Talk by Rohit Lamba (Economics, Cornell University)

India's pursuit of great power status faces a fundamental paradox: the economic nationalism that shapes its development strategy simultaneously undermines the global integration necessary for achieving its international ambitions. This article examines how India's current blanket commitment to strategic autonomy and self-reliance, while producing notable achievements, such as in digital infrastructure and financial inclusion, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi (2014-2024), ultimately constrains its ability to project power and influence globally. Drawing on developmental state theory, nationalism and civilizational-state typologies, and comparative analysis with East Asian success stories, I argue that India's economic nationalism operates through four transmission mechanisms—worldview constraints, state capacity limitations, decision-making pathologies, and foreign perception costs—that create a self-reinforcing feedback loop limiting its global reach. Highlighting India's distinctive political economy model as a premature and pluralist democracy specializing in high-skilled services, I argue that the country's development trajectory may be better served by strategies that leverage its democratic strengths and pursue an incremental but consistent reforms by consensus strategy while heeding Deng Xiaoping’s dictum of "hide your strength, bide your time" on the international stage. The analysis suggests that while India's fundamentals ensure respectable growth rates of 5-6%, achieving the 8-9% growth needed to fulfill its global ambitions before demographic dividends dissipate will require transcending the current overtly nationalist framework in the economic realm.

Rohit Lamba is an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. He has previously held academic positions at the Pennsylvania State University, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University Abu Dhabi. He did his PhD in economics at Princeton University. He was also an economist at the Office of the Chief economic Adviser to the Government of India. His research spans economic theory and economic development. He is the co-author of the best-selling book Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India's Economic Future.

Global Research Fellows are a new interdisciplinary research and professional development community at the Einaudi Center for advanced graduate students, Cornell postdocs, and visiting and local scholars. You'll find a community of fellow researchers with regional and international interests and a desire to foster a more equitable world.

Eligible students:
• Have completed at least two years of graduate education
• Engaged in research on a topic of global or regional studies significance
• Hold a strong desire to impact global challenges and create real-world solutions
• Interested in engaging and collaborating with other researchers

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Talk by Jason Cons (Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin)

Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh’s southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see its rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. This talk, and the book upon which it is based, explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta’s climate-affected future.

Jason Cons is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Delta Futures (University of California Press, 2025) and Sensitive Space (University of Washington Press, 2016). He is the co-editor of Frontier Assemblages (Wiley) and is a member of the Limn editorial collective and an outgoing editor of South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies.

This presentation is supported by a grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor

Talk by Sara Kazmi (English, University of Pennsylvania)

This talk will focus on left, feminist, and anticaste literatures produced by radical intellectuals from Punjab, a border region split between India and Pakistan. I show how Punjabi writers deployed regional oral poetic and performative forms to critique caste, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and dominant religion in postcolonial South Asia. Focusing on Marxist playwrights Najm Hosain Syed and Gursharan Singh, the talk will analyze how they interpreted and referenced key genres embedded in poetic cultures that predate the national divide, like the Var of Dulla Bhatti, a historical ballad that celebrates 16th-century rebellions against the Mughal throne. In doing so, these authors responded to the rising significance of the peasant as a political actor in 1960s Punjab in both India and Pakistan, intervening in global debates around revolutionary transformation and decolonization. Moreover, they constituted a border-crossing literary practice that traversed, and indeed, actively challenged the colonially drawn boundary between the two nation-states.

Sara Kazmi is an Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She is a scholar and translator whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anticolonial, left, and oppositional literary production in the global south. Sara focuses on the Panjab region, and more broadly, on South Asia and South Asian diasporas, combining methods in literary studies, performance, and history to examine how marginal and vernacular writing engages planetary debates around decolonization, Marxism, and revolutionary transformation. Sara is also part of the Revolutionary Papers collective, which is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th-century periodicals of left, anti-imperial, and anticolonial critical production. In addition to her work as a scholar, she is a performer and student of Indian classical music. She blends ragas with folk tunes in renditions of protest music from South Asia, some of which are archived at mein.beqaid (I, Uncaged). Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Sara Kazmi was a Postdoctoral Fellow at LUMS University in Lahore, Pakistan. She received a PhD in Criticism and Culture at the Department of English, University of Cambridge, an MA in South Asian History at SOAS, London, and a B.A. (Hons) in Humanities from LUMS University.

Discussion with Sarah Thompson (Government, Cornell University), Sadia Mahmood (South Asia Program, Cornell University) and author Natasha Raheja (Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University)

Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India (Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) explores the flexibility of minority-majority politics in the context of citizenship claims in South Asia. The book offers an ethnographic account of the migration of minoritized Pakistani Hindus to India, where they ostensibly become part of a religious majority. I argue that majority-minority politics in South Asia exceed state borders, in ways that are not nation-bound. Theorizing the ways that national majorities construct themselves as global minorities, and conversely, the ways that minorities imagine justice as majorities, I contend that liberal democracy's minority form does majoritarian work. As more and more national majorities consolidate authoritarian rule through imagining themselves as minorities under threat, this work makes an important contribution to scholarly conversations about political theory, migration, and borders across the humanities and social sciences.

Members of the Cornell community may read a draft of the book's introduction before the presentation (Cornell netID required to view).

Natasha Raheja is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from NYU and her BS in Biology and MA in Asian Languages and Literature with a focus on Urdu from UT Austin. Her projects explore questions of migration, belonging, and majority-minority politics in South Asia. Dr. Raheja is the director of Cast in India, an observational portrait of the Bengali metal workers who manufacture New York City manhole covers, and A Gregarious Species, an experimental, found-footage film featuring cross-border locust swarms in the Thar Desert region. She is also completing a book tentatively entitled Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India.