Social Theory and the Urban Poor: Notes from Delhi, India, delivered by Veena Das of Johns Hopkins University, is the UCLA Center for India and South Asia annual lecture.

I track how the urban poor are brought forth within some selected texts on South Asia. My argument is that much as in colonial and nationalist/reformist prose, the poor here too are seen or heard as they encroach upon the spaces of the rich or the middle classes. What if theory was attentive instead to the places, in which the poor actually lived, engaged in work, love, play? What spectacles, what quarrels might take place here? I try to walk the reader through such spaces arguing for thinking with all our senses.