Reading India: Selections from Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. III: (1991–2017)

Contents: I. Society: 1. Prehistory of Indian Environmentalism: Intellectual Traditions/Ramachandra Guha. 2. Language and Schooling of Tribal Children: Issues Related to Medium of Instruction/Geetha B. Nambissan. 3. Birth of a Goddess: “Vande Mataram,” Anandamath, and Hindu Nationhood/Tanika Sarkar. 4. Films and Free Speech/A. G. Noorani. 5. Neoliberal Subjectivity, Enterprise Culture, and New Workplaces: Organised Retail and Shopping Malls in India/Nandini Gooptu. 6. Comparative Contexts of Discrimination: Caste and Untouchability in South Asia/Surinder S. Johdka and Ghanshyam Shah. 7. Broken Lives and Compromise: Shadow Play in Gujarat/Harsh Mander. 8. From Parliamentary to Paramilitary Democracy/Sumanta Banerjee. 9. The Bhopal Disaster and Medical Research/C. Sathyamala and N. D. Jayaprakash. 10. Masculine Spaces: Rural Male Culture in North India/Prem Chowdhry. 11. Lives in Debt: Narratives of Agrarian Distress and Farmer Suicides/Ajay Dandekar and Sreedeep Bhattacharya. II. Economy: 12. Indian Economy at the Crossroads/Dilip Mookherjee. 13. Paradox of Competitiveness and Globalisation of Underdevelopment/Kalyan K. Sanyal. 14. Growth, Poverty, and Reforms/Jagdish Bhagwati. 15. Terms of Trade, Trade, and Technical Change: Strategies for Agricultural Growth/Bhupat M. Desai. 16. Impact of Reservation in Panchayati Raj: Evidence from a Nationwide Randomised Experiment/Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo. 17. The Three Rs of Reform/Amartya Sen. 18. Limits of Amartya Sen’s “Three Rs of Reform”/G. Haragopal. 19. A Model of Growth of the Contemporary Indian Economy/Prabhat Patnaik. 20. The Case for Direct Cash Transfers to the Poor/Devesh Kapur, Partha Mukhopadhyay, and Arvind Subramanian. 21. National Manufacturing Policy: Making India a Powerhouse?/Sunil Mani. 22. Flawed Cartography?: A New Road Map for Monetary Policy/D. M. Nachane. 23. Dynamics of Income Inequality in India: Insights from the World Top Incomes Database/Amit Basole.  24. Making Indian Agriculture More Resilient: Some Policy Priorities/Madhur Gautam. 25. Economic Reforms and Manufacturing Sector Growth: Need for Reconfiguring the Industrialisation Model/R. Nagaraj. III. Polity: 26. Left Secularists and Communalism/Dharma Kumar.  27. Electoral Politics in the Time of Change: India’s Third Electoral System, 1989–99/Yogendra Yadav. 28. Representation for Women: Should Feminists Support Quotas?/Meena Dhanda. 29. Socio-political Unrest in the Region Called North-east India/U. A. Shimray. 30. Sino-Indian Boundary Dispute, 1948–60: A Reappraisal/Srinath Raghavan. 31. Democracy and Economic Transformation in India/Partha Chatterjee. 32. Caste in Twenty First–century India: Competing Narratives/Sonalde Desai and Amaresh Dubey. 33. Secularism: Its Content and Context/Akeel Bilgrami. 

The period 1991–2017 was marked by communal aggression, the official start of economic liberalisation, growing inequality, and state militarisation. All of these have been reflected in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly, which stood steadfast witness—quietly, reflectively, but also urgently and passionately.

Reading India, Vol. III (1991–2017), the final commemorative volume celebrating 50 years of the EPW, provides a selection of papers published during this period, reflecting on the social, political, and economic changes of the time. The chapters focus on five themes that dominated India’s public sphere: the question of secularism versus communalism; social justice and power-sharing by the backward castes; political configurations in a post-Congress polity; the entrenchment of impunity instead of the rule of law; and the political economy of economic policy.

The contributors to this volume have observed, analysed, and commentated on a range of topics, from the lack of justice for victims of the 2002 Gujarat massacres, farmer suicides, and agrarian distress, to the Indo–China border dispute. Focusing on India’s society, economy, and polity, the volume includes research on the environment, health, education, censorship, and free speech, among other themes which have formed subjects of prescient debates that will help us to make sense of the present times as well. (jacket)