Youth have been seen as vital to delivering India’s demographic dividend, but today, face a compounding crisis of rising unemployment, climate risk and democratic decline. India’s cities, far from being spaces of emancipation for caste- and gender-marginalized youth, exacerbate…

We are excited to announce the return of the annual Penn Hindi–Urdu workshop for Fall 2026! This year, the workshop will be held on Saturday, November 14th, in the Cherpack Lounge at Williams Hall. As always, participants in the workshop collectively read a set of texts available…

From the late nineteenth century, sound recording and the mass circulation of commercial records helped reconfigure South Indian musical traditions, loosening them from earlier temporal, spatial and social settings. Alongside the much-discussed shift from courtly patronage in…

Sir M. Visvesvaraya (1861-1962) was one of the most prominent engineers in late-colonial India, becoming the face of iconic irrigation projects, industrial enterprises, and technical institutions. But he is arguably best known as an evangelist for industrialization and economic…

This talk examines the teleological narratives of scientific progress that persist in both European and Indian historiographies of science, from the Ancient Alexandrian myth of “pure rational inquiry” supposedly devoid of religion, to what Banu Subramaniam terms the "archaic…