CSA Fall Lecture Series: Ajantha Subramanian (Professor, Anthropology & South Asian Studies, Harvard University)

How does the utopian democratic ideal of meritocracy reproduce historical inequality? At the heart of the study are the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, a set of highly coveted engineering colleges that are equally representative of Indian meritocracy and, until recently, of caste exclusivity. In this talk, I hope to show that the politics of meritocracy at the IITs illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India.