The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India

The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India PDF Author: Nandini Gooptu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521443660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491

Book Description
Nandini Gooptu's magisterial 2001 history of the labouring poor in India represents a tour-de-force.

Megacities

Megacities PDF Author: Dirk Kruijt
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848137311
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in cities, the result of a rapid process of urbanization that started in the second half of the twentieth century. 'Megacities' around the world are rapidly becoming the scene for deprivation, especially in the global South, and the urban excluded face the brunt of what in many cases seems like low-intensity warfare. Featuring case studies from across the globe, including Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Megacities examines recent worldwide trends in poverty and social exclusion, urban violence and politics, and links these to the challenges faced by policy-makers and practitioners.

Migrants and Machine Politics

Migrants and Machine Politics PDF Author: Adam Michael Auerbach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691236097
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
How poor migrants shape city politics during urbanization As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics shows how slum residents in India routinely defy such portrayals, actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country’s expanding cities. Drawing on years of pioneering fieldwork in India’s slums, including ethnographic observation, interviews, surveys, and experiments, Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil reveal how migrants harness forces of political competition—as residents, voters, community leaders, and party workers—to sow unexpected seeds of accountability within city politics. This multifaceted agency provokes new questions about how political networks form during urbanization. In answering these questions, this book overturns longstanding assumptions about how political machines exploit the urban poor to stifle competition, foster ethnic favoritism, and entrench vote buying. By documenting how poor migrants actively shape urban politics in counterintuitive ways, Migrants and Machine Politics sheds new light on the political consequences of urbanization across India and the Global South.

Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India

Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India PDF Author: Nandini Gooptu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134511868
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
The promotion of an enterprise culture and entrepreneurship in India in recent decades has had far-reaching implications beyond the economy, and transformed social and cultural attitudes and conduct. This book brings together pioneering research on the nature of India’s enterprise culture, covering a range of different themes: workplace, education, religion, trade, films, media, youth identity, gender relations, class formation and urban politics. Based on extensive empirical and ethnographic research by the contributors, the book shows the myriad manifestations of enterprise culture and the making of the aspiring, enterprising-self in public culture, social practice, and personal lives, ranging from attempts to construct hegemonic ideas in public discourse, to appropriation by individuals and groups with unintended consequences, to forms of contested and contradictory expression. It discusses what is ‘new’ about enterprise culture and how it relates to pre-existing ideas, and goes on to look at the processes and mechanisms through which enterprise culture is becoming entrenched, as well as how it affects different classes and communities. The book highlights the social and political implications of enterprise culture and how it recasts family and interpersonal relationships as well as personal and collective identity. Illuminating one of the most important aspects of India’s current economic and social transformation, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Business, Sociology, Anthropology, Development Studies and Media and Cultural Studies.

From Hierarchy to Ethnicity

From Hierarchy to Ethnicity PDF Author: Alexander Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
From Hierarchy to Ethnicity discusses the origins of politicized caste identities in twentieth-century India, and how they evolved over time.

Political Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century India

Political Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century India PDF Author: Mrinalini Sinha
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135023978X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
This volume reconsiders India's 20th century though a specific focus on the concepts, conjunctures and currency of its distinct political imaginaries. Spanning the divide between independence and partition, it highlights recent historical debates that have sought to move away from a nation-centred mode of political history to a broader history of politics that considers the complex contexts within which different political imaginaries emerged in 20th century India. Representing the first attempt to grasp the shifting modes and meanings of the 'political' in India, this book explores forms of mass protest, radical women's politics, civil rights, democracy, national wealth and mobilization against the indentured-labor system, amongst other themes. In linking 'the political' to shifts in historical temporality, Political Imaginaries in 20th century India extends beyond the interdisciplinary arena of South Asian studies to cognate late colonial and post-colonial formations in the twentieth century and contribute to the 'political turn' in scholarship.

The Bungalow in Twentieth-Century India

The Bungalow in Twentieth-Century India PDF Author: Madhavi Desai
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351893475
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
The primary era of this study - the twentieth century - symbolizes the peak of the colonial rule and its total decline, as well as the rise of the new nation state of India. The processes that have been labeled 'westernization' and 'modernization' radically changed middle-class Indian life during the century. This book describes and explains the various technological, political and social developments that shaped one building type - the bungalow - contemporaneous to the development of modern Indian history during the period of British rule and its subsequent aftermath. Drawing on their own physical and photographic documentation, and building on previous work by Anthony King and the Desais, the authors show the evolution of the bungalow's architecture from a one storey building with a verandah to the assortment of house-forms and their regional variants that are derived from the bungalow. Moreover, the study correlates changes in society with architectural consequences in the plans and aesthetics of the bungalow. It also examines more generally what it meant to be modern in Indian society as the twentieth century evolved.

Urbanisation, Citizenship and Conflict in India

Urbanisation, Citizenship and Conflict in India PDF Author: Tommaso Bobbio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317514009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
Urbanisation is rapidly changing the geographic and social landscape of India, and indeed Asia as a whole. Issues of collective violence, urban poverty and discrimination become crucial factors in the redefinition of citizenship not only in legal terms, but also in a cultural and socio-economic dimension. While Indian cities are becoming the centres of a culture of exclusion against vulnerable social groups, a long-term perspective is essential to understand the patterns that shaped the space, politics, economy and culture of contemporary metropolises. This book takes a critical, longer-term view of India’s economic transition. The idea that urban growth goes hand in hand with the modernisation of the country does not account for the fact that increasingly higher portions of the urban population are comprised of lower-income groups, casual labourers and slum dwellers. Using the case study of Ahmedabad, this book investigates the history of city and of its people over the twentieth century. It analyses the contrasting relationship between urban authorities and the inhabitants of Ahmedabad and examines instances of antagonism and negotiation – amongst people, groups and between the people and the public authority – that have continuously shaped, transformed and redefined life in the city. This book offers an important tool for understanding the bigger context of the conflicts, the social and cultural issues that accompanied the broader process of urbanisation in contemporary India. It will be of interest to scholars of Urban History, studies of collective violence and South Asian Studies.

Claiming the City

Claiming the City PDF Author: Anindita Ghosh
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199464791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This study on colonial Calcutta charts the history of its urbanization from below in its streets, strikes and popular urban cultures. It offers a close up view of the city's underbelly by drawing on a range of non-archival sources, from illustrations and amateur photographs to street songs, local histories and memoirs which show how Calcutta was not just a problem to be disciplined and governed as the colonialists would have us believe. Instead, it emerges as a remarkably lively and crucial site for the shaping of a discourse of rights and claims to the city by various marginal urban groups.

Hyderabad, British India, and the World

Hyderabad, British India, and the World PDF Author: Eric Lewis Beverley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107091195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
A study of political possibilities in the era of modern imperialism, from the perspective of the sovereign state of Hyderabad.