Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent - Hardcover

Stern, Robert W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521421055 ISBN 13: 9780521421058

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1993

Synopsis

This book presents a comprehensive, provocative, and highly readable introduction to contemporary India's modern history and social institutions. Robert Stern discusses India's family households and villages, its long-lived and little understood caste systems and venerable faiths, its extraordinary ethnic diversity, and India's modern agricultural and industrial economies. He also traces the country's history as 'the jewel in the crown' of British imperialism, its evolving systems of classes, electoral politics, and parliamentary democracy, and contrasts India's 'third world' poverty and illiteracy with its technological sophistication and subcontinental predominance. Changing India's central argument is that change in India is now rapid and profound, yet adaptive to the remarkable continuity and vitality of India's social systems. The dominant pattern of change, argues Stern, derives from the simultaneous development of capitalism and parliamentary democracy.

About this title

Review

'This small volume contains some of the most intelligent writing on contemporary India that one is likely to encounter ... Responsible for this success ... is a sustained narrative of the 'bourgeois revolution' that (Stern) sees going on, and also an engaging register of language and argument.' Burton Stein, South Asia Research

From the Author

Praise for the First Edition (from the first page of the 2nd edition)

"this volume contains some of the most intelligent writing on contemporary India that one is likely to encounter...an engaging register of language and argument... a unique publication." Burton Stein, SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH

"...a picture of India that cannot be praised too highly...absolutely essential reading." Gilbert Etienne, REVIEW TIERS-MONDE

"The considerable achievement of this book is to explain so much so clearly and so briefly." R. K. Newman, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521421055
• ISBN 13: 9780521421058
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 267