Eight recently published academic books about India that investigate the concerns of our times

Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics: Polarisation and the Growing Crisis of the Congress Party (2009-19), Zoya Hasan

Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics examines the immense changes that have occurred in Indian politics over the past decade and their impact on the Indian National Congress. The impact is most apparent in the changing fortunes of the Congress party, which suffered two major defeats in 2014 and 2019 elections, bringing the party’s crisis to the front and centre of public debate.

This book reflects on the reasons for these enormous changes by looking, first, at the underlying conditions that led to the decline of the Congress and, second, at the challenges’ both external and internal’ confronting the Congress and, while doing so, estimating its impact on Indian politics and on the Congress. More specifically, it looks at how important ideological debates provoked by the rise of majoritarianism, the Gujarat model, hypernationalism, the secular retreat, and the curbs and restrictions on the opposition influenced the Congress.

This analysis of the political change in India in the past decade affords insights into the processes of transformation and polarisation that grounded the Congress party and centrist parties in other countries as well.

Universities as Transformative Social Spaces: Mobilities and Mobilizations from South Asian Perspectives, edited by Andrea Kölbe, Susan Thieme, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka

The realm of higher education, much like everything else in a global and mobile world, has rapidly altered in the last few decades. More and more universities and seats of higher education are using strategies towards ‘ ‘internationalisation’, by increasing heterogeneity in rank, student composition, resource endowments, faculty profiles, and their social spaces.

The essays in this book take a critical look at universities across South Asia – more specifically, at the dynamics of student mobility and mobilisations existing in such localised social spaces, and compares these with their counterparts in universities across the world. While elite universities in South Asia, as elsewhere, have been caught in a stiff international competition and are aspiring for the highest ranks, students from the most excluded communities and remote parts of the country seek entry to badly endowed universities, facing obstacles during their courses, and upon seeking entry into employment.

The book evaluates such universities as spaces for mobility opportunity and mobilisations in a globally networked world. It combines local and international perspectives with thorough observations of the dynamics in localised university spaces, while embedding them in transnational processes.

Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions, Rohan Mukherjee

Why do rising powers sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, and at other times support an order that constrains them? Ascending Order offers the first comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena.

International institutions shape the choices of rising states as they pursue equal status with established powers. Open membership rules and fair decision-making procedures facilitate equality and cooperation, while exclusion and unfairness frequently produce conflict. Using original and robust archival evidence, the book examines these dynamics in three cases: the United States and the maritime laws of war in the mid-nineteenth century; Japan and naval arms control in the interwar period; and India and nuclear non-proliferation in the Cold War.

This study shows that the future of contemporary international order depends on the ability of international institutions to address the status ambitions of rising powers such as China and India.

Divorce and Democracy: A History of Personal Law in Post-Independence India, Saumya Saxena

Divorce and Democracy captures the Indian state’s difficult dialogue with divorce, mediated largely through religion. By mapping the trajectories of marriage and divorce laws of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities in post-colonial India, it explores the dynamic interplay between law, religion, family, minority rights and gender in Indian politics.

The book demonstrates that the binary frameworks of the private-public divide, individuals versus group rights, and universal rights versus legal pluralism collapse before the peculiarities of religious personal law. Historicising the legislative and judicial response to decades of public debates and activism on the question of personal law, it suggests that the sustained negotiations over family life within and across the legal landscape provoked a unique and deeply contextual evolution of both, secularism and religion in India’s constitutional order. Personal law, therefore, played a key role in defining the place of religion and determining the content of secularism in India’s democracy.

Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon, Thomas Cowan

In urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment, and transfer state power to private sector actors. Much of this development has taken place on the outskirts of the traditional metropoles, in the territorially flexible urban frontier.

At the forefront of these processes in India is Gurgaon, a privately developed metropolis on the south-western hinterlands of New Delhi, that has long been touted as India’s flagship neoliberal city. Subaltern Frontiers tells a story of India’s remarkable urban transformation by examining the politics of land and labour that have shaped the city of Gurgaon.

Subaltern Frontiers examines how the country’s flagship post-liberalisation urban project has been shaped and filtered through agrarian and subaltern histories, logics, and subjects. In doing so, the book explores how the production of globalised property and labour in contemporary urban India is filtered through colonial instruments of land governance, living histories of uneven agrarian development, material geographies of labour migration, and the worldly aspirations of peasant-agriculturalists.

Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women, edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma

Editors Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma recover, translate, annotate, and provide historical and cultural context for the 17th-to-20th-century writings of Muslim women travellers in ten different languages. Queens and captives, pilgrims and provocateurs, these women are diverse.

Their connection to Islam is wide-ranging as well, from the devout to those who distanced themselves from religion. What unites these adventurers is a concern for other women they encounter, their willingness to record their experiences, and the constant thoughts they cast homeward even as they traveled a world that was not always prepared to welcome them.

When thinking of intrepid travellers from past centuries, we don’t usually put Muslim women at the top of the list. And yet, these stunning firsthand accounts completely change our preconceived notions of who was exploring the world.

Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India, Srila Roy

In Changing the Subject, Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalisation were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signalled the co-optation and depoliticisation of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalisation of queer activism.

Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organisations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues, and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and non-queer neoliberal feminisms.

The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism – both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.

State Capitalism: Why SOEs Matter and the Challenges They Face, Lalita Som

The crises emanating from the Global Financial Crisis and the Covid-19 Pandemic have underscored the emergency role of the State and its smooth, seamless reactivation, for situations when private activity and markets are disrupted. In many countries, state-owned enterprises have played a crucial part in delivering on that effort. While SOEs are increasingly sought out to play a role during emergency situations, evidence suggests that they misallocate capital and mismanage resources.

This is indicative of the conflicts of interests in owning and regulating enterprises as well as between the commercial and non-commercial objectives of SOEs, crony capitalism, the private agenda of public officials, internal management of SOEs, the significant role played by state owned banks and financial institutions and the conflicts that arise in the State’s primary role vs. its ownership of enterprises. The studies of eight countries from different regions undertaken for this book, provide answers to these key policy questions related to state capitalism.