(Co-taught with Siddhartha Deb) 

Is inequality the price of growth? Rising inequality seems a relentless accomplice of rapid economic change. In India and China, the world’s most populous and fastest growing countries, the very wealthy are swelling at staggering rates as an emerging middle class transforms society through new patterns of global consumption and production—and yet more than 1.5 billion people earn less than US$2 a day. This course explores this paradox by examining how daunting new forms of inequality are wrestled with and represented through genres such as contemporary fiction, non-fiction, journalism, ethnography, and film. It thus provides a lens through which to understand China and India’s different circumstances, historical narratives, and cultural and political contexts in relation to economic change and inequality. We will also examine their interlinked transformations and global implications to situate India and China in larger questions of how societies respond to swift social change. This class is part of a Ford Foundation-supported project and is being offered in conjunction with partner classes on the same subject in Peking University in Beijing and Jawaharlal University in Delhi. It will include substantial reading and writing, films and guest lectures.