SPJIMR Podcast

Past Imperfect Episode 31 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Sudev Sheth, Senior Lecturer at the Lauder Institute, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India.

Sheth unearths the remarkable story of how one family, the Jhaveris of Ahmedabad, navigated business and politics under Mughal rule. As prominent diamond merchants, the Jhaveris prospered under the protection of the Mughals, becoming partners in empire. Once the Mughal Empire disintegrated, however, they faced enormous risks and opportunities: state violence but also new leverage in influencing politics. In a manner familiar to any contemporary Indian business tycoon, the Jhaveris had to cultivate diverse political ties while conducting their commercial activities, all while managing the delicate task of family succession. And they largely succeeded: the family, now known as the Lalbhais, remains in business today, some fourteen generations later.

Past Imperfect Episode 30 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Aparajith Ramnath, Associate Professor of History at Ahmedabad University and the author of Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya.

M. Visvesvaraya was much more than India’s most famous engineer. As Ramnath details, he was a risk-taking diwan of Mysore, a liberal statesman, and a tireless advocate of mass education and industrialization in India. Engineering a Nation provides us with a critical chapter in modern India’s development trajectory, telling us how Visvesvaraya presided over the construction of big dams, ironworks, factories, bureaucracies, education systems, and the scaffoldings of democracy. His vision for India was highly technocratic, one that embraced economic planning and top-down leadership. This technocratic vision helped lay the foundations for things like India’s IT economy—but it also, as Ramnath is careful to note, came with some significant costs.

Past Imperfect Episode 29 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of Capitalism: A Global History.

“A radical departure and discontinuity in human affairs”: this is how Beckert describes capitalism. Capitalism: A Global History spans centuries and continents to piece together a continuous revolution in economic affairs, one which has involved slaves and plutocrats, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, and communists and committed neoliberals. Consciously avoiding the Eurocentrism of earlier histories, Beckert takes us to early Islamic hubs of capitalists like twelfth-century Aden and visits textile production centers in modern Cambodia. Along the way, he stresses how none of this would have been possible without the state. The free market, in Beckert’s telling, is fiction. It was through state power that a loose, marginal network of capitalists turned into the juggernaut that is modern capitalism.

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Past Imperfect Episode 28 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Pronoti Datta, author of In the Beginning There Was Bombay Duck: A Food History of Mumbai.

Mumbai, the Maximum City, is arguably also the city of maximum food variety. Where else do people put shrimp in banana cake and make biryani out of patrel? In the Beginning There Was Bombay Duck chronicles Mumbai’s astonishing diversity of cuisines, both past and present. Datta describes how the city’s food options developed through British and Portuguese inputs, the arrival of new communities bringing their distinct masalas, and the bounty of the sea. Food provides a unique window into the city’s complex socioeconomic tapestry. On the one hand, Mumbaikars have been united in their craze for tasty pao bhaji and chaat. On the other hand, rich and poor have rarely ever eaten in the same places and particular food items, like vada pao, have become politically charged. Datta’s food history goes beyond the contents of our plates to example the people and communities which have made Mumbai’s food so delicious and complex.

Past Imperfect Episode 27 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Joshua Ehrlich, Associate Professor of History at the University of Macau and the author of The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge.

Google has one thing in common with the East India Company: it sees itself as not just a business but a promoter of knowledge. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, Ehrlich explains why colonial officials like Warren Hastings and Lord Wellesley set up schools and promoted scholarship. They saw an explicit political value in such projects. By being a patron of knowledge, the Company could “conciliate” key constituencies in India and Britain and fend off accusations of philistinism. Company officials began by forging alliances with learned elites and scholar-administrators. By the 1820s, however, some British colonial administrators were experimenting with something far more revolutionary: mass education.

Past Imperfect Episode 26 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with John Cassidy, staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World.

Although the term “capitalism” only dates from the 1830s, people have been analyzing it—and, quite often, condemning it—for over 250 years. Capitalism and Its Critics provides a sweeping account of over thirty major economic thinkers. These range from well-known names like Adam Smith and Karl Marx to lesser-known—but equally important—figures like Silvia Federici, who demanded wages for housework, and Eric Williams, who laid bare the formative role of slavery in capitalism. Flagrant inequality has been a rallying cry of these critics, but so has empire and imperialism. From eighteenth-century critiques of the East India Company to twenty-first century assaults on American hegemony, we can observe some remarkably consistent arguments about how capitalism has been immoral, inequitable, and exploitative but also remarkably resilient.

Past Imperfect Episode 25 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Avrati Bhatnagar, Instructor in the Department of History and International Comparative Studies Program at Duke University, and Sumathi Ramaswamy, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of History at Duke University. Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy are the editors of Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931.

Photographing Civil Disobedience captures Bombay in a moment of upheaval, convulsed by the Civil Disobedience Movement. Based on an album of photographs recently discovered at the Alkazi Collection in Delhi, the volume provides a new perspective on Bombay and Indian nationalism, demonstrating the power of female political participation. Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy show us how, in the months after Mahatma Gandhi’s famous Salt March, the women of Bombay led, directed, and dominated key acts of anticolonial protest. Photographs, they remark, can tell us a very different version of history from what we derive from written records.

Past Imperfect Episode 24 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia.

The Partition of 1947 was not carried out in isolation. Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands reconstructs a longer and much more complex story: how the British Indian Empire, which once stretched from modern-day Yemen to Myanmar, was sundered through five distinct and traumatic separations. Between 1937 and 1971, twelve nation-states emerged from the rubble of empire—yet their creations were not inevitable. Shattered Lands is a story of cosmopolitan connections, opposition to partitions, and several missed opportunities which could have changed the course of South Asia’s very violent twentieth century.

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