Utsa Patnaik

Utsa Patnaik is an Indian Marxian economist. She taught at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, from 1973 until her retirement in 2010. Her husband is the Marxian economist Prabhat Patnaik.

Biography
Patnaik obtained her doctorate in economics from the Somerville College, Oxford, before returning to India to join JNU. Her main areas of research interest are the problems of transition from agriculture and peasant predominant societies to industrial society, both in a historical context and at present in relation to India; and questions relating to food security and poverty.

Selected works
These issues have been discussed in more than 110 papers published as chapters in books and in journals. She has authored several books, including Peasant Class Differentiation – A Study in Method (1987), The Long Transition (1999) and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (2007). The Republic of Hunger was directly referenced in a volume published in 2021 titled The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect, the first volume of the India Since the 90s series published by Tulika Books. A German translation of selections from the last book appeared in 2009. She has also edited and co-edited several volumes including Chains of Servitude – Bondage and Slavery in India (1985), Agrarian Relations and Accumulation – the Mode of Production Debate in India (1991), The Making of History – Essays presented to Irfan Habib (2000), The Agrarian Question in Marx and his Successors in two volumes (2007, 2011 ) and A Theory of Imperial Capitalism.

Book reviews

 * Bagchi, Amiya Kumar. On A Theory of Imperialism. Social Scientist, edited by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, vol. 45, no. 3/4, Social Scientist, 2017, pp. 87–91.
 * Vijay, R. The Agrarian Question and the Marxist Method. Economic and Political Weekly, edited by Utsa Patnaik, vol. 48, no. 35, Economic and Political Weekly, 2013, pp. 27–30.
 * Pratt, Brian. Development in Practice, edited by Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo, vol. 22, no. 7, Taylor & Francis, Ltd., 2012, pp. 1060–1061.
 * Gopinath, Ravindran. Social Scientist, edited by Utsa Patnaik, vol. 36, no. 1/2, Social Scientist, 2008, pp. 94–97.
 * Bose, Sugata. The Journal of Asian Studies, edited by Jan Breman et al., vol. 47, no. 4, [Cambridge University Press, Association for Asian Studies], 1988, pp. 912–914, doi:10.2307/2057913.