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Introduction -- Indentured Migration to Trinidad: Recruitment, Journey, and Life in the Estate -- Settlement and Community Formation -- Ethnicity and Ethnic Mobilisation -- Elections and the Politicisation of Race and Ethnicity -- Sex-Ratio Disparity and Marriage: Erasures and Reconstitutions -- Family, Kinship, and Gender Relations: Erasures and Reconstitutions -- Religion, Ethnic Protest, and Cultural Contestation -- Religion and Society I: Trinidad Hinduism -- Religion and Society II: Presbyterianism, Islam, and Syncretic Practices -- Culture and the Community: Language and Foodways -- Conclusion.

Preface -- Contents -- Editor and Contributors -- List of Tables -- List of Photographs -- 1 Introduction: Towards Understanding the Social Dynamics of the Urban -- Abstract -- 1 Urban in the Census -- 2 Urbanisation in India -- 3 Social Dynamics of the Urban -- 4 Summary -- References -- 2 Revisiting the City: The Relevance of Urban Sociology Today -- Abstract -- 1 The City: Locale and Milieu -- 2 Community-Cosmopolitanism Dialectics -- 3 Thematics of an Urban Sociology Today -- 4 The Urban Citizen: Contestations Over Definition -- 5 Differences, Identities and Territories -- 6 Social Networks: Negotiating Life in the City -- 7 The City and Civil Society Organisations -- 8 Conclusion: Some Methodological Considerations -- References -- 3 Global Flows or Rural-Urban Connections? Temporality, Public Spaces and Heterotopias in Globalising Mumbai -- Abstract -- 1 Researching Time-Space and Flows in the City: Methodological Issues -- 2 Globalisation and Time-Space Opportunities in the Informal Sector -- 2.1 Servicing the Outsourced Workers -- 2.2 The World in the Street -- 3 Global Cultural Flows and Conflicts Over Time and Space -- 3.1 Environmental Ideoscapes and Time-Space Conflicts -- 3.2 Religion, Culture and the Expansion of Time-Space -- 4 The Spatio-temporal Implications of Cultural/Political Struggles -- 5 Concluding Comments -- References -- 4 Globalisation, Group Autonomy and Political Space: Negotiating Globalised Interests in Bengaluru -- Abstract -- 1 Bengaluru and Its Spaces -- 2 Globalisation and Its Contents -- 3 Global Garment Circuit -- 4 Information Technology Circuit -- 5 Hindu Priest Circuit -- 6 Globalisation and Urban Negotiation -- 7 Conclusion -- References -- 5 Directed Decentralisation: Analysing the Experience of Decentralisation via JNNURM in Maharashtra -- Abstract -- 1 Decentralisation: Recent Debate

This volume emphasises the sociological view that cities are primarily about people, not places or buildings, and explores the social dynamics of urban space in globalising India. Distinguishing between 'locale' and 'milieu' and the community-cosmopolitanism dialectic in urban areas, it elucidates the thematic for urban sociology today. The chapters explore the various perspectives and processes in understanding the urban predicament in India today. The contributors specifically ask: What are the characteristics of the fastest growing cities in India? What are the forces shaping their forms and processes? Who benefits from what type of livelihood options cities offer? How have city administrations been dealing with mounting demands for housing, energy, and water resources, and problems of mass transportation? What implications do these have for the ecology of the city and the surrounding areas? Given the heterogeneity of urban populations, what social processes are at work and how they affect cit y]zenship and identity? What aspirations and tensions are expressed among different groups, and what implications do these have for inter-group relations? What challenges do inter-group relations pose for urban planning and administration? The contributors include renowned scholars as also young researchers. They go beyond their disciplinary moorings of economics, history, political science, social work, and sociology, and their trans-disciplinary dialogues carry inputs from policy makers, administrators, and grassroots activists working in urban areas.

In his book Modernization of Indian Tradition, Yogendra Singh advanced a 'paradigm for an integrated approach' to analysing social change. Drawing insights from this paradigm, this lecture delivered in his memory analyses the dialectics of or the relations between tradition and modernity. It is based on a sociological reading of the historical novel Saheb Bibi Golam by the Bengali litterateur Bimal Mitra. It elucidates fiction as ethnography and provides a corrective to the conventional polarisation between fiction and social research.

Taking a cue from G. S. Ghurye's Shakespeare on Conscience and Justice (1965) this lecture in his memory explores the role of ethnicity in shaping the self-knowledge and literary sensitivity of V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul's life traverses three distinct cultures: the Hindu culture brought by his ancestors who came as indentured migrants to Trinidad, the Creole culture of colonial Trinidad and the emerging modern culture of western civilisation. Much of Naipaul's self-knowledge involved his engagement with these three cultures and his experience of the interplay between colonialism and ethnicity. In his first four novels— Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and A House for Mr Biswas—Naipaul describes the life and times of the descendants of Indian immigrants in colonial Trinidad and the making of a girmitiya diaspora there. The lecture delineates the rare sociological insights into this diaspora provided by these novels.

This essay is a tribute to the memory of Partha Nath Mukherji (1940–2021), the past President of the Indian Sociological Society (2004–2005). After briefly tracing his scholarly career, it provides an overview of his sociological contributions spanning almost six decades. His oeuvre covered a variety of themes and issues, both empirical and theoretical, which can be categorised under the following rubrics: social movements and social change, sociology of agrarian relations, democratic decentralisation and panchayats, nationalism and nation-building, research methodology, indigenisation of the social sciences, regional (South Asian) sociology, and the question of approach and relevance in Indian sociology.

M. N. Srinivas is undoubtedly the most readable among sociologists in India. For him, the way he wrote about a subject was as important as the subject itself. This lent a literary flavour to his writings. His writings are, in fact, imbued with a rare combination of sociological imagination and literary sensitivity; The Remembered Village, his masterpiece is perhaps the best illustration of this. In his Hassan Raja Rao Lecture, titled 'Social Anthropology and Literary Sensibility' (1998), he explained the relevance and importance of such sensitivity for sociologists engaged in understanding society and culture. Taking a cue from this, the instant lecture examines the mutual relations between sociological imagination and literary sensitivity. Substantively, it elucidates the sociological imagination embedded in literature and the consequent importance of literature for the sociologist.

Ashok K. Pankaj and Ajit K. Pandey (Eds), Subalternity, Exclusion and Social Change in India, New Delhi, Cambridge University Press India, 2014, 387 pp., ₹895, ISBN 978-93-82993-24-7.