Uploaded March 2017 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Join us for a special public lecture as renowned academic and author Professor John Harriss (co-author: India Today, Keywords for India) explores the dimensions of political power in contemporary India. Professor Harriss will examine different aspects of power, including: power as force or strength; power as the capacity to manipulate and influence decision-making and power as a tool of domination.
Professor Harriss will reflect on how different social classes influence public policy and why there has not been more forceful resistance from the masses to their exclusion and oppression in the course of India’s dramatic surge of economic growth.
About the speaker:
John Harriss became interested in the anthropology of India and in the political economy of development as a result of a journey overland to India, and of travels in Punjab, in 1969, just as the ‘green revolution’ was taking off. His first field research, in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, in the early 1970s, was concerned with the social implications of the introduction of modern agricultural technology, and resulted in one of the few Indian village monographs to deal substantially with agrarian production relations, as well as with caste and kinship. He has retained a strong interest in agrarian change, and in the transformations of caste, reflected in recent writing, some of it based on further village studies in Tamil Nadu. His second major project took him, however, to the industrial city of Coimbatore, and to work both on the sociology of labour markets, and on industrial organization. A third body of research, based mainly on fieldwork in Chennai, had to do with ideas of trust and of social capital, but also led him to revisit the work of Milton Singer on the ‘industrial leaders’ of Madras, and this to some study of modern Hinduism. Subsequently he has undertaken ethnographic research on civil society and urban politics in both Delhi and Chennai, and most recently on the politics of business in Tamil Nadu. He has written widely on modern India.
Join us for a special public lecture as renowned academic and author Professor John Harriss (co-author: India Today, Keywords for India) explores the dimensions of political power in contemporary India. Professor Harriss will examine different aspects of power, including: power as force or strength; power as the capacity to manipulate and influence decision-making and power as a tool of domination.
Professor Harriss will reflect on how different social classes influence public policy and why there has not been more forceful resistance from the masses to their exclusion and oppression in the course of India’s dramatic surge of economic growth.
About the speaker:
John Harriss became interested in the anthropology of India and in the political economy of development as a result of a journey overland to India, and of travels in Punjab, in 1969, just as the ‘green revolution’ was taking off. His first field research, in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, in the early 1970s, was concerned with the social implications of the introduction of modern agricultural technology, and resulted in one of the few Indian village monographs to deal substantially with agrarian production relations, as well as with caste and kinship. He has retained a strong interest in agrarian change, and in the transformations of caste, reflected in recent writing, some of it based on further village studies in Tamil Nadu. His second major project took him, however, to the industrial city of Coimbatore, and to work both on the sociology of labour markets, and on industrial organization. A third body of research, based mainly on fieldwork in Chennai, had to do with ideas of trust and of social capital, but also led him to revisit the work of Milton Singer on the ‘industrial leaders’ of Madras, and this to some study of modern Hinduism. Subsequently he has undertaken ethnographic research on civil society and urban politics in both Delhi and Chennai, and most recently on the politics of business in Tamil Nadu. He has written widely on modern India.
