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The City and the Scam
Corruption Politics and Stories of Urban Space in Bengaluru and Mumbai
Speakers
In this event, Professor Malini Ranganathan will discuss her new book, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Yoda Press 2024, Cornell University Press 2023). Through ethnographic fieldwork, the book studies what its co-authors call “corruption plots” from the streets of Bengaluru and Mumbai, where black money, skyscrapers, land grabs, encroachment on wetlands, and slum evictions invoke outrage at deepening economic polarization and the impunity with which the real estate lobby operates. Flying in the face of conventional wisdom, the book argues that corruption is a story-telling practice charged with ethical meaning, one that does not simply condemn illegality or bribery, but is also used to call attention to the legal—and legalized—abuses of power by the state, political class, and elites.
At the same time, the book warns that anger by various publics about corruption is uneven, inflected by caste, class, and ethno-religious bias, especially in the context of rightwing nationalism and crony capitalism in India. Why do certain things get called “corruption” while others don’t—and why do corruption charges suddenly erupt into public discourse, while at other times remain muted in the background?
Drawing on ethnography in two Indian cities undertaken in 2018, as well as a cross-section of films and novels on the global city (in India and beyond), this book attends to the political slipperiness, sensationalism, and opportunism associated with corruption talk, wherein fantastical scams about the city can often appear more fictional than factual. Ultimately, in deriving a humanistic and multifaceted theory of corruption—sorely lacking in one-dimensional policy pronouncements—the book contends that across the world’s ostensible democracies, we need a more grounded analysis of how anti-corruption has been selectively championed and challenged, and with what effects, by both liberal and rightwing regimes. More information available here. The author will briefly discuss the book, followed by a conversation with Professor Sushmita Pati and an audience Q&A.
Speakers
Malini Ranganathan
Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the Department of Environment, Development, and Health in the School of International Service at American University, Washington, DC. A scholar of urban geography and environmental justice, her research is focused on the political economy of land, water, and climate change in Bengaluru. She has authored papers related to water access; the disappearance of lakes; and caste, class, and land politics in Bengaluru.
She is the coauthor of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (with D. Pike and S. Doshi, Yoda Press 2024, Cornell University Press 2023), a book that humanistically and ethnographically studies the topic of corruption in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and other cities. She is also the coeditor of Rethinking Difference as Racialization in India: Caste, Tribe, and Hindu Nationalism in Transnational Perspective. She is currently working on a book project titled The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Politics in Bengaluru, for which she received an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship in June 2024. In 2023, she received the Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracism Research and Practice from the American Association of Geographers, an award historically given to academics who align their research with human rights and social justice goals. She earned her Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.
Sushmita Pati
Sushmita Pati is Associate Professor of Politics at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Sushmita’s primary academic intervention has been at the cusp of urban politics and political economy.
Her first monograph Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022 and went on to win the prestigious BASAS Book Prize 2024 and the BISA-IPEG Book Prize 2023. Apart from that, her writings have been published in several academic journals and popular media. She studied Political Science at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, from where she earned her PhD.
