Is culture still important for the twenty-first century world-society that is in the making? Are terms like ‘progress’ and ‘development’ transcultural and universally applicable, or do they have unique and distinct echoes in every culture? These fundamental questions were at the heart of a three-day conference, organized by Geothe Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan, Calcutta and the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), featuring distinguished panelists from India and Germany who took a searching look at ‘development’ in its Indian application as well as at the possibilities for Indo-German cooperation in development. This volume contains the most important contributions to the conference and several articles that have been written exclusively for this publication. Tracing the contours of many views around the ideas of progress, modernization and development, coming at them from the perspective of diverse disciplinary specialisms and activisms, this collection helps us comprehend in practical terms various oft-used words such as ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘dynamics’, ‘change’ or ‘modernization’.
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