The Politics of Community-Making in New Urban India

How is urban India changing? And how do communities inhabit and transform India’s new cities and urban spaces? In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Ritanjan Das to discuss a new book co-authored by Das and Nilotpal Kumar titled The Politics of Community-making in New Urban India: Illiberal Spaces, Illiberal Cities (Routledge, 2023). The book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. Based on ethnographic research in Noida, bordering the national capital Delhi, Ritanjan Das introduces us to a transforming urban India, and the often exclusivist forms of solidarity it generates.

Ritanjan Das is Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk