Toward a Free Economy: Swantantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India - A Book Talk with Aditya Balasubramanian

Join us for a talk about historian Aditya Balasubramanian's (Australian National University) first monograph, Toward a Free Economy: Swantantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (Princeton University Press, 2023), which presents the unknown history of economic conservatism in India through the steady rise and relatively uneventful decline of the Swantantra Party in democratic electoral politics. Democracy's persistence in India is uncommon among postcolonial societies. By excavating a perspective of how Indians made and understood their own democracy and economy, Aditya Balasubramanian broadens our picture of the free market, neoliberalism, democracy, and the postcolonial world. In the process, he helps us understand why geographically specific and culturally rooted histories from the Global South are necessary for qualifying and nuancing these ostensibly universal concepts.