Prof. Sunila S. Kale is associate professor of international studies at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on Indian and South Asian politics, energy studies, the political economy of development, and the history of capitalism. She is the author of Electrifying India (Stanford, 2014), Mapping Power (OUP, 2018), and “Rural Land Dispossession in China and India” (Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020). She completed her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of Texas.
In 2020, India’s Railway Ministry announced that the railways would resurrect the practice of selling chai (tea) to its millions of customers the old-fashioned way, in kulhads, the small mud-clay cups that are meant to be used once and discarded. Prof. Kale’s Fulbright research asks whether and how policies such as the kulhad program support and reproduce modes of informal, artisanal work that persist despite developmental ideologies that have long predicted their demise. In her project, she is focusing on small-scale, labor-intensive informal production in urban India by looking at the work of traditional potters, or kumbhars, in western India.