Preface and Acknowledgements

Summary

India has been on the move, changing from within and without in multifarious ways. These changes have been sincerely as well as glibly dubbed a ‘new’ India, which has surreptitiously and unwittingly swept away the ‘old’ India. Any casual observer would notice that the ‘new’ no doubt coexists with an ‘old’ India, although where one begins and the other ends is difficult to mark. It is equally vexing to separate an earlier modernizing, idiosyncratic India from its traditional past, the ‘other’ India, and from the current globalizing, modern India. That there are multiple Indias is an oft repeated cliché, but it cannot be denied. To put it differently with another cliché, is there a unity of Indian change in all of this diversity?

This volume acknowledges that India, as a social system, mimics, mocks, and reinvents itself continuously – in real and imagined ways. There are new forces at work, gnawing at and pushing out the old even as the old reinvents itself in a changing India. To capture these multiple, multilayered, centripetal and centrifugal shifts remains a daunting task. This volume should be seen as a modest and selective attempt to begin the intellectual quest to unravel a ‘new’ India in its complexities.

This project had its genesis at the end of 2007 when I founded the book series India and Asia in the Global Economy with Anthem Press in London. In March 2008 I organized two academic panels with the theme A New India?