Globalizing India

This is one of the earliest books to present a collection of writings on the effects of globalization on India and Indian society. The very concept of globalization needs critical examination, and one productive approach is to focus specifically on the local impacts of globalization in its various guises through comparative ethnographic investigations. Such research also permits examination of the relative significance of globalization, as opposed to national, regional or local factors of change that may actually be more salient. Assayag and Fuller have assembled a team of eminent academics, who present a series of critical discussions about important issues of economy and agriculture, education and language, and culture and religion, based on ethnographic case studies from different localities in India. This challenging collection also includes a major study of the history of globalization and India that sets current trends in perspective.

Jackie Assayag is Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), Maison française, Oxford, UK, and affiliated to the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies at EHESS, Paris. He has worked extensively on anthropology, sociology, history and politics in modern South Asia, but also from a comparative perspective. His publications include At the Confluence of Two Rivers: Muslims and Hindus in South India (2004). He is currently working on a comparative analysis and theoretical discussion of violence, terrors and genocides, and raises questions about the difficult challenges for modernity constituted by extreme violence and other mass crimes. Dr Chris Fuller is Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics. His publications include The Renewal of the Priesthood: Modernity and Traditionalism in a South Indian Temple (Princeton University Press, 2003) and The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Indian Society (Princeton University Press, 2004).