India Observed

Virtual

Dr. Raghuram Rajan, in conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Avik Chanda on Indian history, society, and politics.

Speaker Profiles

Raghuram G. Rajan

Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth. He was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2013 and September 2016. Between 2003 and 2006, Dr. Rajan was the Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund.  Dr. Rajan’s research interests are in banking, corporate finance, and economic development, especially the role finance plays in it. The books he has written include The Third Pillar: How the State and Markets are leaving Communities Behind 2019, I do What I do: On Reform, Rhetoric, and Resolve, 2017, and Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, for which he was awarded the Financial Times-Goldman Sachs prize for best business book in 2010.  Dr. Rajan is a member of the Group of Thirty. He was the President of the American Finance Association in 2011 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2003, the American Finance Association awarded Dr. Rajan the inaugural Fischer Black Prize for the best finance researcher under the age of 40. The other awards he has received include the Infosys prize for the Economic Sciences in 2012, the Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics in 2013, Euromoney Central Banker Governor of the Year 2014, and Banker Magazine (FT Group) Central Bank Governor of the Year 2016.

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty holds a BSc (physics honors) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate Diploma in management (considered equivalent to MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD (history) from the Australian National University. He is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College. He is the Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. He was one of the founding editors, with Sheldon Pollock from Columbia University and Sanjay Subrahmanyam from UCLA, of the series, South Asia Across the Disciplines, published by a consortium of three university presses (Chicago, Columbia, and California). He served on the Board of Experts for non-Western art for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Center for Global Cooperation Research (Bonn and Essen) for a few years from 2012.  He is also an Associate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney 2018-2021. Chakrabarty’s most recent book is The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (in press, University of Chicago).

Avik Chanda

Avik Chanda is a bestselling author, columnist, business advisor, and entrepreneur. His book, From Command To Empathy: Using EQ in the Age of Disruption (HarperCollins, 2017), was featured in Amazon India’s Best Reads under Business, Strategy and Management. His latest book, Dara Shukoh: The Man Who Would Be King (HarperCollins, 2019), was on the National Non-Fiction Top 10 Bestsellers List for 10 consecutive weeks, garnered huge critical success, and has been released as an audiobook by Audible. Avik is the Founder and CEO of NUVAH ELINT LLP, a NASSCOM 10,000 incubated startup, and is also a visiting faculty at IIT-Delhi and XLRI.