Alpa Shah presents her co-authored ‘Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India’, listed as a 2018 Book of the Year by The Hindu newspaper. While the world marvels at India’s economic growth rates, inequality is rising and the country’s ‘untouchable’ and ‘tribal’ communities – who make up a staggering one in twenty-five people across the globe – remain at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy. How and why is this the case? In conversation with economists, a team of anthropologists lived with Adivasis (‘tribes’) and Dalits (‘untouchables’) in five different sites across India to answer this question. They show how capitalism is entrenching social difference, transforming traditional forms of identity-based discrimination into new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression. Inherited inequalities of power are merging with the super-exploitation of migrant labour, and the conjugated oppression of class, caste, tribe and gender. The struggles against these inequalities are considered.

Alpa Shah was raised in Nairobi, read Geography at Cambridge and completed her PhD in Anthropology at the London School of Economics, where she now teaches as Associate Professor. She is the author of Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas (shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the New India Foundation Book Prize), In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India, and co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India. She has reported for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service and co-curated the photo exhibition, Behind the Indian Boom.