South Asia exemplifies the contradictions of contemporary capitalism: a rapidly expanding stock market with high return for investors and a high aggregate economic growth have continued to coexist with unprecedented ecological crises, uneven-development, and absolute poverty. Yet the ideologues of market fundamentalism across the region continue to demand for greater state retraction even as neoliberal restructuring policies strengthen existing caste-class divides, landlessness, and environmental distress. Amidst this, new alliances between states and capitalists are forming giving rise to neo-cronyism, militant ethno-nationalism, rent-seeking, and super-exploitation. It is equally important to stress that this process is far from frictionless: emerging horizons of resistance and crisis are concretizing in the form of farmers protests in India; the failure of the rentier state and neoliberal austerity in Sri Lanka; peasant movements against privatization of agrarian land in Lahore, to name just a few.
How do we then theorize capitalism from South Asia to advance our political agenda of addressing these variegated manifestations of economic, political, and ecological distress at a time when the hegemony of capitalism in South Asia is imploding from within? What does centering South Asia reveal about the imminent contradictions of global capitalism? Our goal is to not only think through the specificity of capitalism in South Asia, but to also understand how these specificities unfold and challenge the world-systemic structure of capitalism.
Proudly co-sponsored by COSAS, the Franke Institute, and the University of Chicago Graduate Council