Economy, Politics and Society

Code: FC-0412-1 | Semester: Monsoon 2026

FC Section: First Year

Why does the US have the lead in AI? What do vests and bank loans have in common? What is money and what does the Reserve Bank of India do? What does deglobalization mean and what do tariffs and controls on immigration by Western countries have to do with it? What is a budget and why do economists spend so much time worrying about government budgets? Is the Sensex a correct gauge of how the Indian economy is doing? Why are countries afraid of “Japanification”? What is China’s “ mayor economy”?

This course addresses a diverse range of issues in economics and public policy in a non-technical way. It emphasises the intuition behind complex economic ideas and also explores the connections of economics with other disciplines – psychology, philosophy, finance, sociology and political science—for example. Finally, it explores India-specific problems such as the risk of a middle-income trap. The aim is to blend an understanding of current issues with the history of ideas to leave students with a quick but comprehensive idea of the science and art of economics.

The course will use a diverse set of resources – short videos, excerpts from Yale and MIT open learning courses, blogs and a simple textbook written by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.

Code: FC-0412-2 | Semester: Monsoon 2026

FC Section: First Year

This course puts the I in EPS. Few social, political, or economic movements can be understood in isolation from their international context. Their triggers may be local, but the ideas, people, money, and technologies that mobilise them travel. We will therefore read economy, politics, and society in comparative perspective, unearthing shared intellectual undercurrents and the material impact of watershed events across time and geography. We will pay particular attention to global markets as shapers of political and social developments.

Rather than starting with theory, the course is organised around ebbs and flows in societies.  We will connect social upheaval to disruption in markets, understand the role coercion plays in international political economy, ground the origins of economic life in religion and dogma, and frame technology as a vehicle for political engineering. When we do go through canonical texts, it will mostly be to understand societies in convulsion: Luther’s Europe, Smith’s Scotland, Meiji Japan, Weimar Germany, Mao’s China and Malviya’s Benares for example. Technology will play a starring role in this course — and although you are not expected to have a legal background, we will occasionally analyse legal texts both as an instrument of powerful interests and a resistance tool for social movements.

Code: FC-0412-3 | Semester: Monsoon 2026

FC Section: First Year

This course introduces students to seminal writings on the intertwined trajectories of economy, politics, and society in the Indian subcontinent during the emergence of modernity. It traces the evolution of modern South Asia from 1818 to 1947, examining key social, political, and economic transformations under colonial rule.

We will explore major figures who engaged with — and shaped — the political and social struggles of the period, alongside critical debates on religious reform, women’s roles, caste hierarchies, communalism, and nation formation. Special attention will be given to the complexity of colonial governance, economic change, and social contestations.

Students will engage with a range of primary texts — including autobiographies, speeches, political treatises, ethnographies, and literary fiction — to analyse how ideas of economy, politics, and society were debated and reimagined in colonial South Asia.

Code: FC-0412-4 | Semester: Monsoon 2026

FC Section: First Year

Does Caste Still Matter in India Today?

“Democracy in India is a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” These words by Dr Ambedkar in the Annihilation of Caste continue to compel us to critically reflect upon the myriad hurdles that have kept India away from fully realising its democratic potential. For Ambedkar, one of the main social cleavages that resisted notions of equality and social justice was the pervasive phenomenon of caste in India. Achieving political freedom, as Ambedkar presciently reminded everyone, was no guarantee for realising social freedom. Seven decades after India’s independence, how deeply entrenched is this social idea of democracy in India today? More specifically, how do we understand the role of caste in the chequered story of India’s democracy? Should caste only be understood as a pernicious form of social hierarchy or can it also be seen as an entity that has shaped the rise of ‘lower-caste’ identity assertion and led to the socio-economic upliftment of marginalised sections?

This course will introduce students to debates and discussions around why, how and in what ways caste shapes different facets of everyday life in contemporary India. With a thematic focus around politics, society and economy, this course will offer varied perspectives to meaningfully approach a deceptively simple question – ‘Does Caste Still Matter in India?’. The course will be divided into 3 categories. The first section will deal with how caste became politicized after 1947 by focusing on the rise of caste-based political parties and social movements in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu. The second section will introduce students to how caste continues to operate as a form of social hierarchy through seemingly egalitarian spheres of food, music, sport and educational institutions. The final section will focus on the complex role caste plays in the Indian economy by dealing with conceptual issues like ‘caste and class’, along with thematic issues like caste-based discrimination in labour markets, the gig economy, the question of Dalit capitalism, among others. This course will encourage students to think critically about these issues in relation to how the story of Indian democracy has unfolded over the years. It will provoke students to think of caste as the ‘undemocratic soil’ of a rapidly urbanising India, and not treat it as a past relic or as a phenomenon that rears its ugly head only among rural, ‘backward communities’ and in underdeveloped regions of India.

Code: FC-0412-5 | Semester: Monsoon 2026

FC Section: First Year

What makes a society just, prosperous, and worth living in? Questions of the common good cannot be answered by economics, political science, sociology, philosophy, or environmental studies alone. They require us to move between moral ideas, empirical realities, institutional arrangements, and lived experience.

This foundation course examines how states, markets, communities, and other institutions organise collective life. We shall study how societies produce order, distribute resources, manage conflict, define belonging, respond to inequality, and confront environmental and technological change. Rather than treating states and markets as separate or opposing spheres, the course asks how they are historically constituted, socially embedded, and politically contested.

Students will learn to read across social science disciplines, reconstruct arguments, interpret evidence, and exercise judgment when reasonable people disagree. The aim is not to provide a single theory of the common good, but to develop the intellectual habits needed to think carefully about competing values, institutional choices, and their consequences.

Code: FC-0412-7 | Semester: Monsoon 2026

FC Section: Senior Year

How does an economy shape the society it sits inside, its politics, its culture, its institutions, and even its most intimate human arrangements? This course builds a working framework for reading any politico-economic system. We begin with the foundational insight that economies are not natural facts but social constructions: they are built through institutions, legitimised through ideology, and reproduced through the everyday habits and beliefs of ordinary people. From that foundation, we trace the historical arc of Capitalism — from its origins through imperialism and industrial labour, to its transformation via financialization and the welfare state, to its current mutations in platform monopoly and digital extraction. Running alongside this economic history is a second strand: the story of how political power is organised in capitalist societies, how business captures the state, how international institutions transmit a particular economic ideology across the globe, and where the cracks in democratic governance are appearing. The course closes with the question that all of this is building toward: what does the system do to people, to their emotions, their relationships, their sense of hope and meaning, and where is it headed?

No prior background in economics, politics, or sociology is required.