Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India

This book brings together essays that critique entrenched discourses on development. Using culturalist frameworks, the essays advance public and scholarly debates on development that move beyond globally dominant and homogenized views of modernity. Drawing on extensive ethnographic treatments, the contributors to the volume point out the diversity of both the development experience, and the nature of modernities that development puts in place. The essays challenge post-structural analyses of development, and rethink the concept of globalization by strategically focusing on the cultural politics of social transformations. Further, the volume suggests that local histories and agencies are at work in any modern context. To this end, it advances the need for greater attention to the region as a conceptual device—to understand how the local is constructed, and how regional political and economic formations selectively empower or undermine particular local processes and phenomena. In analysing these different enactments of development, the volume puts forward the idea of ‘regional modernities’, and weaves cases around diverse regions to present a rich and complex but strongly analytical set of studies. The theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded research reported in this volume would be useful to scholars and researchers in development studies, cultural studies, South Asian studies, sociology, social anthropology as also NGOs and activists.