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Trehan India Initiative

The Trehan India Initiative at the University of Michigan Presents

State, Space, and Citizenship: Indian Cities in the Global Era

A year of thematic programming on key issues confronting Indian cities, sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. Please visit the Theme Year website for additional information.

The Trehan India Initiative at the University of Michigan is made possible by the principled generosity of:

Drs. Ranvir and Adarsh Trehan
and the Trehan Foundation Fund

The United Nations estimates that India’s urban population will nearly double to reach 586 million by 2030. This urbanization is taking place as the country grapples with the dramatic challenges and promises presented by economic liberalization and exposure to global flows of people, ideas, finance, investment, and media. The first Trehan India Initiative Theme Year at the University of Michigan will take place during 2009, and will address how urbanization is transforming contemporary India socially, economically, politically, culturally, and environmentally. It will focus on three closely related areas of investigation:

1) Transformations in urban politics and the role of the state in urban development. The liberalization of the Indian economy has fostered new models of private sector involvement in urban politics and development. What impacts have this change had on representations of civil and political society in urban governance?

2) Changes in the production of urban space. Liberalization has also brought the emergence of ‘global’ urban forms (malls, condominiums, new towns and industrial estates), and investment in metro systems, highways and flyovers. What implications do these new urban forms have for social and cultural change?

3) Issues of citizenship and politics in the urban realm. Some have argued that the emergence of new enclaves of wealth has led to new forms of social exclusion. Are we seeing a fragmentation of citizenship, as lower income groups suffer increasingly unequal access to rights and privileges in Indian cities?

Theme Year Programming Components

A lecture series will bring leading contributors to debates on contemporary urban development in India to UM.
A grant program will provide graduate students at UM the opportunity for summer study in India on urban development issues.
A Visiting Scholar, Ravi Sundaram, will be in residence during the Fall semester. Dr. Sundaram is a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.
Dr. Sundaram will teach a graduate seminar on urban change in India. This seminar will involve collaborative instruction between UM and institutions in India.
A theme-based film series will feature post-screening discussions by an inter-disciplinary group of faculty and graduate students at the University of Michigan, invited filmmakers, and visiting scholars.
A graduate student panel will be organized by UM graduate students to address an issue related to the theme that is of interest to them.
A year end conference will bring scholars from the US and India together to assess the year’s findings.

Longer Term Outcomes

The longer term objective of the theme year is to strengthen links between UM and institutions of higher education in India. Our eventual objective is to establish a center for the study of contemporary Indian urban development to be based at an institution in India with an interdisciplinary research focus.

Co-Coordinators of the theme year

Gavin Shatkin, Associate Professor of Urban Planning.

Neha Sami, Doctoral candidate in Urban and Regional Planning.

William Glover, Associate Professor in Architecture and Director of the
Center for South Asian Studies.

Lecture Series Schedule and Participants

January 23 Keynote Panel Discussion

Solomon Benjamin is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He was previously a consultant on urban development issues and an independent scholar based in Bangalore. He has published widely in international journals on issues of urban poverty and land development in the Global South.

Ravi Sundaram is a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), and a founding member of SARAI, a coalition of researchers that has had a major impact on contemporary scholarship on urban issues in India. His research interests focus on the relationship between the city and contemporary media experiences. He will be in residence at UM as a visiting scholar in Fall 2009 as part of the theme year.

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work plays with fiction and non-fiction to focus on ideas of gender, urban life and popular culture. Her films as director include the documentaries Ek Manohar Kahani (Best Short Doc IVFK2008), Q2P (Best Doc IFFLA and Stuttgart, 2007), Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City, andUnlimited Girls (Women’s News Award, WFFIS, Seoul; Best Doc, Aaina FF). She is also the writer of the feature Khamosh Pani (Best Screenplay, KARA FF; Best Film, Locarno FF) and the documentaries A Few Things I Know About Her, If You Pause and Skin Deep.

January 26 Occupancy Urbanism:
Unexpected Contestations to Indian Metros' Globalization

February 16 Caste, Gender and the Body Politic:
Begaluru's Experiments with Democracy

Janaki Nair is professor of history at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, India. Her research focuses on 19^th and 20^th century history of Karnataka and Mysore, on feminist histories, and on urban studies. Her books include The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press), and Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (Sage Publications).

March 13 Infrastructure

Swati Chattopadhyay is an associate professor of art and architectural history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is interested in the ties between colonialism and modernism, and in the spatial aspects of race, gender, and ethnicity in modern cities. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge), and co-editor of a special issue of PostColonial Studies.

March 27 Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws:
The Politics of Nature on the Streets of Delhi, India

Amita Baviskar is a professor of anthropology and researcher at the Institute for Economic Growth, University of Delhi, whose research explores issues of cultural politics of environment and development. She is the author of several books, including Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (Permanent Black), and In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (Oxford University Press). She has held visiting faculty positions at Cornell and Stanford Universities.

October 16 Lineages of Political Society

Partha Chatterjee is an internationally renowned Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial scholar, and a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He is professor of anthropology at Columbia University and Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His numerous books include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Zed Books), The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton University Press), Texts of Power (University of Minnesota Press), and The Politics of the Governed: Popular Politics in Most of the World (Columbia University Press).

November 20 Globalization and Democracy: A Theoretical Perspective
on Inequality and Citizenship in Contemporary India

Leela Fernandes is a professor of political science at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on questions of cultural politics, gender and political economy. Her books include India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (University of Minnesota Press), Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (University of Pennsylvania Press) and Transforming Feminist Practice (A. Lute Books).