Past Imperfect Episode 19 features SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel in conversation with Amrita Shah, author of The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire.

What does Mohanlal Killavala have in common with Mahatma Gandhi? Both men migrated to South Africa. Both men were Gujarati professionals who smarted at racial prejudice in the British Empire, protested against unjust laws, and spent time in jail. There were important dissimilarities, as well—dissimilarities which add nuance to the story of the Indian diaspora. Amrita Shah’s The Other Mohan traces the story of her great-grandfather, Killavala, as he joined thousands of other Indians seeking better opportunities abroad in the early twentieth century. While reconstructing Killavala’s travels, she also tells a much more complex story of how the Indian Ocean knit together so many different people through bonds of labor, political activity, and marriage.

Past Imperfect Episode 18 features SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel in conversation with Rosemary Wakeman, Professor of History at Fordham University and author of The Worlds of Victor Sassoon.

Victor Sassoon (1881-1961) called three cities home: Bombay, London, and Shanghai. These three cities, as Rosemary Wakeman explains, best epitomised capitalism and globalisation in the 1920s and 1930s. In The Worlds of Victor Sassoon, Wakeman uses the life and fortunes of the Baghdadi Jewish businessman to tell a much larger story of cosmopolitanism and global cities. Bombay, London, and Shanghai resembled one another more than their own countries: they became international hubs of finance, technology, media, and the leisure economy. This was a world of horse races and aviation, real estate speculation and the movie industry, and art deco architecture and investment banking. Victor Sassoon stood at the centre of a much broader transformation of global capitalism, one which sprouted the roots of today’s economy.

Past Imperfect episode 17 features SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel in conversation with Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin and author of Making Empire.
 
Question: What unites a European island country of 5 million people and a subcontinental nation of 1.45 billion? Answer: A remarkably deep and complex history. Jane Ohlmeyer explains how the Irish—as both colonial victims and members of the colonial elite, army, and bureaucracy—shaped British India from the 1600s onward. Ireland gave India some of its staunchest allies, such as Annie Besant, and its most recalcitrant colonial governors, like Michael O’Dwyer of Punjab. And the Irish have influenced modern India in some profoundly unexpected ways. Bombay’s second governor—the Irishman Gerald Aungier—instilled its commercial ethos and transformed the city into a cosmopolitan entrepot. India’s ‘City of Dreams’ retains several reminders of Irish inputs from nearly four centuries ago.

Past Imperfect Episode 16 features SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel in conversation with Ashoka Mody, formerly a deputy director at the International Monetary Fund and a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and author of India Is Broken.

When Ashoka Mody published India is Broken two years ago, it stoked fierce controversy. Instead of describing the promise of the ‘India story’—a buoyant economy, a growing middle class, and great potential for manufacturing and service sector growth—Mody portrayed a country which systematically refused to get the basics right. India, Mody argues, remains trapped in a jobs crisis, and its failure to meaningfully invest in quality education, public health, and other public goods condemns it to continued high rates of unemployment and underemployment. In this episode, Mody explains how his views have evolved in the past two years, and why he believes that India is even more broken today.

Past Imperfect Episode 15 features SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel in conversation with Nico Slate, a Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. They discuss Prof. Slate’s latest book, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was one of the most remarkable leaders of twentieth-century India, someone who was unafraid of shattering taboos, speaking her mind, and linking together campaigns for social justice around the world. Nico Slate’s new biography, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom, traces a political career which lasted nearly seven decades. She was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, a socialist firebrand, a global ambassador for India, and a towering personality in the world of Indian handicrafts and arts. Slate’s book investigates Kamaladevi’s multifaceted career, allowing us to better appreciate the words she lived by: “Beauty is the soul of freedom.”

This edition features SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel in conversation with A.R. Venkatachalapathy, Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies.

How did one man take on one of the world’s biggest multinational corporations of the early twentieth century? A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s Swadeshi Steam traces the life of V.O. Chidambaram Pillai who, in 1906, founded the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company to break a British shipping monopoly. Swadeshi Steam was powered by both patriotism and remarkable business acumen: it canvassed shares from across India and the global Indian diaspora. And it nearly succeeded in disrupting British commercial interests—the primary reason for why Swadeshi Steam was eventually crushed by the British Indian government.

This episode features Prof. Dinyar Patel in conversation with the independent historian Murali Ranganathan. Over the past fifteen years, Murali Ranganathan has trawled archives and libraries looking for material on Mumbai’s history in Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, and Persian. And he has assembled some remarkable finds into a series of books and articles covering everything from print history to pandemics.

His latest book, The First World War Adventures of Nariman Karkaria, is a translation from Gujarati of a Parsi soldier’s rollicking accounts of his world travels and battle experiences. And it provides a window into a broader discussion of Mumbai and its people.

How has the city changed and stayed the same over the centuries? What is the longer history of controversies over naming, identity, and belonging in the Maximum City? How do Mumbaikars understand their city’s history?

How much of history is mythmaking? In this episode, Taylor Sherman, author of Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths, tackles some shibboleths of India’s first seventeen years of independence. How nonaligned was nonalignment? Could socialist policies actually widen socioeconomic disparities? Was Nehru really the architect of modern India? The answers, Sherman discovers, are far more messy and complex than we imagine.

SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel is in conversation with Aditya Balasubramanian, Senior Lecturer in History at Australian National University

The Swatantra Party, established in 1959, briefly became India’s chief opposition party before disintegrating in the early 1970s. What explains its rise and fall? Aditya Balasubramanian’s Toward a Free Economy charts one of democratic India’s earliest experiments in viable opposition politics: how a diverse cast of political leaders articulated the need for an alternative to a dominant political party. Swatantra’s clarion call was for a “free economy,” one unshackled from the license-and-permit raj. But the party was equally concerned with unchecked political power, rising corruption, and the long-term health of India’s democracy.

SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel is in conversation with Ashok Gopal

In B. R. Ambedkar, India possessed a phenomenal intellectual powerhouse. Drawing on ideas and thinkers from the subcontinent and around the world, he stirred India’s conscience, pointing to the devastating legacies of caste and untouchability while raising urgent questions about the viability of democracy in India. Ambedkar’s ideas could be unsettling and uncomfortable—and that is precisely why he remains so relevant today. In A Part Apart, Ashok Gopal has written the definitive English-language biography of Ambedkar, the product of fifteen years of close research and study. Gopal’s book charts the evolution of Ambedkar’s career and thought, from his engagement with Hindu social reform to his embrace of Buddhism as a religion truly compatible with social. democracy.

SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel is in conversation with Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Columbia University.

Before the internet and television, South Asia tuned in to the radio, and the radio helped South Asians forge a shared sense of belonging. Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s Radio for the Millions chronicles the history of broadcasting from the beginnings of All India Radio (AIR) in the 1930s to the heights of Radio Ceylon’s filmi music-powered popularity from the 1950s through the 1970s. Governments tried to use radio to project state power, but listeners regularly used their sets and transistors as tools of defiance or resistance. This was particularly the case after 1947 when film songs and Hindustani broadcasting helped bring together people divided by Partition.

SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel is in conversation with Ulbe Bosma, International Institute of Social History and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

What can sugar teach us about global history? Plenty, as Ulbe Bosma demonstrates in his new book. “The World of Sugar” is a sweeping narrative of how sugar emerged from India and China to conquer the world: generating both enormous riches and endemic poverty, powered by sophisticated networks of capital and technology as well as brutal labour regimes. Bosma examines how the human penchant for sweetness has shaped politics and economics for centuries, laying the foundations for modern capitalism and globalisation.

The series is brought to you by SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

In the latest episode of Past Imperfect, SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel discusses with Prof. Vinayak Chaturvedi, University of California, Irvine, the role of history in shaping Hindutva, including the ideas of V.D. Savarkar. Chaturvedi’s work engages with Savarkar’s ideas and perspectives, which may be viewed as innovative, controversial, or challenging. The podcast highlights the significant role of history in shaping the concept of Hindutva, and Savarkar’s insights into the account provide context for understanding this ideology.

The series is brought to you by SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

Priya Atwal, Author and Professor at the University of Oxford, is in conversation with SPJIMR faculty Dinyar Patel. Women’s voices are absent from so much of South Asian history. In “Royals and Rebels,” Priya Atwal recovers the remarkable roles that royal women played in the affairs of the Sikh Empire (1799-1849). Ranjit Singh might have been the Sher-e-Punjab, but Atwal demonstrates that his empire owed much of its success to female power.

Robert Stephens, Author and Architect, RMA Architects, is in conversation with SPJIMR Prof. Dr Dinyar Patel.

The architect Charles Correa once described Bombay/Mumbai as a great city but a terrible place. In ‘Bombay Imagined,’ Robert Stephens, an American-born architect at RMA Architects, chronicles several centuries of unfulfilled plans to make the city both greater and less terrible. ‘Bombay Imagined’ demonstrates that smelly sewage, awful infrastructure, paltry open space, and inadequate housing are not simply modern problems: Bombay citizens have established a long tradition of devising plans to mediate these perennial headaches, unfortunately with limited success.

Author and Professor, Georgetown University, Dr Joseph Sassoon, is in conversation with SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel. Joseph Sassoon’s ‘The Global Merchants’ charts the meteoric rise and calamitous collapse of the Sassoon family, Jewish refugees from Baghdad who built a world-spanning business empire out of Bombay, London, and Shanghai. Sassoon’s book is full of fascinating characters: opium traders, horse racing aficionados who rubbed shoulders with British royalty, and perhaps the first woman to lead a global commercial enterprise.

Dr Nikhil Menon, Author and Professor, University of Notre Dame, is in conversation with SPJIMR Prof. Dr Dinyar Patel.

“In ‘Planning Democracy’ Nikhil Menon takes us to the summit of Nehruvian planning in the 1950s and 1960s—and what we find there might surprise us. The story of India’s first Five-Year Plans involved a genius professor, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis; deft Cold War diplomacy; and the introduction of India’s first computers. But it was also about so much more: an attempt to make planning ‘democratic,’ a project which involved rural volunteers, Bollywood talent, and even sadhus.”

Historian and Author Linda Colley is in conversation with SPJIMR Prof. Dr Dinyar Patel.

Linda Colley’s ‘The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen’ is a wide-ranging exploration of the development of constitutions, a book which demonstrates how increasingly violent warfare led to the worldwide spread of these documents between the 18th and early 20th centuries. In this episode, Colley discusses global influences on Indian constitutional thought, the relevance of constitutions today, and why historians need to write accessible books.

“Past Imperfect,” explores leadership from a historical perspective while bridging the past and present. The series is brought to you by SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL) and features conversations with authors of recent works of global and Indian history and explores political and economic leadership in unusual or unconventional situations.

In a new SPJIMR podcast series, ‘Past Imperfect’ our Faculty member Dr Dinyar Patel is in conversation with Historian Dr Ramachandra Guha.

They discuss the dearth of good biographies in India and South Asia. Dr Guha emphasises why biographies should not be written with a political agenda but draw on rich and original research as well as a perceptive frame of analysis. They talk about his new book, ‘Rebels Against the Raj’ and the insights it provides into relations between India and the West, and India’s story as a country searching for its identity and liberty beyond British colonial rule.

The new edition of Sapience features Prof. Surya Tahora in conversation with Dr. Knut O.J. Ims, Professor Emeritus in Business Ethics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Hege Tuen Seglem, Founder of Being Mindful. They discuss how mindfulness, defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn as purposeful, present, and non-judgmental awareness, can address interconnected systemic crises in the Anthropocene, such as environmental, social, and economic challenges. It argues that mindfulness can foster conscious, value-driven choices, breaking habitual behaviours to promote sustainability and deeper connections with nature, others, and oneself.

In this episode, Prof. Surya Tahora speaks with Christian Mayhofer, Co-founder of CCG-Conscious Consulting Group. They explore the evolving role of consulting amidst technological advancements, societal shifts, and the rise of AI. Key challenges such as intergenerational conflicts, ethical leadership, sustainability, and fostering equality and inclusion are discussed. The conversation highlights the importance of empowering organisations and tackling global issues through continuous learning, innovation, and conscious leadership.

Tune in to the latest episode of the podcast series Sapience presented by SPJIMR Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

This edition features Prof. Surya Tahora in conversation with Mr. Sai Sambat Co-founder, Institute of Indic Wisdom. The Institute of Indic Wisdom, promoted by INDICA, amplifies the global permeation of Indic Wisdom through partnerships, alliances, self-organising networks and eventually, an Indic Wisdom Movement.

Mr. Sambat’s journey began with intensive work at the Indian Society for Individual and Social Development in the 90s, leading to deep personal transformation and ongoing spiritual exploration.

Prof. Surya Tahora is in conversation with renowned Leadership Advisor Rajesh Kamath. Mr. Kamath is a Keynote Speaker, Storyteller, Consultant, Facilitator, Columnist, Teacher, Coach and Lifelong learner. In this episode, he discusses elevating leadership and transforming organisations by adapting timeless principles from Indian wisdom, with a focus on the ancient Indian text Arthashastra.

The discussion touches on its historical context, authorship, and relevance to modern leadership. The conversation also explores specific tools and frameworks from the Arthashastra that can be applied in organisational contexts. Join us in the latest episode of Sapience to gain insights about implications and wisdom related to leadership. The series is presented by SPJIMR Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

This edition features Prof. Surya Tahora in conversation with Prof. Chris Laszlo, Department of Organizational Behavior, Weatherhead School of Management. In this engaging discussion, Prof. Laszlo reflects on the evolving role of business in society, emphasising the integration of ethical behaviour, market forces, and individual transformation. Explore the importance of personal practices and experiences in driving transformative change, drawing parallels with wisdom traditions that recognise the interconnectedness of self, others, and the world.

Tune in to the latest episode of the podcast series Sapience presented by SPJIMR Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

Prof. Surya Tahora is in conversation with Prof. Judith Gluck, University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Prof. Gluck offers an insightful perspective on the different approaches to wisdom in the field of research, drawing parallels to the well-known fable of the blind men and the elephant. Listen in as she shares her journey towards developing a unified model of wisdom and its various interpretations. Join us for a thought-provoking and informative conversation on the latest episode of Sapience. The series is brought to you by SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

In our latest episode of Sapience, SPJIMR Prof Surya Tahora is in conversation with Prof Monica Ardelt, University of Florida. Monica Ardelt takes us on a journey into the heart of wise organisations. Drawing from her Three-Dimensional Wisdom model, she breaks down the components of a wise organisation, from leadership and decision-making to the sharing of profits. She also explains why wise organisations are the way of the future and how they can create a better, more sustainable world for future generations.

The series is brought to you by SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

Faculty member Surya Tahora is in conversation with Howard Nusbaum, University of Chicago. They discuss how, despite its long history, there is still much to learn about wisdom and how it can be applied in the real world. They also scrutinise how wisdom researchers from various disciplines and backgrounds can collaborate to identify commonalities in their theories and develop a more comprehensive understanding of wisdom. This understanding can then be used to assist people in making wiser decisions that consider the impact of their actions on others.

Faculty member Dr Surya Tahora is in conversation with Dr David Rooney, Macquarie University. They discuss if there is a way to overcome the existential threat that young executives feel and what wisdom practices they can adopt. The series is brought to you by SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

Faculty member Dr Surya Tahora is in conversation with Dr Justin Brienza, University of Queensland Business School.

They discuss why despite extensive work on wisdom research it is yet to percolate to the Organisations. They also talk about how ‘wise reasoning’ can benefit organisations where intelligence, emotional intelligence and cognitive ability fail. The series is brought to you by SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).

In our new podcast series, ‘Sapience’, Faculty member Dr Surya Tahora is in conversation with leadership Development Advisor Dr Elizabeth King

They dive into the many aspects of mindfulness; does the evidence match the hype, and can we distinguish between mindfulness’s peripheral and deeper side? They discuss the implications for organisations, what goes on in senior leadership rooms, and do those decisions serve the greater good.

The series is brought to you by SPJIMR’s Centre for Wisdom in Leadership (CWIL).