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...