Anjan Chakrabarti

Vishwa Raj Sharma

Mukunda Mishra

This book addresses the “urban” and “peri-urban” spaces in India within a single frame. The reasoning is that while the former is studied for its transformation towards more value addition in terms of power and neoliberal economic viabilities, the latter is the land of visible transformation of the built environment. It acquaints readers with how the processes of circulation of migrant labour, the shift in occupations of landowning groups, and the residential cohabitation of diverse social groups contribute to re-scripting social relations, green spaces, and the forging of new subjectivities. The chapters of the book speak of the need to create sustainable cities for uncertain futures, with a quest to reverse global climate change and make an effort to halt urbanization at the cost of the natural ecosystem, all of which have become more urgent in the post-pandemic years. The book addresses different aspects of the evolutionary urban and peri-urban spaces in India amidst the conflict of the environmental and social sustainability agendas with the neo-liberal ascendancy. The integration of urban and peri-urban areas with emerging political and economic equations and the involvement of multiple disciplines to work in tandem for a deep insight into the complex phenomena incorporating diverse actors validate the need for such a volume. This edited volume seeks to record how all these stakeholders—state agencies, political leaders, businessmen, workers, investors, households, builders, real estate intermediaries, business owners, migrants, and many more with their varying capacities to influence outcomes on the ground—interact with one another. It also shows how multiple power relationships are calibrated and recalibrated to produce urban and peri-urban spaces in diverse ways in many parts of India.

A Roadmap Towards Environmental and Social Sustainability

Political Economy of Emerging Urban and Peri-urban Spaces in India

Sarmila Banerjee

Following the reforms undertaken in the last two decades, India’s economic landscape has been radically transformed. This book examines the new economic map, which is shown to be shaped by two intertwined currents: globalization and sustainability. Weaving extensively through these currents and the canvas of development in the Indian economy they open up, this work seeks to introduce new methodologies, a corpus of concepts and modes of analysis to make sense of the emerging order of things. What transpires in the course of the investigation is a critical reflection of the present in which not only the new institutions, policies and practices are analyzed, but their limitations, fragility and at times myopic approaches are brought to light. By highlighting the rough edges created by the new conditions, this book is firmly engaged with the frontier of the Indian economy and ends up challenging many well-known conjectures and assumptions. In doing so, it strives to shift the Indian economy to a new terrain, thereby fundamentally re-locating and re-orienting the discourse of that economy as a unique object of analysis.

India in a Global Perspective

Development and Sustainability

Ajit Chaudhury

Dīpaṅkara Dāsa

It all started with two small papers by the first author of this book. The first one was "From Hegemony to Counter Hegemony/A Journey in a Non-Imaginary Unreal Space" published in Economic and Political Weekly, 1988. Chapter Three and a half of this book records a part of the history: how the paper was not read. A few months went by, another effort followed. In the form of a cheap dot-matrix printout in archaic-looking courier-new a typed paper distributed in private circles. "Mimicry of Overdetermination, Synthetic Hegemony, and Margin of Margin: Three Key-concepts: An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile for Third World Studies". History repeated itself. Would history repeat again for this book too? We do not know. Maybe not, we will wait for that. (We can think. We can wait. We can fast.) Indeed we did fast for long years. And then God sent His angels for help: Jack Amariglio, Zahiruddin Mohammed Alim, Masato Aoki, Enid Arvidson, Antonio Callari, Steve Cullenberg, Jonathan Diskin, Julie Graham, Bruce Roberts. Without their minute reviews of the five articles published in "Rethinking Marxism", the content of the pages that follow could never find a book form and would have forever remained what many people call the ravings of a few cranks. Lastly, no word of thanks can express our debt to Richard Wolff who explored the third stream writing in Calcutta and put his money on the dark horses that drive the chariot of this book. We dedicate this book to him.

Profile of an Unrepentant Postcolonial Collaborator

Margin of Margin

Anjan Chakrabarti

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