Because of certain developments beyond our control, we are forced to cancel this event! We deeply regret the inconvenience caused by this.

The special session will discuss the core thesis of Maryam Aslany's recent book Contested Capital: Rural Middle Classes in India, Cambridge University Press (2020). Mujibur Rehman has kindly agreed to become the discussant for the session!

Abstract

The expansion and transformation of Asian economies is producing class structures, roles and identities that could not easily be predicted from other times and places. The industrialisation of the countryside, in particular, generates new, rural middle classes which straddle the worlds of agriculture and industry in complex ways. Their class position is improvised on the basis of numerous influences and opportunities, and is in constant evolution. Enormous though its total population is, meanwhile, the rural middle class remains invisible to most scholars and policymakers. Contested Capital is the first major work to shed light on an emerging transnational class comprised of many hundreds of millions of people. In India, the 'middle class' has become one of the key categories of economic analysis and developmental forecasting. The discussion suffers from one major oversight: it assumes that the middle class resides uniquely in the cities. As this book demonstrates, however, more than a third of India's middle class is rural, and 17 per cent of rural households belong to the middle class. The book brings this vast and dynamic population into view, so confronting some of the most crucial neglected questions of the contemporary global economy.

Biographies

Speaker

Maryam Aslany is an economic sociologist of international development. She is currently a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where she is working on an ERC-funded project about future migration in West Africa. She is also a part-time researcher at Wolfson College, Oxford, University of Oxford.

Aslany received her doctorate in Economic Sociology from King’s College London in 2018. Following her doctorate, she joined Wolfson College, Oxford, as a Career Development Researcher and Junior Research Fellow, where she worked on the political economy of climate change adaptation in rural India and Fiji. Aslany’s research interests include: patterns of global migration; climate-induced migration; the political economy of climate change adaptation; and informal labour and rural middle-class formation in low- and middle-income countries. She is also interested in innovative mixed methods in social-science research.

Her first monograph, Contested Capital: Rural Middle Classes in India, was published by Cambridge University Press (2020). Contested Capital explores the dynamic processes of new class formation in the Indian countryside, and identifies a large but previously neglected group – the rural middle class – whose material situation and social aspirations differs markedly from its urban counterparts.

Discussant

Mujibur Rehman teaches at Jamia Millia Central University, New Delhi. He specializes on political economy and identity politics. His forthcoming book is , Shikwa-e- Hind: The Political Future of Indian Muslims( Simon and Schuster 2021). His past publications include, Rise of Saffron Power( Routledge 2018); and Communalism in postcolonial India: Changing Contours( first published in 2016). Its second edition has a forward by Romila Thapar. He writes columns and reviews in the Hindu, The Hindustan Times, The Frontline, The Outlook etc.

Format:

The presentations will be typically 30 min long, followed by Q & A.

Maryam Aslany's new book:

This session is a part of the larger project:

Expanding the frontiers of economics: Evidence from South Asia

This project aims to organise series of special sessions on emerging areas of research in Economics. By synthesising theoretical assumptions of sociology, psychology, anthropology and political sciences, a new generation of researchers are rediscovering the principles which govern the actions and interaction among ‘economic (hu)man’.

This will be a year-long project. In this series, we hope to ensure inclusivity across different schools of thoughts and across genders.