Changing India - Robert W. Stern

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.