Pradesh.
In 2024, she has peer-reviewed essays appearing in top-tier journals such as the Journal of Cultural Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Human Values , and Geoforum
RE SEARCH AFFILIATE
This research agenda is led by CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow Sarath Pillai (Ph.D. in History, 2022, University of Chicago). The history of Indian federalism is often assumed to have begin in 1947 when India attained independence and the founders met in the Constituent Assembly to debate India’s new constitution. This project offers both an alternative genealogy and ideological origins of Indian federalism and brings to light hitherto unknown global influences in Indian federal thought. It extends back the history of federalism to the turn of the twentieth century, showing how federalism was the main conduit through which Indians imagined their political futures at least from the 1900s onward. It also defamiliarizes the history of Indian federalism by showing that certain leaders of the Indian princely states, Muslims, and liberals, impacted by ideas of federalism prevalent in Germany and the US, were the main proponents of federalism. These groups and their alternative ideological vision contributed much to the development of federalism in colonial India than the anticolonial nationalist vision committed to a British parliamentary type of state.
In October 2023, Dr. Pillai’s Ph.D. dissertation was awarded the Sardar Patel Award, given to the best dissertation on modern India in any social sciences or humanities discipline in the US. He has been focused on revising this dissertation into a manuscript and in preparing a book proposal to be submitted to a US press in the summer or fall of 2024. Last year, an article showing the impact of German history and constitutionalism on the federalist thought in interwar India was published in the Comparative Studies in Society and History. This article was featured in the Ideas of India podcast hosted by Shruti Rajagopalan at the George Mason University and was also discussed at the Laws, Institutions, and Cultural Interactions (DIIC) seminar at the University of Tours. In August 2023, he helped convene a conference, “Rethinking Nationalism,” at CASI drawing 8 historians from across the US to debate the past, present, and future of nationalism in India. His article showing how the principles of international law justified and legitimized British imperialism in the princely states in colonial India is currently under review with Leiden Journal of International Law. Another article project on the history of British treaties with the Indian princely states is also underway.
This research agenda is led by CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow Shikhar Singh (Ph.D. in Political Science, 2022, Yale University). The project focuses on how recent transformative changes in India’s welfare state affect voting behavior. Shikhar’s analysis suggests that digital public infrastructure has transformed the welfare state in three important ways: there is less discretion and favoritism with a move to rule-based targeting; there are fewer opportunities for rent-seeking through direct benefit transfer; and there has been an expansion in the repertoire of benefits because of public savings and increased capacity. These changes map onto three questions about voting behavior: does rule-based targeting of benefits blunt the logic of ethnic voting, which hinges on intermediaries favoring co-ethnics in the distribution of benefits? Is there public support for welfarism because voters value efficient implementation (less leakages and corruption), or because efficient implementation frees up more resources for the government to deliver benefits? In other words, do voters care about “outcomes” or “process?” Finally, which type of benefits have greatest political impact? Do more expensive benefits have greater impact than relatively inexpensive benefits? Shikhar’s book evaluates these questions using empirical evidence from extensive fieldwork, including experiments, a survey of welfare program beneficiaries, and interviews of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. A paper from this project received the Best Paper Award by the Democracy and Autocracy Section at the Annual Political Science Association Conference 2024.
Sarath Pillai (CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow): “German Lessons: Comparative Constitutionalism, States’ Rights, and Federalist Imaginaries in Interwar India ,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, July 2023.
CASI Director Tariq Thachil & CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar
Adam Auerbach (SAIS, JHU): Migrants and Machine Politics: How India’s Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness (Princeton University Press, 2023). Additional coverage in Penn Today, June 26, 2023; Book Adda talk , Brown University, November 3, 2023. Awards Received: the 2024 Giovanni Sartori Book Award from APSA’s Qualitative and Mixed-Methods Section, 2024 Best Book award by APSA’s Experimental Research Section, and Honorable Mention for the Luebbert Prize for best book from the Comparative Politics Section. With Adam Auerbach and Shikhar Singh (CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow): “ Who Knows How to Govern? Procedural Knowledge in India’s Small-Town Councils ” American Political Science Review, July 31, 2024.
CASI Spring 2023 Visiting Fellow
Monika Arora (PHFI, India; PSOM Center for Global Health International Scholar): Public Health Approaches to Health Promotion (Routledge, 2023), co-edited with Shifalika Goenka.
Ashley J. Tellis (CASI IAB Member; CEIP): “Completing the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement: Fulfilling the Promises of a Summer Long Past ,” CEIP Report, November 27, 2023.
Dr. Richard Eaton (University of Arizona), distinguished South Asia historian, joined the South Asia Center as a Spring 2024 Visiting Scholar (co-sponsored by CASI and Penn’s Department of History).
Shikhar Singh (CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow): “ When Does Welfare Win Votes in India? ” CEIP, January 25, 2024.
CASI Associate Faculty Director
Nikhil Anand (with CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar Lalitha Kamath: “ Eviscerating the Sea ,” Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East, May 1, 2024; “Atal Setu is Bad for Mumbai— its People and Ecology,” The Indian Express, January 18, 2024; “Cities After Planning ” (with Jenny Lindblad) and “Anthroposea: Perfect Pollution and Planning in Mumbai’s Wetscapes ,” both Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, October 10 and June 30, 2023, respectively; “ Dwelling in the Anthroposea ,” Hindustan Times, August 4, 2023.
Sudev Sheth Gr’18 , (Lauder Institute; CASI Summer 2014 Travel Research Funds Graduate Student Awardee): Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (CUP 2024). Interview in Penn Today, February 6, 2024; book excerpt : Scroll.in, February 2, 2024.
CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar
Milan Vaishnav (CEIP), co-authored with Caroline Mallory: “A Guide to India’s 2024 Elections ,” and “ In India, Foreign Policy is on the 2024 Ballot ,” CEIP, March 2024 and April 2024, respectively.
Duvvuri Subbarao (CASI 2019-20 Distinguished International Fellow; former Governor, RBI): Just a Mercenary? Notes from My Life and Career (Penguin, 2024).
CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholars
Mark Schneider (Community Change) and Neelanjan Sircar (Centre for Policy Research): “ Do Local Leaders Prioritize the Poor: Identifying the Distributive Preference of Village Politicians in India ,” Electoral Studies, April 2024.
Indivar Jonnalagadda (Miami University; former Penn doctoral student): special feature in City, March 2024 issue (coorganized with Thomas Cowan) exploring
negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia (first presented at 2022 CASI 30th Anniversary Workshop).
Rithika Kumar (2019 CASI Travel Funds for Research winner): “ What Lies Behind India’s Rising Female Voter Turnout ,” CEIP, April 5, 2024.
Adwaita Banerjee (Penn doctoral candidate; 2022 CASI Summer Research Grants recipient; 2024 Dean’s Scholar) was featured in “ Inside the Dumping Grounds of Mumbai ,” Omnia, July 8, 2024 and “ The Anthropology of Plastics in India ,” Penn Today, July 9, 2024.
In keeping with CASI’s commitment to supporting research on contemporary India across the social sciences, this year’s Visiting Scholars and Fellows hail from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, history, and political science. Their work showcases research excellence across a wide range of methodological orientations and subject areas. From the workings of agricultural markets and supply chains to the impact of female labor force participation, from the impact of air pollution and coastal flooding to pre-independence debates on federalism, these innovative scholars will continue to shape our understanding of many of India’s most pressing concerns. We are delighted to have them enrich our Center.
111
TOTAL SCHOLARS/FELLOWS SINCE THE PROGRAM BEGAN
THIS YEAR, NON-RESIDENT VISITING SCHOLARS AND FELLOWS REPRESENT:
17 INSTITUTIONS
8 COUNTRIES
9 ARE CO-PIs ON CASI MAJOR RESEARCH GRANTS AND OTHER SPONSORED FUNDING
CASI is fortunate to have these 30 distinguished researchers, in residence and non-resident, serve as Visiting Scholars & Senior Fellows, Postdocs, and Sobti Family Doctoral Fellows for the academic year.
Suraj Jacob is a Political Economist at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, where he teaches development and policy, and is a CASI Fall 2023 Visiting Scholar. His research draws on his training in political economy and collaborations with anthropologists and development practitioners. Suraj’s research explores development policy, institutions, governance, and social practices. His co-authored book Governing Locally: Institutions, Policies and Implementation in Indian Cities is based on fieldwork in Kerala and Gujarat and explores local autonomy and governance processes through which implementation of decentralization policy diverged from progressive intent. Suraj has published on global and Indian gender politics, food politics, maternal health and domestic violence, and schooling. He recently finished a co-authored book manuscript on social practices and state policy in the context of rural sanitation drawing on ethnographic material from Chhattisgarh. He is currently working on a book project to theorize Indian policy processes grounded in long case histories. Suraj also works with Indian nonprofits on vision, organizational health, program design and learning, and community relations. He previously served as chief executive of Vidya Bhawan in Rajasthan, a 90-year old institution with a staff of 500 reaching underserved populations for education, agricultural improvement, and environment conservation.
Adam Auerbach SAIS (as of 2024) American University (through December 2023)
The CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program provides dynamic early career researchers with a one- to two-year opportunity to establish their profile as scholars of contemporary India. The fellowship has no teaching obligation, providing young scholars with valuable time to advance their own research agenda. The Center also provides support in connecting Fellows to its considerable networks among scholars and policymakers both in the U.S. and in India.
Amrita A. Kurian
CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow 2022–24
Amrita A. Kurian is an anthropologist by training. Her work investigates the role of intermediaries in commercial agriculture in India. Using historical and ethnographic lenses, she studies how key intermediaries and their practices have shaped the contours of agrarian social relations and geographies in postcolonial India. Her research finds that intermediaries—including scientific experts, state administrators, affluent farmers, and labor contractors (or maistrees)— are not only foundational but inevitable to the rise of capitalist markets in erstwhile colonies. Her research is based on twenty months of ethnographic field research and archival research conducted with the support of the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in the Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV)/cigarette tobacco sector in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
In Spring 2025 she will join Ashoka University as a Visiting Faculty member.
Sarath Pillai
CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow 2022–24
Sarath Pillai received his Ph.D. in History with distinction from the University of Chicago. His research interests lie in Modern South Asian history, global, legal, and intellectual history, and postcolonial studies. His Ph.D. dissertation cum book manuscript, Federal Futures: Imagining Federation, Constitution, and World in Late Colonial India, studies the rise of federalist ideas in interwar India and their growing influence among various groups—nationalists, princes, liberals, and minorities—in the late 1920s through the 1940s. His work has appeared or will appear in both peer-reviewed and public forums like Law and History Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Scroll.in, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He was an archival intern at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the inaugural postdoctoral representative on the University Council at Penn (for a two-year term).
In Fall 2024, he will join the Department of History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas as the Kenneth Pye Visiting Assistant Professor in South Asian History.
CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow 2022–24
Shikhar’s Singh completed a Ph.D. in political science at Yale University. One line of his research looks at how transformative changes in the welfare state affect voting behavior. A second strand seeks to explain why decentralization often fails to deliver expected improvements in public goods provision, local state capacity, and political responsiveness. A third line of work focuses on why citizens don’t hold elected officials accountable for bad outcomes like air pollution and inadequate response to public health crises. He employs a mixed-methods approach to study these issues, using experiments, observational analyses, and extensive fieldwork. Apart from research, he teaches comparative politics and quantitative methods for social scientific research. In 2020, he received a university-wide award at Yale for excellence in teaching.
In Fall 2024, he will become an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University, researching democratic accountability, identities in politics, and the politics of development, with a focus on South Asia.
Fellows are also expected to play a key role in the Center’s thriving intellectual community. Fellows organize the academic year seminar series , plan workshops, and contribute to the Center’s working paper series . They also serve as mentors to the incoming CASI-affiliated graduate students and on selection committees for CASI Student Programs’ annual competitions .
Ranjini Basu
UPIASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow
For the first time, UPIASI, CASI’s partner institution in New Delhi, has an India-based postdoctoral research fellow.
Ranjini Basu is the new Garware Post-Doctoral Fellow at UPIASI and a CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar. Her research interests include agrarian studies, peasant movements, rural transformations, and food governance.
As part of the fellowship, she will be studying contemporary agrarian politics and ecological concerns in rural North India.
Ranjini was a CASI Winter 2024 Visiting Scholar and presented preliminary finds from her UPIASI postdoc project at a CASI seminar in February.
Jitender Swami
CASI/DevLab Research Coordinator
For the first time, CASI has partnered across campus to create a predoctoral research fellowship to mentor first-generation students from India. In 2023, the first predoctoral fellow, Jitender Swami was hired in collaboration with DevLab@Penn.
Before coming to Penn, Jitender Swami worked as an Academic (Research & Teaching) Associate at the Indian Institute of Management Amritsar in the Department of Economics. Previously, he was a Writing Urban India Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, India, and a Research Intern at Hyderabad Urban Lab.
Jitender has a Masters in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad and a Bachelors in Economics from the Central University of Karnataka. His interests lie in engaging with and contributing to academic research, especially the kind that strongly influences development policy and improves individual and collective human experiences.
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program Summary:
CASI HAS SUPPORTED 11
YOUNG SCHOLARS SINCE 2010 9
HOLD ACADEMIC POSITIONS, TENURE TRACK AND TENURED, IN INDIA, SINGAPORE, THE U.K., AND THE U.S.
MOST HAVE CONTINUED THEIR CASI AFFILIATIONS AS KEY RESEARCH COLLABORATORS
The Center for the Advanced Study of India encourages and supports Penn student engagement with modern India. CASI provides grants for undergraduate and graduate students conducting research on India’s politics, economy, and society and provides fully-funded summer internship opportunities with internationally renowned partners in India. CASI also offers the year-long Sobti Family Doctoral Fellowship, designed to support Penn Ph.D. students whose research interests align closely with CASI.
OUR STUDENTS HAVE HAILED FROM
23 COUNTRIES AND 6 CONTINENTS
263
STUDENTS SUPPORTED SINCE 2007, REPRESENTING 11 OF 12 SCHOOLS AT PENN
17
ORGANIZATIONS HAVE HOSTED PENN STUDENTS AS INTERNS THROUGH CASI SINCE 2007
These talented Penn students embark on fully-funded internships in India, tackling diverse challenges across different sectors such as public health, environment and sustainability, education, gender, and social enterprise. The CASI Summer Internship allows students to gain invaluable on-the-ground experience and foster deep cross-cultural understanding.
2023 CASI Summer Interns
PUBLIC HEALTH FOUNDATION OF INDIA (PHFI): NEW DELHI, DELHI
Melissa Bell
SAS’25, Health and Society
Meghan Fersten College’23, Neuroscience, Public Health Studies; Master of Public Health, Public Health Studies
ARAVIND EYE CARE SYSTEM: MADURAI, TAMIL NADU
Achint Das Wharton’25, Health Care Management
Eric Lee College’26, Biochemistry
Sage Leland College’26, Neuroscience
Ashna Patel
Vagelos Life Sciences & Management College’25 and Wharton’25, B.S. in Economics & B.A. in Biology
Aravind Highlight Reel Created by Sage Leland
The Center for the Advanced Study of India aims to nurture a new generation of scholars in the study of modern India. In line with CASI’s vision, Penn Parents Rajiv Sobti, GR’84, and Slomi Sobti, have created the Sobti Family Doctoral Fellowship to support University of Pennsylvania graduate students in developing independent research interests broadly related to CASI’s agenda. The award includes an unrestricted $10,000 grant with the addition of up to $2,500 in travel expenses, conference attendance fees, and research materials. Sobti Fellows are in residence at CASI for their fellowship year and are invited to partake in seminars, events, and CASI activities throughout the year.
Two former Sobti Family Fellows have advanced their academic careers this year:
Raka Sen GR’24, (Sobti Fellow 23–24) will begin a tenure track assistant professorship at Arizona State University in Fall 2024
Kim Fernandes GR’24 GES’24 (Sobti Fellow 22–23) will begin a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Toronto in Fall 2024
Raka Sen
2023–24
Sobti Family Doctoral Fellow
“CASI has been an integral space for me during my Ph.D. journey, it has been an open and generative intellectual home that created a space for me to explore my place amongst South Asian scholarship. I was a CASI summer research fellow twice, which helped me conduct my fieldwork in India and Bangladesh both financially but also creating spaces for collaborative thinking that helped me navigate the many decisions facing a first-time ethnographer with peers who were going through similar processes. Throughout the years, CASI has always hosted incredible events and scholars.
My journey with CASI culminated this year, the final year of my Ph.D., as a Sobti Fellow, where getting to engage deeply with everyone at CASI as well as the scholars, activists, and other creators who visited was a highlight of my year. This year’s focus on South Asian environmentalisms made it a perfect year for me to be at CASI and many of the scholars who have long inspired my work came to the Center. I was on the job market this year, and CASI was an incredibly supportive place to be through the rollercoaster of the market. They created space for my practice talks, a shoulder to cry on during rejections, and celebrated with me on all the wins, no matter how big or small, along the way. CASI is the kind of place where if you have an idea what you’re passionate about, everyone there will do their very best to help you at every level to make it happen (and they will ensure there is delicious food while your ideas come to fruition).”
Rashi Sabherwal
2023–24
Sobti Family Doctoral Fellow
“Being included in the CASI community as a Sobti Fellow has been invaluable on many levels. In addition to using the Fellowship funds to run a survey in India, the fellowship enabled me to develop stronger ties with others in the CASI community (including new faces like Professor Anand and his research team), the UPIASI community in India and the CASI summer interns. My research has benefited immensely from the CASI community’s expertise on the Indian context, and from viewing my research questions through the lens of all the diverse perspectives that scholars in the extended CASI community bring to the table.”
CASI supports Penn students with their independent research related to contemporary India with grants of up to $5,000. Applications are encouraged from undergraduate students working on senior theses and graduate students conducting and analyzing fieldwork for their capstone projects or dissertations.
2023 CASI Summer Research Grant Recipients
Rabani Garg
Graduate School of Education, Ph.D. Candidate in Education Youth-Led Coalitions and Playful Political Expression in Urban Delhi; Youth Perspectives and Understandings of their Spaces
Arshdeep Singh Brar
Penn Arts and Sciences, Ph.D. Candidate in History Community and the Formation of Culture: The Making of Punjab, 1891–1955
Shaashi Ahlawat
Penn Arts and Sciences, Ph.D. Candidate in South Asia Studies Reimagining Medieval Magadha and its Cultural Encounters: Religious and Socio-political Landscape of Nalanda during the eleventh-fourteenth century CE
Abhi Sanghani
Penn Arts and Sciences, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology Landscapes of Glory: Hydraulic Commons in Western India
Ngamlienlal Kipgen
Penn Arts and Sciences, Ph.D. Candidate in History and Sociology in Science Wartime bodies in Frontier lands: Racializing American medicine in colonial India during WWII
Deepaboli Chatterjee
Penn Arts and Sciences, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science Unpacking Transnational Migration Aspirations of Indian Muslims in the Current Political Climate
Sanya Dhar Malhotra College’24, History, Minor in Economics Ghadar Party and Revolutionary Socialism in late-colonial Punjab
CASI supports graduate and undergraduate students with Research Assistant opportunities throughout the year. This allows Penn students an intimate, hands-on experience in the world of academic research and broadens their perspectives on contemporary India. Many students use this experience as a launching point to begin conducting their own research in India.
Tanya Vaidya
Penn Arts and Sciences, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, supported on Professor Thachil’s IREF sponsored research project on Small Towns Governance and Air Pollution project.
Insha Lakhani ENG’25
Networked and Social Systems, collaborating with PORES on a data project with CASI Visiting Fellow, Rukmini S.
Manya Gupta, C’25
Comparative Politics and Economics (undergrad part-time student staff, since FY23, and CASI-Aravind Summer 2022 alumna).
Throughout the year, CASI hosts academic seminars and special lectures on Penn’s campus and beyond. We generate opportunities for students, faculty, and the Penn community to engage in thoughtful discussion with scholars and thoughtleaders focused on modern India. This past year featured an array of interdisciplinary talks on campus and high-profile guests in Philadelphia and NYC, including Academy Award-nominated film director Mira Nair and Ambassador Vijay Keshev Gokhale.
Beyond campus, CASI continued its long running online publication, India in Transition (IiT ), now in its 18th year, which presents brief, analytical perspectives to a wide and diverse audience on innovative ideas and ongoing transformations in contemporary India.
INDIA IN TRANSITION ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN 4 LANGUAGES
Our robust schedule of interdisciplinary events has included 39 talks by scholars from 6 different disciplines. Our academic seminar series has consistently increased turnout, which is now 40% higher than pre-pandemic levels. Each event had at least one co-sponsor, leading to an increased collaborative outreach with 16 departments, centers, and schools at Penn.
The Data Seminar Series—practitioner-focused and aimed at researchers, students, academics, journalists, those in government, and private firms who use data in their work— ran monthly for 12 seminars throughout the 2023 calendar year. Each month, a leading practitioner presented on a relatively new or under-used dataset of which he/she had deep working knowledge. The series was hosted by Rukmini S. (Independent Data Journalist; CASI Fall 2022 Visiting Fellow) and led to her creation of the Data for India website, a “public platform that seeks to expand access to Indian data for everyone, and deepen the understanding of the country that can come from this data.”
Annenberg School for Communication
Comparative Politics Workshop
Department of Anthropology
Department of Cinema & Media Studies
Department of Economics
Department of History
Department of Political Science
Department of South Asia Studies
EnviroLab
Kelly Writers House
Legal History Workshop
PDRI-DevLab
Penn Anthropology Colloquium
Penn Law
Pop Studies
South Asia Center
FALL 2023
Saluja Global Fellow Lecture with Mira Nair, Academy Award-Nominated Director
FALL 2023
Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture with Ambassador Vijay Keshav Gokhale
SPRING 2024
Mira Jacob: Reading and Conversation
SPRING 2024
Conversation with Yashica Dutt author of Coming Out As Dalit
SPRING 2024
Academy AwardNominated Film, All That Breathes, Screening and Q&A with the Director Shaunak Sen
India in Transition (IiT ) is a biweekly publication that presents brief, analytical perspectives to a wide and diverse audience on innovative ideas and ongoing transformations in contemporary India. In Spring 2023, we hired Rohan Venkat, a veteran journalist from India as Consulting Editor for IiT. He has helped professionalize and systematize the recruitment of pieces for IiT, as well as grow the publication’s range of themes and contributors. In 2023–24, we published 30 articles in English, Hindi, Bangla, and Tamil, including a special series of CASI Election Conversations on the 2024 Indian General Elections.
CASI continues its strong partnership with Indian news outlet Scroll.in (the largest digital English news media outlet in India, with 7–9 million readers per month) to republish all IiT articles. This collaboration has significantly expanded the digital footprint of IiT contributions.
Read the FULL 8-part series:
From April–May, as millions of Indians set out to vote, India in Transition brought you CASI Election Conversations 2024, an interview series featuring IiT Consulting Editor & CASI Spring 2024 Visiting Fellow Rohan Venkat speaking with renowned scholars, reflecting on the factors and dimensions of politics, political economy, and democracy that would define India’s 2024 election.
Louise Tillin on How Indian Federalism Has Evolved Under the BJP
April 8, 2024
Yamini Aiyar on the BJP’s “Techno-Patrimonial” Welfare Model
April 15, 2024
Rachel Brulé on the Promise and Pitfalls of Gender Quotas in Indian Politics
April 22, 2024
Pavithra Suryanarayan on the BJP, “Social Status,” and Anti-Redistributive Politics
April 29, 2024
Francesca R. Jensenius on Misconceptions About the Indian Voter
May 6, 2024
Sumitra Badrinathan on the Need to Study Misinformation in India
May 13, 2024
Neelanjan Sircar on the Roots of Political and Economic Centralization in India
May 20, 2024
Milan Vaishnav on “VoteBuying,” Caste Politics, and Debunking Assumptions about Indian Democracy
May 27, 2024
In the coming year, CASI is delighted to welcome three new postdoctoral fellows, two of whom will focus on grant-funded research dedicated to climate issues. Our multilingual publication, India in Transition, will present a special three-part series on pollution, further deepening our engagement with environmental research and policymaking in India. Along with a robust slate of in-campus seminars and events, we will co-host a workshop in India, which will bring together India-based researchers to explore innovative solutions to climate challenges in Indian cities. We will host another workshop in India on the challenges of urbanization for India’s small towns. These strategic initiatives will strengthen the Center’s growing portfolio on climate and environmental policy, and India’s urban transition.
CASI Student Programs will also undergo its largest expansion since 2017, offering 16 internship placements and adding three new placement partners across India, broadening the opportunities for student engagement.
Additionally, the Annual Khemka Distinguished Lecture will be held on campus this Fall, featuring a talk by Dr. Gagandeep Kang, one of India’s leading virologists at the Gates Foundation. In Spring 2025, we will host the renowned singer and composer Shubha Mudgal as our Saluja Global Fellow to give a special lecture and performance on campus.
These developments reflect our continued commitment to expanding CASI’s research, outreach, and educational opportunities, particularly in the critical areas of climate, environmental policy, public health, and the politics and dynamics of political representation.
September 26, 2024, at 4:30 pm
Widener Lecture Hall, Penn Museum
Gagandeep “Cherry” Kang
Director, Enteric & Diarrheal Diseases, Diagnostics, and Genomics, Epidemiology, & Modeling Global Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Dr. Gagandeep “Cherry” Kang is responsible for leading the newly formed team at the Gates Foundation and executing against its three strategic focus areas as Director of Enteric & Diarrheal Diseases, Diagnostics, and Genomics, Epidemiology, & Modeling.
Previously, in addition to serving on the foundation’s Scientific Advisory Committee, Cherry has been a Professor in the Division of Gastrointestinal Sciences, Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore, India. She is a physician scientist working on vaccines and public health, particularly focused on children and enteric infectious disease in India. Her research ranges from water and sanitation to vaccines and nutrition, and her team is one of the strongest multidisciplinary research groups in India, internationally recognized and consistently funded by the Wellcome Trust, the National Institutes of Health, and more recently, the foundation. While based at CMC for most of her career, she also worked for the Government of India, leading and building India’s first translational health science institute. She has served on WHO headquarters, WHO Southeast Asia and Indian committees related to vaccines, covering policies and introductions, and in more technical areas, safety, new product development, modeling and biological standardization. She has been a mentor and guide for women at work and outside of work.
Saluja Global Fellows Lecture with Shubha Mudgal
March 27, 2025
Born into a musically dedicated family, Shubha Mudgal has been trained by some of the finest musicians and musicologists in India. Trained by eminent scholar-musician-composer Pandit Ramashreya Jha “Ramrang,” she also received guidance from Pandit Vinaya Chandra Maudgalya and Pandit Vasant Thakar. She later learned stylistic techniques from well-known maestros Pandit Jitendra Abhisheki and Pandit Kumar Gandharva. She also received training in thumri from Smt. Naina Devi and is thus a versatile and popular performer.
In addition to being a performer, Shubha has also won recognition as a composer. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Padma Shri from the Government of India in the year 2000, the Gold Plaque Award for Special Achievement in Music at the 34th Chicago International Film Festival, 1998, and the Yash Bharati Samman from the Government of Uttar Pradesh in 2015.
She has also been closely involved with several projects related to music education in India. Formerly a member of the Central Advisory Board of Education constituted by the Government of India, Shubha also chaired a focus group discussing the need for introducing an arts education program in mainstream school education during the National Curriculum Framework 2005. Shubha was also a Nana Shirgaokar Visiting Research Professor for traditional music at Goa University. She has taught a course on Hindustani Music with Aneesh Pradhan for the Performing Arts Department of Ashoka University, India. Shubha has recently been invited by the Goa Institute of Management as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar for a period of two years from January 2022.
Shubha Mudgal along with Aneesh Pradhan have established an online distribution platform for musicians specializing in diverse forms of Indian music through their website www.UnderscoreRecords.com
Among the many projects they have initiated in their efforts to preserve the rich musical heritage of India is www.SangeetKosh.net , an online encyclopedia of Indian Music.
M atthew Peter Barlow
Ph.D. Anthropology
The University of Adelaide (2023)
Dissertation: Waste in the Tropics: Urban Environments and (Post) colonial Infrastructure in Kochi, India
Matt is an environmental anthropologist who researches the everyday politics of water and waste infrastructures in Kochi, Kerala. As CASI’s Climate Postdoc, he will be working on his first book while also assisting Nikhil Anand on the “Stories of Climate Action: Negotiating Planning in Mumbai’s Wetscapes” research project. He recently completed a postdoc in the School of International Relations at The University of St Andrews, and has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Adelaide.
Kiran Kumbhar
Ph.D. History of Science
Harvard (2022)
Dissertation: Healing and Harming: The ‘Noble Profession’ of Medicine in Post-Independence India, 1947–2015
Kiran is completing a postdoc in the Dept. of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Previously, he was a postdoc associate and lecturer at the South Asian Studies Council at Yale. Kiran is a former physician from India, and now he studies and teaches the history of medicine, science, and healthcare, including the role of caste and privilege in these domains. He also writes regularly for public media platforms in India and the US.
Shahana Sheikh
Ph.D. Political Science
Yale (2024)
Dissertation: Party Campaigns in the Digital Age: Theory and Evidence from India
Shahana studies how significant transformations associated with development—especially, shifts in media and communication technology, and urbanization—shape party politics and political behavior in India. At CASI, she will be primarily working on “The Politics of Air Pollution in India’s Cities” research project, funded by Penn Global. Current postdoc Shikhar Singh, who will begin as Assistant Professor of Political Science, Duke University will also be on this project team.
Hilal Ahmed
Associate Professor, CSDS, Fall 2024
Jahnavi Phalkey
Founding Director, Science Gallery Bengaluru, Spring 2025
Lubaina Rangwala
Program Head, Urban Development, WRI India, Spring 2025
The University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI) was established in 1997 as CASI’s counterpart institution in India to ensure a stronger network for collaborative research and scholarship. Under the leadership of Dr. Eswaran Sridharan , UPIASI has developed a strong research program and academic presence of its own, and is increasingly playing a nodal role for a number of Penn-related initiatives in India such as global immersion programs, student internships and exchanges, and orientations for newly admitted students from India.
Eswaran Sridharan
Academic Director and Chief Executive, UPIASI
We aim to facilitate research that fosters a greater understanding of problems facing contemporary India especially in areas of Politics & Governance, International relations, National Security, Economic Development, Energy and Environment amongst others. UPIASI thus acts as a catalyst to stimulate exchange of knowledge and best practices for the mutual benefit of American and Indian scholars.
UPIASI partners with various Penn entities on a range of activities, including, the School of Arts and Sciences, CASI, Penn Global, College of Liberal and Professional Studies, South Asia Center, The Lauder Institute, Penn Alumni Relations, and Penn’s Alumni Interview Program. UPIASI also works closely with alumni groups in India, including the five Penn Clubs and the four Alumni Interview Committees.
The past year has been incredibly enriching at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI). As the country navigated the 2024 elections and its aftermath, we saw the opportune release of two new publications: The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics and Elections, Parties and Coalitions in India: Theory and Recent History. There are also two more books accepted as well as 7 academic papers accepted and in the pipeline.
UPIASI conducted four webinars over the year, the most recent being India’s Defence Sector in a Changing World Order with distinguished speakers Ashley J. Tellis, Anit Mukherjee, and Bharat Karnad, all present and past CASI affiliates.
We also continued our “Knowledge Series,” with the support of Penn alumnus Gaurav Motwane, which features research papers that analyze India’s challenges in the context of its growing needs while suggesting avenues for sustainable development.
In March 2024, we organized the inaugural “Global Media Cultures Collective Doctoral Institute” with Annenberg School of Communications’ Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the India Habitat Centre which brought together doctoral students from Penn and from institutions across India to New Delhi for cross-cultural collaboration.
This summer, we organized the Penn Forerunner 2024 event in Mumbai in collaboration with the International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) office, at Penn Global marking the exciting return of Penn with Forerunner India. This event, aimed at newly admitted Penn international students, introduces them to the University’s resources and provides opportunities to connect with current students, alumni, staff, and faculty.
UPIASI also started two new projects in 2023–24:
1. Hamaara Itihaas (Our History), a collection of recordings, photos and other artefacts on India's lesser-known freedom fighters, particularly women freedom fighters, a project directed by filmmaker and author Sagari Chhabra.
2. The Cost of Democracy, a project on campaign expenditure studying four state assembly elections during 2024–25, in collaboration with a Dutch research institute KITLV, as part of a larger project on political finance in India and Indonesia, extendable to the Global South.
This book on India’s recent experience with elections, parties, and coalitions consists of ten papers that cover two broad areas—elections and voting behavior, and political parties and coalition politics. It presents the evolution of key elections and shifts in voting patterns in the post-Congress-dominance period since 1989, showing how these have led to the rise or decline of parties; to a reshaped party system; and to particular patterns of coalition politics and types of coalition and/or minority governments.
The book also shows how coalition politics has enabled the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and regional parties, enabled a revival of the Congress from 2004 to 2014, and affected elections and the party system in reverse.
All the papers in this book undertake empirical analysis of elections and the party system —including origins, key elections, party behaviour, coalition patterns, and political finance—and are situated within the relevant theoretical and comparative literature.
This collection makes interconnected historical, conceptual, theoretical, and empirical arguments in relation to Indian politics. It helps us make sense of the evolution of the post1989 party system and is indispensable for scholars and students of Indian politics.
Tariq Thachil
(ex officio, IAB)
CASI Director, Professor of Political Science, Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India, University of Pennsylvania
Juliana Di Giustini
Executive Director (as of May 2024; Deputy Director through April 2023)
Georgette Rochlin
Senior Associate Director
Nikhil Anand
CASI Associate Faculty Director, Daniel Braun Silvers and Robert Peter Silvers Family Presidential Professor of Anthropology
Alan Atchison
Head of Communications (as of November 2023; Senior Publications Editor through October 2023)
Juni Bahuguna
Assistant Director, Student and Visitor Programs
Rachael Dougherty
Administrative Coordinator (as of April 2024)
Megan Cuadrado
Administrative Coordinator (through March 2024)
Amrita A. Kurian
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Sarath Pillai
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Shikhar Singh
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
The Friends of CASI are individuals who, by their annual unrestricted financial support, demonstrate their dedication to the mission of the Center. As an integral part of the Center’s community, many members also contribute their time as advocates of CASI’s work. In appreciation, we encourage our Friends of CASI to take special advantage of the programs that their support sustains, including unique opportunities to engage with each other and special access to the work of the Center.
For more information about making a gift to CASI please contact Michael Baker, Senior Director of Global Operations, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania.
