INTRODUCTION

India has long fascinated Western imagination, and trade routes from Europe have been linked to the Indian subcontinent for millennia. Today India is part of world economy more than ever before. Since the 1990s, India has emerged as one of the leading global economies, continuing to be one of the fastest growing economies. The state has liberated the economy, and infrastructure and communication systems are improving. Yet, despite having its own space flight program, India remains a developing country plagued by widespread child malnutrition, gender discrimination and caste hierarchies. Many features of Indian culture and society continue to be prominent even in the midst of changes, albeit accompanied by new interpretations and tensions.

India is also visible and tangible outside of South Asia. People of Indian origin are among the largest migrant groups in the world, from the Caribbean and Malaysia, to the United States, Europe and the Gulf States. Migrant Indian populations keep up with their Indian identity and cultural practices, even when they have lived in their host societies for centuries. Cultural, social, and political transnational connections of migrant Indians link them with their country of origin and increase the need to understand how India as a nation-state is evolving and making itself recognized globally.

India's growing international importance — economically, politically, and culturally — has been accompanied with a widening need to understand India's diversity, changes, and continuity. The idea for this introductory book evolved from our experiences of teaching diverse audiences about contemporary India from business people and civic organizations, to students of various disciplines. What unites these various audiences is their desire for a holistic understanding of contemporary India. For instance, issues of health and population do not merely concern health professionals but also business people and environmental activists: population issues determine the size of the market and contribute to environmental burden. This book is also intended to be used by students of Asian and Indian studies, development studies, and various social sciences when in need of a wider understanding of development, culture and society in contemporary India.

This book focuses on the intertwining of culture, politics and development in India. By drawing on our own anthropological fieldwork in various settings in rural and urban India we give ordinary Indians a voice by exploring their aspirations for change and continuity, while also describing macro-level processes. We aim to provide a balanced picture of emerging India's many triumphs as well as its lingering problems and the ongoing battle for more inclusive growth. The following chapters deal with politics, economic life, appropriation of new technologies, population and environmental issues, culture, and everyday life, thereby providing the reader the information needed for intercultural encounters between Indians and people from other national backgrounds.

We argue that culture, politics, and development need to be understood as interconnected and interdependent spheres. While cultural connections make daily politics and development efforts intelligible, politics and development efforts themselves mould culture. "Culture" is a multifaceted concept, referring to a rather different phenomenon in everyday parlance than in academic discourse in which it has become highly contested and debated during the last decades. The common sense meaning of "culture" tends to be essentializing and to view the world as a mosaic of separate and clearly demarcated cultures. Culture is often recognized in rituals, festivals, and other phenomena that are easy for an outsider to regard as exotic. Here, our understanding of culture follows the mainstream of current anthropological thinking, and we view culture as socially acquired meaning systems through which people see and understand their worlds but which also enables a contest of meanings. In this book, we aim to bring forward the double nature of culture, having on the one hand continuity and perseverance as naturally occurring, and on the other hand, being susceptible to change. Culture is dynamic through the interplay of social power asymmetries and core symbols that have to be continuously reinterpreted in social praxis in order for them to remain resilient.

We aim to capture cultural dynamism by looking at agents with differing positions and viewpoints — and cultures in motion. When we speak about culture in India, we do not claim an existence of "Indian culture" as a unified and shared totality. Due to very noteworthy regional, religious, social, and other differences which are described throughout the book and more specifically in Chapter 3, such a general abstraction would have no meaning. Thus it is better to speak about "cultures in India" than about the "Indian culture." However, we do not consider "culture" only as discourse or as a politically motivated invention, but believe that there are certain temporally resilient, largely taken-for-granted core symbols, emotions, values, and relations that people learn through the process of socialization. These in turn are in constant interplay with politics and development.

According to the socio-cultural anthropological view, well-being and development receive their meaning in a cultural context. Development inevitably touches upon the conceptions of good life which are not universally shared, even if certain basic values such as avoidance of pain or hunger may be universal. Development refers to a positive and desirable change. In the Indian context caste and kinship, despite their wide regional and community wise differences, form the cultural backbone of social relations, and thus are examined in detail in Chapter 4. Culture is inseparable from social and economic relations, and thus is present throughout the book.

One of the basic social values shared by many Indians is the desirability of being maximally interconnected with others. The necessity of interconnectedness is constitutive of a gendered lifecycle, and has particular importance for women's lives in South Asia. Women's identities are more based on their relatedness within the family and kin than on their individual freedoms, which easily leads to using women, particularly young women, as the supporters of the ends of others rather than as ends in their own right (Nussbaum 2000, 5-6). This naturally limits their structural capabilities for individual well-being and development. Gender asymmetries crucially influence issues of population, labor force, politics, rural development, health, and education in India, and consequently we discuss gender throughout the book. Our focus is not solely on women's lives but on how men's and women's roles are interrelated. In India — as elsewhere — development is gendered.

Our national background as descendants of Finland, a nation that experienced one of the fastest structural transformations between 1965 and 1975, from an agrarian, poor country, to a high-tech, post-industrial society together with our shared disciplinary background in social anthropology directs attention in this book more to the potential dynamism in Indian society than to the incapacitating colonial legacies of the past. When the Third World is in focus, the main interest tends to be the various indicators of the level of economic or human development. Such a view that sees development as a state to be compared to and defined by the level of per capita income, national gross domestic product, educational or literacy level, life expectancy or the like, has been widely used but also incessantly criticized. Naturally it is justified to use such parameters to characterize the state of particular national economies or to understand macro-level processes. However, such an aggregated and universalizing view does not help in understanding the developmental challenges of Third World countries like India very well. Here, we understand development broadly as improved well-being and capabilities, drawing from an American philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2000) and Indian Nobel Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen (1999) whose definitions of development take into consideration capabilities, i.e. what people are effectively able to do, instead of merely measuring wealth and poverty levels. Rather than using universal definitions of development, we follow Sen in viewing ideas of development as deriving from contemporary local and global debates.

Nussbaum and Sen point out that development cannot be reached without freedoms and human rights, and rights in turn are not enough if they are not substantial or based on real opportunities. Rights tend to be understood too passively and should be replaced by considerations of freedoms as positive freedoms to act. For instance, the right to vote is ineffectual without securing literacy and access to accurate information on the candidates. In the most philosophical sense, this reading of development as freedom derives from John Rawls's (1971) principle of social justice in which economic development or efficiency should never be acceptable justifications for limitation of basic liberties such as freedom of speech, thought and political liberties. This approach means that when we speak about development, we are inevitably destined to discuss politics and democracy as well, which is central particularly in Chapters 5 and 6. Moreover, development as a positive freedom that makes it possible for people to secure human dignity also points to social justice, equality, and limited socio-economic disparities. A society plagued by constantly widening income differences between the poor and the affluent can hardly be considered as advancing human development, no matter how fast its gross national product is rising. This issue is discussed especially in Chapter 7.

The interconnectedness of basic liberties, development, and well-being is further stressed for example in Len Doyal and Ian Gough's (1991) A Theory of Human Need, which points out how in addition to basic freedoms, basic capabilities relating to health are essential for people's ability to participate politically and to reap the benefits of the economy. Health and well-being are thus in the core of developmental processes, and will be discussed in Chapter 7 which deals with population issues.

India is a democratic country where development efforts emerge from the political sphere and debate. When India as the first non-Western country chose democracy as its form of government, it did not merely adopt Western influences. Indian democracy and politics draw from local traditions and meanings. In this book, we do not merely examine politics as related to the development of political institutions and democracy in India. As anthropologists we have adopted a view of politics as a symbolically constructed sphere with local meanings and patterns. This anthropological understanding of politics enables an understanding of how culture and development efforts merge in practical politics, as discussed in Chapter 5.

We have been engaged in anthropological research on kinship, gender issues, politics, class and caste, population issues, and the appropriation of information technology in Indian society and culture for nearly twenty years. Sirpa Tenhunen has conducted field research in rural and urban West Bengal and Minna Saavala in rural and urban Andhra Pradesh in southern India. In the following chapters, we offer the reader a tangible picture of mundane realities along with a more general picture of Indian society. We do not, however, present our fieldwork locations as typical villages but as examples portraying unique regional features that help the reader to fathom the multiplicity of actual everyday life in India. We have excluded detailed discussions on anthropological theory and analyses from the ethnographic descriptions we offer in this book in order to broaden the readership of the book. Those interested in more detailed anthropological theoretical debates and analyses are asked to turn to our monographs and journal articles.

In addition to our own empirical, field-based research, the wide-ranging description of the social, political, and economic situation in India derives from a close reading of research literature. For the sake of brevity and readability, we mention these sources when they refer to distinct analyses and challenged viewpoints, interpretations, or figures and leave out the sources on generally accepted historical and political facts and interpretations. While we discuss many disputed issues on which scholars have not reached a consensus, we have avoided far-reaching speculations and preferred more generally supported viewpoints. The aim of this introductory book is to provide a freshman in Indian studies with the basic understanding of key issues relating to development, politics, and culture in India. Academic controversies relating to different interpretations and intellectual frames of reference are kept in the background and reviewed only when they contribute to the general objective of this book.

Contents

The following two chapters present information that facilitates the understanding of the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, we examine the country's long history of globalization; this offers a panorama of the multiplicity of Indian traditions and societies and the effects of colonialism. The third chapter offers a view of the diversity in India by describing regional differences and the spectrum of languages and religions, while to conclude the chapter we explore the factors that contribute to the coalescence of Indian diversity.

The fourth chapter examines changes in caste and kinship, which fundamentally affect politics, markets, and human choice as a whole throughout India. We describe how caste and kinship are made to work in a village as well as examine changes occurring in India as a whole and the role that caste and kinship play in work culture, consumer behavior, business, and cross-cultural communication.

After the first chapters which describe the most fundamental and general issues pertaining to all features of social and political life in India, we turn to the realities of politics. The fifth and sixth chapters concentrate on India's domestic, foreign, and trade policies. What kind of objectives do the main political parties have and where are they leading India in terms of trade and foreign policies? The fifth chapter describes the main stages in India's recent political history, concentrating specifically on the changes that occurred after the 1991 economic reforms. In Chapter 5, we also relate modern India's political history with the specificities of India's political culture. The sixth chapter deals with the emergence of political alternatives, such as fundamentalist movements and women's activism.

Within the next two decades India will have the world's largest national population. The seventh chapter examines population growth and its consequences particularly from the viewpoint of women's and girls' health and status. We discuss whether and how the government has been able to ensure reproductive rights while providing birth-control facilities and health care. We also examine the causes behind the rapid decline in the average number of children per woman and the consequences of the trend, particularly in the southern part of the subcontinent. This chapter also discusses demographic projections, taking into account the growing prevalence of sex-selective abortions in some areas.

The eighth chapter deals with the immense gap between the haves and have-nots in India while exploring poverty-related problems. Analysis is provided of the ongoing debate concerning developments in the proportion of people living in poverty, its relation to the period of economic liberalization, and the simultaneous process of polarizing income differences. Education and educational reforms are discussed as key factors in India's development and the pivotal social and political role of the middle classes is analyzed.

The ninth chapter examines growth in the different branches of the Indian economy. How do agriculture, industries, communication and IT businesses and outsourcing interact and contribute to the economic growth? This chapter also examines the impact of India's huge culture production industry in relation to development and cultural change.

New technologies offer developing countries a chance to speed up their development by leapfrogging to the latest technology. The tenth chapter deals with the introduction of new technologies, especially information technology, to India. Do these new technologies help to reduce poverty or do they increase disparities? How has India emerged as the world's fastest growing mobile-phone market, and how is mobile technology influencing its culture and society?

The eleventh chapter examines India's environmental questions. India's water supplies are meager in relation to the population, and climate change is likely to complicate the problem. The air in urban areas is highly polluted and so are the main rivers of India. Do environmental pollution and the shortage of water and energy threaten the welfare and the economy of the country? Is human development in India stalled by the ecological limitations and environmental degradation?

This book is a result of a long-lasting academic cooperation between the authors. Each author has been responsible for her own chapters. Sirpa Tenhunen wrote Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 and 11 of the book as well as most of Chapter 3, with the exception of the section on religion, which was written by Minna Saavala, who also wrote Chapters 7 and 8. This introduction and the concluding chapter were collaborative efforts.