Ronald Inden is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He investigates Indian class formations in relation to changes in world ruling classes and the ways in which people have tried to articulate these changes with intellectual practices and national and ethnic “identities” in the twentieth century. He is particularly interested in people’s efforts to construct paradises or utopias on earth in and beside their everyday lives. These involve practices ranging from “rituals” in medieval or traditional societies to the “media” in modern ones and, especially in India, the world of cinema. The problems of how people have situated and resituated these differing practices in a “developing” country like India bring together his historical, anthropological, and Indological interests.