Stuart Corbridge

John Harriss

When India was invented as a "modern" country in the years after Independence in 1947 it styled itself as a secular, federal, democratic Republic committed to an ideology of development. Nehru's India never quite fulfilled this promise, but more recently his vision of India has been challenged by two "revolts of the elites": those of economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism. These revolts have been challenged, in turn, by various movements, including those of India's "Backward Classes". These movements have exploited the democratic spaces of India both to challenge for power and to contest prevailing accounts of politics, the state and modernity. Reinventing India offers an analytical account of the history of modern India and of its contemporary reinvention. Part One traces India's transformation under colonial rule, and the ideas and social forces which underlay the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly in 1946 to consider the shaping of the post-colonial state. Part Two then narrates the story of the making and unmaking of this modern India in the period from 1950 to the present day. It pays attention to both economic and political developments, and engages with the interpretations of India's recent history through key writers such as Francine Frankel, Sudipta Kaviraj and Partha Chatterjee. Part Three consists of chapters on the dialectics of economic reform, religion, the politics of Hindu nationalism, and on popular democracy. These chapters articulate a distinct position on the state and society in India at the end of the century, and they allow the authors to engage with the key debates which concern public intellectuals in contemporary India. Reinventing India is a lucid and eminently readable account of the transformations which are shaking India more than fifty years after Independence. It will be welcomed by all students of South Asia, and will be of interest to students of comparative politics and development studies.

Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy

Reinventing India

Chandan Sengupta

Offering new insights into the political economy of contemporary India, this book considers how and why unequal patterns of economic growth have taken shape within the context of a democratic and decentralising political system, and how this has impacted upon the processes of economic development.

Continuing Debates

Democracy, Development and Decentralisation in India

First published in 2010. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Brings together more than one hundred articles dealing with the discipline of development in all its diversity. Key topics include the transformation of peasant economies, argibusiness, rural-urban relations, markets, industrialization, workers, trade, aid and structural adjustment. A unique set in its comprehensiveness and diversity, it also considers four key challenges for development theory and practice relating to capabilities, ethics, sustainability and regulation.

Development: Identities, representations, alternatives

Alpa Shah

As India emerges as a major economic power, producing dollar billionaires rising at the rate of 17 per year, more than 800 million Indians eke out a living on less than two dollars a day. This book takes the reader to the underbelly of the Indian boom, an India that is not shining but is struggling to survive. From the Indo-Soviet Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhattisgarh, where an aristocracy of labour is increasingly being replaced by a more vulnerable contract labour force, we move to the banks of the Hoogly River. Here, Norwegian shipping companies exploit a precarious labour force that is as vulnerable to the vagaries of global finance and its crisis as the elderly, especially women and wage-workers, who live in the slums of Chennai. Also in Tamil Nadu, but this time in Tiruppur, we find that the garment and textile industries boom has nurtured new regimes of debt bondage among industrial workers. Though public concern about the vulnerability in which poor people find themselves has resulted in new nation-wide schemes framed in the language of rights, we find in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh that the practical workings of these schemes are dependent on the regional political systems in which they are enmeshed. We end in the belly of the Maoist-inspired Naxalite insurgency, denounced by the Indian government as the country’s greatest security challenge, where the poor are being mobilised to rise against the injustices of the Indian state. This book was originally published as a special issue of Economy and Society.

The Underbelly of the Indian Boom

Sharad Chari

Comprising writings ordered around intentional and immanent 'development', this reader offers a compendium of classical and contemporary debates on development: Adam Smith and Karl Marx meet, among others, Robert Wade, Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs.

The Development Reader

Craig Jeffrey

Twenty years ago India was still generally thought of as an archetypal developing country, home to the largest number of poor people of any country in the world, and beset by problems of low economic growth, casteism and violent religious conflict. Now India is being feted as an economic power-house which might well become the second largest economy in the world before the middle of this century. Its democratic traditions, moreover, remain broadly intact. How and why has this historic transformation come about? And what are its implications for the people of India, for Indian society and politics? These are the big questions addressed in this book by three scholars who have lived and researched in different parts of India during the period of this great transformation. Each of the 13 chapters seeks to answer a particular question: When and why did India take off? How did a weak state promote audacious reform? Is government in India becoming more responsive (and to whom)? Does India have a civil society? Does caste still matter? Why is India threatened by a Maoist insurgency? In addressing these and other pressing questions, the authors take full account of vibrant new scholarship that has emerged over the past decade or so, both from Indian writers and India specialists, and from social scientists who have studied India in a comparative context. India Today is a comprehensive and compelling text for students of South Asia, political economy, development and comparative politics as well as anyone interested in the future of the world's largest democracy.

Stuart Corbridge

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