Changing India: Bourgeois Revolution on the Subcontinent

by RobertW.Stern (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2003

  $40.15

  The revised edition of Robert Stern's book brings India's story up to date. Since its original publication in 1993, much has altered and yet central to the author's argument remains his belief in the remarkable continuity and vitality of India's social systems and its resilience in the face of change. This is a colourful, readable and comprehensive introduction to modern India. In a journey through its family households and villages, the author explains its long-lived and little understood caste and class systems, its venerable faiths and extraordinary ethnic diversity, its history as 'the jewel in the crown' of British imperialism and its post-Independence career as a major agricultural and industrial nation. While paradoxes abound in an India which is constantly transforming, Stern demonstrates how and why it remains the largest and most enduring democracy in the developing world.

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $3.68

  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.