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Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India examines the assertion of authoritarian nationalism and neoliberalism; both backed by the authority of the state and argues that contemporary India should be understood as the intersection of the two. More importantly, the book reveals, through its focus on India and its complex media landscape that this intersection has a narrative form, which author, Madhavi Murty labels spectacular realism. The book shows that the intersection of neoliberalism with authoritarian nationalism is strengthened by the circulation of stories about “emergence,” “renewal,” “development,” and “mobility” of the nation and its people. It studies stories told through film, journalism, and popular non-fiction along with the stories narrated by political and corporate leaders to argue that Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism are conjoined in popular culture and that consent for this political economic project is crucially won in the domain of popular culture. Moving between mediascapes to create an archive of popular culture, Murty advances our understanding of political economy through material that is often seen as inconsequential, namely the popular cultural story. These stories stoke our desires (e.g. for wealth), scaffold our instincts (e.g. for a strong leadership) and shape our values.  

The Dalai Lama has represented Buddhism as a religion of non-violence, compassion, and world peace, but this does not reflect how monks learn their vocation. This book shows how monasteries use harsh methods to make monks of men, and how this tradition is changing as modernist reformers—like the Dalai Lama—adopt liberal and democratic ideals, such as natural rights and individual autonomy. In the first in-depth account of disciplinary practices at a Tibetan monastery in India, Michael Lempert looks closely at everyday education rites—from debate to reprimand and corporal punishment. His analysis explores how the idioms of violence inscribed in these socialization rites help produce educated, moral persons but in ways that trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity. Bringing the study of language and social interaction to our understanding of Buddhism for the first time, Lempert shows and why liberal ideals are being acted out by monks in India, offering a provocative alternative view of liberalism as a globalizing discourse.

Since the early 1990s, the achievement of 'good governance' has been a dominant discourse in the pursuit of social and economic development. This book presents a critical challenge to the contemporary development paradigm of good governance. Based on original ethnographic fieldwork on urban water governance reforms in south India (Karnataka), the book examines the two propositions that underlie the current good governance debate. The first refers to a claim that good governance is both democratic and pro-market. The second to the claim that commercially-oriented water services, whether private or public, are good for poor and marginalised citizens. The book analyses these propositions as they intersect on three levels: policy, practice (process) and outcome. It argues that a number of tensions and contradictions exist within and between what the discourse promises, the everyday practises of how good governance policies are implemented and in the outcomes of such. It reveals the networks of power and the complexity of local reforms and their relation to global discourses as well as the motivations and every day practises of those who currently possess the power to reform. The book is of interest to academics in the fields of Development Studies, Asian Studies and Comparative Politics.

This book assesses the impact of liberalization on practices of government and relations between state and society. It is clear that liberalization as state policy has complex forms of regulation and deregulation inbuilt, and these policies have resulted in dramatic increases in productivity and economic wealth but also generated spectacular new forms of inequality between social groups, regions, and sectors. Through a detailed examination of the Indian state, the contributors - all experts in their respective fields - explore questions such as: Have the new inequalities resulted in greater social unrest and violence? How has the meaning of citizenship changed? What will the long-term effects of regional economic imbalances be on migration, employment, and social welfare? Will increasing federalism result in new problems? Will smaller governments be more effective in providing basic necessities such as clothing, housing, food, water, and sanitation to citizens? What does liberalization mean to Indians in cities and villages, in small towns, and metropolises, in poor, middle class, or wealthy homes? Are concepts like social capital, decentralization, private enterprise, and grass-roots globalization effective in analyzing the post-liberalization state, or are new concepts needed? By focusing on what specifically has changed about the state after liberalization in India, this volume will shed light on comparative questions about the process of neoliberal restructuring across the world. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of a variety of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, international studies, public policy, environmental studies and economics. Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California in Los Angeles. His research interests lie in political anthropology, cultural theory and cultural geography, postcolonial studies, development, and food and the environment. K. Sivaramakrishnan is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. An environmental historian and political anthropologist, his research interests include colonial and contemporary forest and nature conservation in South Asia, rural and regional development, comparative social theory, and the cultural geography of migration in India. Introduction: The State in India After Liberalization Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan Part 1: The Indian State as Moral and Political Economy 1. On the Enchantment of the State Sudipto Kaviraj 2. An Institutional Perspective on the Post-liberalization State in India Aseema Sinha Part 2: Citizens, Sociality, and Association 3. States of Empowerment Aradhana Sharma 4. ‘New Politics’ and the Governmentality of the Post-liberalization State in India: An Ethnographic Perspective John Harriss Part 3: Liberalization, the State, and the Experience of Poverty 5. Poverty Knowledge and Poverty Action in India Anirudh Krishna 6. ‘Money Itself Discriminates’: Obstetric Crises in the Time of Liberalization Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery Part 4: Law, Identity, and Rights 7. Normative Vision, Cultural Accommodation and Muslim Law Reform in India Narendra Subramanian 8. The Rule of Law and the Rule of Property: Law-Struggles and the Neo-Liberal State in India Nandini Sundar Part 5: Enterprising Citizens 9. The Terms of Trade: Competition and Cooperation in Neoliberal North India Kriti Kapilla 10. Becoming Entrepreneurial Subjects: Neoliberalism and Media Purnima Mankekar \"The contributions to this volume provide a colourful panorama of life in ‘liberalized’ India. The state is not always directly visible in these contributions, but the changed conditions of political life in the ‘new’ India are well illustrated by all those who have summed up their interesting field work in this publication.\" - Dietmar Rothermund, H-Soz-u-Kult, 2011

iWest Bengal has often been perceived as somewhat of an aberration in the wider context of a rather chaotic Indian democracy, as the erstwhile Left Front government of the state (spearheaded by the Communist Party of India-Marxist, CPIM) demonstrated a rare instance of political stability, decisively winning seven consecutive democratic elections from 1977 to 2006. Its development record has also been substantial, with a focus on land reforms, the panchayati-raj institution, and an agriculture-centric development agenda. This book presents a reappraisal of the political economic history of the CPIM/Left Front regime against the backdrop of the Indian reform experience. It examines two distinct areas: the conditions that necessitated the regime to engineer a transition from an erstwhile agricultural-based growth model to a more pro-market economic agenda post-1991, and the political strategy employed to manage such a transition, attract private capital and at the same time sustain the regime’s traditional rhetoric and partisan character. In order to develop a more textured understanding of the recent political developments in West Bengal, the author applies a historically nuanced and inductive political-economic analysis, which draws on published materials, and primary material such as government documents and interviews (with bureaucrats, political activists, members of the intelligentsia and ministers). A valuable contribution to the ongoing debate in the literature on the drifts underway with the Indian Left and India’s economic transformation post-1990s, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Political Science, Government, Political Economy and South Asian Studies.

Celebratory news features about India's thriving middle class tell only part of the story of the country's recent economic rise, frequently glossing over the 300 million Indians who live on the margins and struggle to survive under economic liberalization. How do those cast out of their country's successes perceive and respond to their position and mobilize against disempowerment? In Logics of Empowerment, Aradhana Sharma takes up these questions, focusing on the work of an innovative women's program called Mahila Samakhya that is part governmental and part nongovernmental and strives to empower those rural Indian women who have been pushed aside. She details the awkward ideological articulations and paradoxical outcomes of this unique activist-cum-government organizational structure and usage of empowerment. Bringing much-needed specificity to the study of neoliberalism, Logics of Empowerment fosters a deeper understanding of development and politics in contemporary India.

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the \"Jewish question\" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls \"the exemplary crisis of minority\"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the \"Jewish question\" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance.