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Many Americans still envision India as rigidly caste-bound, locked in traditions that inhibit social mobility. In reality, class mobility has long been an ideal, and today globalization is radically transforming how India’s citizens perceive class. Living Class in Urban India examines a nation in flux, bombarded with media images of middle-class consumers, while navigating the currents of late capitalism and the surges of inequality they can produce. Anthropologist Sara Dickey puts a human face on the issue of class in India, introducing four people who live in the “second-tier” city of Madurai: an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic designer, a teacher of high-status English, and a domestic worker. Drawing from over thirty years of fieldwork, she considers how class is determined by both subjective perceptions and objective conditions, documenting Madurai residents’ palpable day-to-day experiences of class while also tracking their long-term impacts. By analyzing the intertwined symbolic and economic importance of phenomena like wedding ceremonies, religious practices, philanthropy, and loan arrangements, Dickey’s study reveals the material consequences of local class identities. Simultaneously, this gracefully written book highlights the poignant drive for dignity in the face of moralizing class stereotypes. Through extensive interviews, Dickey scrutinizes the idioms and commonplaces used by residents to justify class inequality and, occasionally, to subvert it. Along the way, Living Class in Urban India reveals the myriad ways that class status is interpreted and performed, embedded in everything from cell phone usage to religious worship.
Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India. Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state. In contrast to previous political economic moments, deaf Indians increasingly depend less on the state for education and employment, and instead turn to novel and sometimes surprising spaces such as NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, and churches that attract deaf congregants. They also gravitate towards each other. Their social practices may be invisible to outsiders because neither the state nor their families have recognized Indian Sign Language as legitimate, but deaf Indians collectively learn sign language, which they use among themselves, and they also learn the importance of working within the structures of their communities to maximize their opportunities. Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India analyzes how diverse deaf people become oriented toward each other and disoriented from their families and other kinship networks. More broadly, this book explores how deafness, deaf sociality, and sign language relate to contemporary society.
By zooming in on urban localities in India and by unpacking the 'meaning of the local' for those who live in them, the ten papers in this volume redress a recurrent asymmetry in contemporary debates about globalisation. In much literature, the global is associated with transnationalism, dynamism and activity, and the local with static identities and history. Focusing on a range of locales in India's metropolitan areas and provincial small towns, the contributions move beyond the assertion that space is socially constructed to explore the ways in which social and political relations are themselves spatially and historically contingent. Using detailed ethnography, the authors highlight the vitality of place-making in the lives of urban dwellers and the centrality of a 'politics of place' in the production of power, difference and inequality. The volume illustrates how urban spaces are increasingly interconnected through wider social and spatial processes, while local boundaries and group-based identities are at the same time reconstructed, and often even consolidated, through the use of 'traditional' idioms and localised practices. All contributions relate detailed case studies of everyday activities to a range of contemporary debates that highlight various spatial aspects of cultural identities, economic restructuring and political processes in India. The volume provides an interdisciplinary perspective on urban life in rapidly changing political and economic environments. It offers a contribution to policy-orientated debates on urban livelihoods and urban planning as well as a wealth of ethnographic material for those interested in the spatial dimensions of urban life in India.
Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life. Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‐class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.
What is urban about urban China and India? -- Land grabs and protests from Wukan to Singur -- Urban redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai -- Airpocalypse in Beijing and Delhi -- Territorial and associational politics in historical perspective.
This book discusses the importance of socio-spatial patterns in cities that are embedded in the cultural heritage and self-understanding of a society, showing that Indian cities follow different urban concepts. In nine episodes (nine is a sacred figure), it highlights the principal influences and social impacts on cities from ancient times to contemporary city developments. As such, it provides planners and architects with insights that can easily be applied in contemporary cities and towns and help foster India’s cultural heritage—a much-needed, but little-discussed approach. Indian cities are the result of various factors, some imposed, others following local traditions that shaped them. They were founded around social needs, landscape conditions and production routines, as well as the religious influences of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity and animism. However, Western town-planning models are often implemented, blurring the traditional way of life in cities. For sustainable town development, it is of key importance to find solutions that deal with Indian city models.
Found in two-thirds of the world, rabies is a devastating infectious disease with a 99.9 percent case-fatality rate and no cure once clinical signs appear. Rabies in the Streets tells the compelling story of the relationship between people, street animals, and rabies in India, where one-third of human rabies deaths occur. Deborah Nadal argues that only a One Health approach of “interspecies camaraderie” can save people and animals from the horrors of rabies and almost certain death. Grounded in multispecies ethnography, this book leads the reader through the streets and slums of Delhi and Jaipur, where people and animals, such as dogs, cows, and macaques, interact intimately and sometimes violently. Nadal explores the intricate web of factors that bring humans and animals into contact with one another within these urban spaces and create favorable pathways for the transmission of the rabies virus across species. This book shows how rabies is endemic in India for reasons that are as much social, cultural, and political as they are biological, ranging from inadequate sanitation to religious customs, from vaccine shortages to reliance on traditional medicine. The continuous emergence (and reemergence) of infectious diseases despite technical medical progress is a growing concern of our times and clearly questions the way we think of animal and environmental health. This original account of rabies challenges conventional approaches of separation and extermination, arguing instead that a One Health approach is our best chance at fostering mutual survival in a world increasingly overpopulated by humans, animals, and deadly pathogens.
This book presents fundamental and applied research aimed at the development of smart cities across India. Based on the exploration of an extensive array of multidisciplinary literature, this book discusses critical factors of smart city initiatives: management and organization, technology, governance, policy, people and communities, economy, infrastructure, and natural environment. These factors are broadly covered under the integrative framework of the book to examine the vision and challenges of smart city initiatives. The book suggests directions and agendas for smart city research and outlines practical implications for government professionals, students, research scholars and policy makers. A lot of work is happening on smart cities as it is an upcoming area of research and development. At international level, and even in India, the concept of smart cities concept is a hot topic at universities, research centers, ministries, transport departments, civic bodies, environment, energy and disaster organizations, town planners and policy makers. This book provides ideas and information to government officials, investors, experts and research students.
This book offers an overview of India’s emerging digital economy and the resulting challenges and opportunities for urban workplaces. It examines contemporary economic and social transformations in India by focusing on how new technologies and policies are shaping urban work practices and patterns. The book emphasizes inclusive and equitable practices that consider the needs of the formal and informal sector workforce as essential to India’s urban development. Drawing on cross-disciplinary frameworks, it examines key issues related to work trends in the Indian urban economy and its digital landscapes, including Industry 4.0 and technology–labour nexus, smart cities and innovation, urbanism and consumerism, workplace transitions such as service industry and remote work, digital divide, skill development initiatives, and the impact of socio-economic inequalities and disruptions. The authors provide perspectives on the digital future of urban work in India and other emerging economies in the post-COVID-19 phase, and underscore the importance of enacting balanced policies, remodelling institutions, and equipping the labour force for adapting to new demands related to future employability and investments. This book will interest students, teachers, and researchers of urban studies, urban sociology, sociology of work, labour studies, human and urban geography, economic geography, urban economics, development studies, urban development and planning, public policy, regional planning, politics of urban development, social and cultural change, urban sustainability, environmental studies, management studies, South Asian Studies, and Global South studies. It will also be useful to policymakers, non-governmental organizations, activists, and those interested in India and the future of the global economy.
This substantive and original contribution to the study of urbanization in India critically analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the Indian urban system and provides new insights into contemporary urban problems. The author's perspective of urban development in India interrelates the geographical dimension with historical and socio-economic aspects. The book focuses on the processes of urbanization and the nature of interdependence among urban centres and between urban centres and their hinterlands. The approach is at the macro level. The first chapter provides an overview of studies of urbanization in India, and a detailed chapter on the history of urbanization follows. These provide the necessary background to the chapter on urbanization processes. The locational aspects of urbanization are covered in the next five chapters which discuss the problem of defining an urban place, spatial patterns of urbanization, classification of cities, theories of settlement location and the analysis of settlement systems. The relationships between a city and its surrounding area are then studied at two levels - the larger area of city dominance and the city fringe area. Finally, the author examines the fundamental issues involved in framing a national urbanization policy, and expresses the hope that the development of smaller cities and towns may provide some relief from the problems of overcrowding and unplanned growth.