Mekhala Krishnamurthy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Shiv Nadar University. She is a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar at CASI, having recently completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology from University College London. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, her doctoral dissertation spans three decades of rural transformation in the social, economic and political lives of an agricultural market (mandi) town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The dissertation explores the interconnections of changing agrarian practices, reforming agricultural commodity markets, the dynamics of political participation, and the forces of local, regional and corporate capital as they are experienced and expressed in the everyday lives and relationships of farmers, traders, laborers, state and corporate institutions.
