Kenneth Bo Nielsen

Over the past decade India has witnessed a number of land wars that have centred crucially on the often forcible transfer of land from small farmers or indigenous groups to private companies. Among these, the land war that erupted in Singur, West Bengal, in 2006, went on to make national headlines and become paradigmatic of many of the challenges and social conflicts that arise when a state-led policy of swiftly transferring land to private sector companies encounters resistance on the ground. Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India analyses the movement by Singur’s so-called unwilling farmers to retain and reclaim their farmland. By foregrounding the everyday politics of popular mobilization, the book sheds new light on the movement’s internal politics as well as on contentious issues rooted in everyday caste, class and gender relations.

Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India

Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger

Uwe Skoda

‘Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond’ contains a collection of lucid, empirically grounded articles that explore and analyse the structures, agents and practices of social inclusion and exclusion in contemporary India and beyond. The volume combines a broad range of approaches to challenge narrow conceptualisations of social inclusion and exclusion in terms of singular factors such as caste, policy or the economy. This collaborative endeavour and cross-disciplinary approach, which brings together younger and more established scholars, facilitates a deeper understanding of complex social and political processes in contemporary India.

Structures, Agents, Practices

Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond

Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Anand Vaidya

What happened to the dream of Indian Democracy?

Origins, Trajectories, Contestations

Indian Democracy

Stig Toft Madsen

This volume addresses the current configuration of democratic politics in South Asia from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The essays seek to examine the larger questions of how democratic values are embedded in social and political institutions, and how localised and everyday political values inform the multiple ways in which democracy is understood and practised. One of the strengths of this collection is the fact that it does not seek to provide answers to these questions from within one academic discipline only, but rather brings together scholars with backgrounds in a variety of social science disciplines and the humanities. A number of allied questions and engaging debates emerge throughout the book. How may we distinguish between democracy’s formal and less-than-formal dimensions in the context of South Asia? How do notions of kinship, kingship and community tie in with larger processes of democratic politics and deepening political mobilisation? How do people construe the political in a context where the sphere of the religious seemingly seamlessly overlaps with the political, where the political cannot be separated from the social, and where the boundaries between state and society are blurred? How do people practically engage with the political and with democratic processes at a local level – and what might democracy mean in the vernacular?

Political Practice in South Asia

Trysts with Democracy

Anne Waldrop

The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. This volume sheds light on how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. Through ethnographically grounded case studies, the authors portray the contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of sociopolitical change. ‘Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India’ moves the debate on gender and social transformation into the domain of everyday life to arrive at locally embedded and detailed, ethnographically informed analyses of gender relations in real-life contexts that foreground both subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations and contestations.

Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India

Questions of the extent to which social movements are capable of deepening democracy in India lie at the heart of this book. In particular, the authors ask how such movements can enhance the political capacities of subaltern groups and thereby enable them to contest and challenge marginality, stigma, and exploitation. The work addresses these questions through detailed empirical analyses of contemporary fields of protest in Indian society – ranging from gender and caste to class and rights-based legislation. Drawing on the original research of a variety of emerging and established international scholars, the volume contributes to an engaged dialogue on the prospects for democratizing Indian democracy in a context where neoliberal reforms fuel a contradictory process of uneven development.

Deepening Democracy?

Social Movements and the State in India

Uday Chandra

Geir Heierstad

This volume offers for the first time a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the making and maintenance of a modern caste society in colonial and postcolonial West Bengal in India. Drawing on cutting-edge multidisciplinary scholarship, it explains why caste continues to be neglected in the politics of and scholarship on West Bengal, and how caste relations have permeated the politics of the region until today. The essays presented here dispel the myth that caste does not matter in Bengali society and politics, and make possible meaningful comparisons and contrasts with other regions in South Asia. The work will interest scholars and researchers in sociology, social anthropology, politics, modern Indian history and cultural studies.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen

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