Vamsi Vakulabharanam will deliver the 17th Giri Deshingkar Memorial Lecture on ‘Class and Inequality in China and India in Historical Perspective: Implications in a Changing World Order’ on 8 July 2025 at India International Centre, New Delhi. It will be chaired by Patricia Uberoi. It is being jointly organized by CSDS and Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi.
China and India have witnessed a significant revival over the last three decades in terms of their place in the world economy. Two and a half centuries ago, they contributed 50 percent of the world output; after suffering a decline thereafter, their share fell to a paltry 9 percent in 1950 but has since resurged to over 25 percent today, in the process shaping the world order, while subsequently being shaped by it. Their growth and inequality experiences diverged for three decades following India's independence (1947) and the Chinese revolution (1949). Thereafter, there are remarkable underlying similarities in the experiences of both countries, especially in terms of their rising inequality patterns analysed through a class lens. The mutual interconnectedness between Chinese and Indian growth and inequality dynamics and the transformation and evolution of global capitalism is key to understanding the within-country inequality dynamics in both countries over the 1950-2010 period.
Vamsi Vakulabharanam is Co-Director of the Asian Political Economy Program and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He previously taught at the University of Hyderabad (2008-14) and the City University of New York (2004-07). His current research focuses on inequality in India and China and the political economy of Indian cities through the axes of gender, caste, class, and religion. In the past, he has also worked on agrarian change in developing economies, agrarian cooperatives, and the relationship between economic development and inequality. Vakulabharanam was awarded the Amartya Sen Award in 2013 by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. His latest publication is titled Class and Inequality in China and India, 1950-2010, published by the Oxford University Press in 2025.
Patricia Uberoi is an Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS), Delhi. She served as the Chairperson of the Institute of Chinese Studies from 2015-2021.
Tuesday, 8 July 2025, 6 pm, Kamaladevi Halls I & II, India International Centre, New Delhi
