Image: frame from West of the Tracks Cities capture much of what we mean by "modern," and have done so since Walter Benjamin's writings on Paris (link). But unlike the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, much of our imagining of cities since the early twentieth century has been dark and foreboding. A recent volume edited by Gyan …
India’s Naxalites
India is the world's largest democracy. It also is home to one of the more persistent and deadly Maoist insurgencies in the world, the Naxalite movement in eastern India (Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI/M)). The Naxalites were a splinter group that separated from India's Communist Party in the 1960s, and their hallmarks have been …
Village life in India
People sometimes describe India as undergoing an economic miracle in the past twenty years. After decades of indolent economic growth following independence, a number of sectors of the economy have taken off with high rates of growth and increasing income. Deepak Lal addresses this assumption in "An Indian Economic Miracle?" (link). Here is the crucial …
Social progress in India?
How much social progress has India made since Independence sixty years ago? According to economist V. K. Ramachandran, not very much when it comes to life in the countryside. (Hear my interview with Ramachandran on iTunes and on my web page.) Ramachandran gives a profile of the social problems faced by India at the time …
Understanding Society 