Reading Contemporary India : An Interdisciplinary Enquiry into Sociocultural Issues

This is the first ever effort to bring such a wide range of socio-cultural issues and establish interdisciplinary links between them by studying India’s past, ancient and modern. The issues include caste and hierarchy, religious and political conflict linked sharply to diverse others like literary practice and intellectual life.

The book is the first ever attempt to examine various sociocultural aspects of contemporary India, ranging from caste and hierarchy and the religious or political conflict resulting from it to literary practice and intellectual life in the public space and making interdisciplinary associations. It does this by going back to various aspects of India’s past, stretching back several millennia to those owing to public policy after independence. Many of the issues today, such as those named above, can be traced to racial mixing through centuries, which has created a multitude of conflicts that need solutions today. The book is divided into separate chapters corresponding to the issues needing addressing, and a brief note at the conclusion of each chapter makes connections with issues dealt in other chapters. The book has an introduction tracing a significant portion of India’s past and an afterword identifying crisis areas in the present.