 Both class and caste have economic dimensions. Both class and caste have political and cultural dimensions. Both class and caste have consequences around natural issues. So how do we, you know, when we put these two together, how do we get a richer analysis? You know, that is the project. My name is Vamsi Vakula Varnal. I teach economics at the University of Massachusetts, I was a grantee at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and I'm also co-directing the Asian Political Program at the University of Massachusetts at SAMHSA. I'm working on this project called Class and Inequality in India and China, and it's actually a forthcoming book. And so this book is all about how to view inequality-related issues in China and India through the lens of class and Marxian understanding of class. And there's a lot of work on inequality in China, and there's also a lot of work on inequality in India, but there's very little work that focuses on the axis of class. And what it does is, you know, apart from helping us characterize these economies, you know, in class regimes, it also throws light on the deeper social dynamics, you know, that drive the economic processes in both these countries. And on top of it, it also helps us understand the nature of the state, nature of the Chinese state, nature of the Indian state in class terms. And, you know, doing this analysis also gives us an insight into within-country inequality dynamics. So this is, you know, if you take the big thinkers on inequality like Simon Kuznets or Thomas Piketty, you know, they posit, you know, a secular kind of relationship, you know, over, you know, between, let's say, level of income of a country and the inequality patterns. Kuznets says, you know, it's an inverted U-shaped curve. Inequality rises first and then declines. And in the case of Piketty, he argues that after a decline in the middle of the 20th century, you know, inequality is continuously rising. So my argument is a little bit different using class analysis. I argue that, you know, it's the particular nature of capitalist crises that drive inequality regimes. Depending on the nature of the crisis, a particular kind of inequality regime, you know, is unleashed, which either, you know, leads to rising inequality or it could also lead to declining inequality. It depends on the particular institutional configuration that emerges in response to particular capitalist crisis. So using class, you know, gives us, you know, all these rich dynamics of the underlying economies of China and India. Another forthcoming book that I have is with a co-author, Mr. Mothina, is titled, tentatively, Vanishing Mosaics, Changing Landscapes of Indian Cities. And so this is, you know, we adopt a novel approach, you know, and this approach is, you know, broadly, it can be called a socio-spatial dialectical approach where, you know, we take multiple social axes and we take spatial axes and we see how they interact in producing economic or social outcomes. So we look, in particular, we look at, you know, the axes of gender, religion, class and caste in the Indian context, and see how city space interacts with each of these axes. So just to give you a couple of examples, so when you take something like gender, you know, and how city space interacts with gender, the key insight is that, you know, city spaces are very gendered, you know, and it actually has a significant impact on something as basic as, you know, labor force participation rates of women. So depending on how the city space is structured, we are comparing two cities in India, Bombay and Mumbai right now and Hyderabad. Mumbai has much better public transportation infrastructure. So women could, you know, therefore, you know, participate more actively in the labor market compared to Hyderabad, compared to women in Hyderabad, or, you know, it could also be, you know, proximity. Are there work opportunities in the city neighborhood where women reside? That determines their labor force participation rate. Similarly, if you take the axis of religion, what we found about Indian cities is Muslims are, you know, ghettoized and the ghettoization process is, you know, deepening in the Indian context right now. And we also know, you know, our primary, you know, major insight, you know, if neighborhoods, city neighborhoods, you know, something like sub districts or wards, comparable to census tracts in western countries. At those levels, if you have more mixed neighborhoods, it has a very significant outcome, which is there are better development outcomes for the people who live in these mixed neighborhoods. So for instance, you know, what we found is, you know, poverty outcomes are much better. You know, there are fewer poor people if the neighborhoods are more mixed, or, you know, there are better educational opportunities if neighborhoods are more mixed. So what we find is, you know, whether it is religion, whether it is something like caste, you know, the social group, social kind of grouping in India, when the neighborhood becomes more mixed, you know, there are better development outcomes. Even striking finding, you know, we compared, you know, similar geographical city tracts in the western countries and Indian cities, something like census tract here and, you know, border, sub district in Indian cities. And what we find is Indian neighborhoods tend to be much more mixed, and western city neighborhoods are much more segregated. So, but then, you know, over the last 30 years, with economic reforms, the neoliberal economic reforms, you know, segregation processes are also deepening in Indian cities. So our work, you know, highlights the nature of Indian cities, nature of these landscapes, and also how these landscapes are undergoing change quickly. So using these four axes, the social axes of religion, gender, class, and caste, and making them interact with city space, we are able to arrive at this outcome. And there's also a lot of policy, advocacy work that can come out of, you know, these insights. Partly coming out of this, you know, book, I've also been thinking about a deeper theoretical question, which is, you know, how do, you know, in India, there are a lot of thinkers who privilege class, you know, Marxist thinkers or communist parties that privilege the category of class, and they argue that this is the only axis that matters, you know, to understand society, and, or the primary, you know, the fundamental axis, whereas there are lots of other kinds of thinkers, you know, social theorists, activists who privilege caste. And there's no unity, you know, there's a lack of trust between, you know, these two groups, although they seem to be working on similar issues, issues of backwardness, issues of lack of privilege, issues of lack of dignity, issues surrounding exploitation in the workplace, they don't see eye to eye. So this work, you know, trying to develop some kind of a, you know, a composite way of thinking about both class and caste together, it'll bring in, you know, the strengths of class analysis, you know, for instance, you know, how do we analyze the Indian capitalism? You know, what are the class dynamics that underlie Indian capitalism? And what are the social dynamics, you know, that have been part of the Indian context for a very long time? How do you bring these two together theoretically? And, and using class caste in a composite sense, how do we make an analysis of Indian, you know, let's say the social formation that is Indian capitalism? So, so that is, you know, an ongoing project, you know, this is going to be written in the, you know, next one or two years. And it's a, you know, a lot of on-the-ground kind of work, practice, has worked with something like, you know, both class and caste issues fused, you know, in an activist space or a policy space. But it has not been adequately theorized yet. People talk about the importance of both, but, you know, so for instance, something like, you know, both class and caste have economic dimensions. Both class and caste have political and cultural dimensions. Both class and caste have consequences around natural issues. So, how do we, you know, when we put these two together, how do we get a richer analysis? You know, that is the project. And, and this could also feed off from and feed into, you know, composite analysis, let's say, in the American or European context, combining class and race or class and gender, right? So, how do we combine two axes, right? So that would be the theoretical contribution.