Residential Segregation in an Urbanizing India

CASI Seminar

in partnership with the South Asia Center & the Penn Institute for Urban Research

Naveen Bharathi
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CASI
A Virtual CASI Seminar via Zoom — 12 noon EDT | 9:30pm IST

About the Seminar:
This seminar will show how residential caste-segregation is independent of city size, using the first ever large-scale evidence of neighborhood-resolution data from 1,235 of the largest cities in contemporary India. Bharathi will discuss one of the central conundrums in Indian urbanism — the persistence of caste segregation across the country, and across cities of varying sizes. This finding punctures a hole in one of the central normative promises of India’s urbanization: the gradual withering of traditional caste-based segregation. This seminar will provide further fine-grained evidence on the ghettoization of the most spatially marginalized groups in urban India: Muslims and Dalits.

About the Speaker:
Naveen Bharathi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CASI as of July 2020. His research interests lie at the intersection of political sociology and political economy of identity in India. Specifically, his research explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and development, most broadly conceived. He has written about issues ranging from the relationship between ethnic diversity and public goods provisioning to spatial segregation in contemporary urban India. His research has been covered in numerous media publications and journals. Prior to his career in research, Naveen worked as an architect and planner in many distinguished architectural and planning firms in India. He was a Raghunathan Family Fellow (2019-20) at Harvard University where he continues to be a Fellow.

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.