In Pursuit of Lakshmi

In Pursuit of Lakshmi PDF Author: Lloyd I. Rudolph
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226731391
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
The pursuit of Lakshmi, the fickle goddess of prosperity and good fortune, is a metaphor for the aspirations of the state and people of independent India. In the latest of their distinguished contributions to South Asian studies, scholars Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph focus on this modern-day pursuit by offering a comprehensive analysis of India's political economy. India occupies a paradoxical plane among nation states: it is both developed and underdeveloped, rich and poor, strong and weak. These contrasts locate India in the international order. The Rudolphs' theory of demand and command polities provides a general framework for explaining the special circumstances of the Indian experience. Contrary to what one might expect in a country with great disparities of wealth, no national party, right or left, pursues the politics of class. Instead, the Rudolphs argue, private capital and organized labor in India face a "third actor"—the state. Because of the dominance of the state makes class politics marginal, the state is itself an element in the creation of the centrist-oriented social pluralism that has characterized Indian politics since independence. In analyzing the relationship between India's politics and its economy, the Rudolphs maintain that India's economic performance has been only marginally affected by the type of regime in power—authoritarian or democratic. More important, they show that rising levels of social mobilization and personalistic rule have contributed to declining state capacity and autonomy. At the same time, social mobilization has led to a more equitable distribution of economic benefits and political power, which has enhanced the state's legitimacy among its citizens. The scope and explanatory power of In Pursuit of Lakshmi will make it essential for all those interested in political economy, comparative politics, Asian studies and India.

In Pursuit of Lakshmi

In Pursuit of Lakshmi PDF Author: Lloyd I. Rudolph
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226731391
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 549

Get Book Here

Book Description
The pursuit of Lakshmi, the fickle goddess of prosperity and good fortune, is a metaphor for the aspirations of the state and people of independent India. In the latest of their distinguished contributions to South Asian studies, scholars Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph focus on this modern-day pursuit by offering a comprehensive analysis of India's political economy. India occupies a paradoxical plane among nation states: it is both developed and underdeveloped, rich and poor, strong and weak. These contrasts locate India in the international order. The Rudolphs' theory of demand and command polities provides a general framework for explaining the special circumstances of the Indian experience. Contrary to what one might expect in a country with great disparities of wealth, no national party, right or left, pursues the politics of class. Instead, the Rudolphs argue, private capital and organized labor in India face a "third actor"—the state. Because of the dominance of the state makes class politics marginal, the state is itself an element in the creation of the centrist-oriented social pluralism that has characterized Indian politics since independence. In analyzing the relationship between India's politics and its economy, the Rudolphs maintain that India's economic performance has been only marginally affected by the type of regime in power—authoritarian or democratic. More important, they show that rising levels of social mobilization and personalistic rule have contributed to declining state capacity and autonomy. At the same time, social mobilization has led to a more equitable distribution of economic benefits and political power, which has enhanced the state's legitimacy among its citizens. The scope and explanatory power of In Pursuit of Lakshmi will make it essential for all those interested in political economy, comparative politics, Asian studies and India.

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India PDF Author: Mytheli Sreenivas
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295748850
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
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.

Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India

Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India PDF Author: Lisa Mitchell
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253353017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India

India Today

India Today PDF Author: Stuart Corbridge
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745676642
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
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.

Political Internet

Political Internet PDF Author: Biju P. R.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315389908
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This book investigates the Internet as a site of political contestation in the Indian context. It widens the scope of the public sphere to social media, and explores its role in shaping the resistance and protest movements on the ground. The volume also explores the role of the Internet, a global technology, in framing debates on the idea of the nation state, especially India, as well as diplomacy and international relations. It also discusses the possibility of whether Internet can be used as a tool for social justice and change, particularly by the underprivileged, to go beyond caste, class, gender and other oppressive social structures. A tract for our times, this book will interest scholars and researchers of politics, media studies, popular culture, sociology, international relations as well as the general reader.

Electoral Politics in Indian States

Electoral Politics in Indian States PDF Author: Sandeep Shastri
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Contributed articles with reference to India; some previously published.

Handbook of Politics in Indian States

Handbook of Politics in Indian States PDF Author: Sudha Pai
Publisher: OUP India
ISBN: 9780198081739
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Unlike other studies on Indian politics which focus on the national level, this Handbook maps the changes in the functioning of India's federal democratic politics since independence. It deals with areas such as democratization, regions and regionalism, political parties and electoral politics, and economic reform. The chapters provide a detailed understanding of some of the significant developments and challenges faced by Indian politics today.

When Crime Pays

When Crime Pays PDF Author: Milan Vaishnav
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300216203
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The first thorough study of the co-existence of crime and democratic processes in Indian politics In India, the world's largest democracy, the symbiotic relationship between crime and politics raises complex questions. For instance, how can free and fair democratic processes exist alongside rampant criminality? Why do political parties recruit candidates with reputations for wrongdoing? Why are one-third of state and national legislators elected--and often re-elected--in spite of criminal charges pending against them? In this eye-opening study, political scientist Milan Vaishnav mines a rich array of sources, including fieldwork on political campaigns and interviews with candidates, party workers, and voters, large surveys, and an original database on politicians' backgrounds to offer the first comprehensive study of an issue that has implications for the study of democracy both within and beyond India's borders.

Electrifying India

Electrifying India PDF Author: Sunila S. Kale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804791023
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Throughout the 20th century, electricity was considered to be the primary vehicle of modernity, as well as its quintessential symbol. In India, electrification was central to how early nationalists and planners conceptualized Indian development, and huge sums were spent on the project from then until now. Yet despite all this, sixty-five years after independence nearly 400 million Indians have no access to electricity. Electrifying India explores the political and historical puzzle of uneven development in India's vital electricity sector. In some states, nearly all citizens have access to electricity, while in others fewer than half of households have reliable electricity. To help explain this variation, this book offers both a regional and a historical perspective on the politics of electrification of India as it unfolded in New Delhi and three Indian states: Maharashtra, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. In those parts of the countryside that were successfully electrified in the decades after independence, the gains were due to neither nationalist idealism nor merely technocratic plans, but rather to the rising political influence and pressure of rural constituencies. In looking at variation in how public utilities expanded over a long period of time, this book argues that the earlier period of an advancing state apparatus from the 1950s to the 1980s conditioned in important ways the manner of the state's retreat during market reforms from the 1990s onward.

The Imaginary Institution of India

The Imaginary Institution of India PDF Author: Sudipta Kaviraj
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152221
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
"The Imaginary Institution of India is the first major collection of Sudipta Kaviraj's essays and as such, will be received with great curiosity and attention."-Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles --