This edited book consists of various chapters — including articles from different leading scholars, on the Great Transition in India with respect to religion, economy and foreign policy. The main aim of the book is to comprehend ongoing transition in India from interdisciplinary perspectives.

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.

This is an improtant collection of papers written by various experts in their selected fields. Both as to the range of topics cealth with as well as the academic calibre of the contributors, the volume is an invaluable one. it is a comprehensive and significant addition to enrich oru understanding of India and its political, socio-economic development and resultant changes in the society in a proper perspective. The book is divided into four sections. The first section is devoted to Dr. V.K. Sukumar Nair, a distingushed son of Kerala to whom this book is dedicated. The second section 'Modern Idnia' contains twelve articles on Indian democracy and its institutions, political stability, evaluation of political parties, Federalism and planned development, Jaya Prakash Narayan and his concept fo 'Total Revolution' state and society,Communalism in West Bengal and Kerala, etc.

In this book, the author makes some generalizations about contemporary India and the years immediately ahead daring to set forth some of his personal concerns for critical review by those in the United States and in India who share in varying degrees his concern for India's future.

Unlike the West, India presents a fascinating example of a society where the pre-modern continues to co-exist with the modern. Modernity in Indian Social Theory explores the social variance between India and the West to show how it impacted their respective trajectories of modernity. A. Raghuramaraju argues that modernity in the West involved disinheriting the pre-modern, and temporal ordering of the traditional and modern. It was ruthlessly implemented through programmes of industrialization, nationalism, and secularism. This book underscores that India did not merely the Western model of modernity or experience a temporal ordering of society. It situates this sociological complexity in the context of the debates on social theory. The author critically examines various discourses on modernity in India, including Partha Chatterjee’s account of Indian nationalism; Javeed Alam’s reading of Indian secularism; the use of the term pluralism by some Indian social scientists; and Gopal Guru’s emphasis on the lived Dalit experience. He also engages with the readings on key thinkers including Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Ambedkar.

India is undergoing a great transition, as the post-reform generation strikes out into the world. The thinking, attitudes, culture, political preferences, consumption patterns and ambitions of the post-reform generations differ greatly from that of the earlier generations. As a consequence, the country is also witnessing rapid changes not only on the socio-political and economic fronts but also on the humanities front. This book seeks to explore great transition in India through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences. In doing so, it lays foundation not only for understanding India but also in initiating a new chapter for Indian and South Asian studies. With contributions by leading scholars, the book will be of great interest to students, researchers, and for anyone wishing to explore India in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences.

According to Nehru, the transition from a backward agricultural society to a modern industrialized society was the only road for India to progress. So, for the past few decades, India has focused its transitional development around movement away from a state-controlled economy toward that of a free market economy. Transition and Development in India challenges the current basis of this theory of development, laying the groundwork for an entirely new Marxist approach to transition that should apply not just to India, but to all developing nations.

This book provides an interpretive and comprehensive account of the history of India between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, a crucial epoch characterized by colonialism, nationalism and the emergence of the independent Indian Union. It explores significant historiographical debates concerning the period while highlighting important new issues, especially those of gender, ecology, caste, and labour. The work combines an analysis of colonial and independent India in order to underscore ideologies, policies, and processes that shaped the colonial state and continue to mould the Indian nation.

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

The second edition of this textbook brings together general political theory and the comparative method to interpret socio-political phenomena and issues that have occupied the Indian state and society since 1947. It considers the progress that India has made in some of the most challenging aspects of post-colonial politics such as governance, democracy, economic growth, welfare, and citizenship. Looking at the changed global role of India, its standing in the G-20 and BRICS, as well as the implications of the 2014 Indian general elections for state and society, this updated edition also includes sections on the changing socio-political status of women in India, corruption and terrorism. The author raises several key questions relevant to Indian politics, including: • Why has India succeeded in making a relatively peaceful transition from colonial rule to a resilient, multi-party democracy in contrast to its South Asian neighbours? • How has the interaction of modern politics and traditional society contributed to the resilience of post-colonial democracy? • How did India’s economy moribund—for several decades following Independence—make a breakthrough into rapid growth and can India sustain it? • And finally, why have collective identity and nationhood emerged as the core issues for India in the twenty-first century and with what implications for Indian democracy? The textbook goes beyond India by asking about the implications of the Indian case for the general and comparative theory of the post-colonial state. The factors which might have caused failures in democracy and governance are analysed and incorporated as variables into a model of democratic governance. In addition to pedagogical features such as text boxes, a set of further readings is provided to guide readers who wish to go beyond the remit of this text. The book will be essential reading for undergraduate students and researchers in South Asian and Asian studies, political science, development studies, sociology, comparative politics and political theory.