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The Indian state of Kerala is known for its high social model of development and social democratic governance. This book presents the most comprehensive analysis of the Kerala Model of Social Development to date. The model has often been identified as one worth emulating because it is seen to have taken the state to the zenith of human development and democratic governance. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book sheds new light on the paradoxes of the Indian state and its model of economic development. The book provides a consolidated exploration and critique of the Kerala model, which usually has been portrayed as linear with the grand narrative of progress, development and democracy...
Presents a historical account of plantations in India in the context of the modern world economy. This book shows how history can assist in explaining contemporary conditions and trends. It focuses on labour and economic development problems and interprets the dynamics of plantation capitalism.
Internationally renowned scholars investigate the discourses, practices and perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) across a wide range of multicultural, multi-ethnic and cross country experiences. Case studies are included from Canada, Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Political Ecospatiality offers a new perspective on subaltern struggles and raises the issue of how people with limited lobbying power can still organise to defend their honour or livelihood-environmental ecospatial systems. The book narrates and analyses the historical and contemporary situations that shape and reshape the strategies and practices of larger livelihood-environmental and identity politics in Kerala by drawing parallels from the rest of India and the global South. By employing Kerala as an example, it engages with and broadens debates in political economy, political ecology, and subaltern politics. The book moves through six ecospatial conflicts and assembles three key ideas - transverse solidarity, epistemological coalescence, and subaltern modernity - and applies them as analytical tools to form an overall framework of political ecospatiality.
Since the early 1990s, the achievement of ‘good governance’ has been a dominant discourse in the pursuit of social and economic development. This book presents a critical challenge to the contemporary development paradigm of good governance. Based on original ethnographic fieldwork on urban water governance reforms in south India (Karnataka), the book examines the two propositions that underlie the current good governance debate. The first refers to a claim that good governance is both democratic and pro-market. The second to the claim that commercially-oriented water services, whether private or public, are good for poor and marginalised citizens. The book analyses these propositions as...
Developing a distinctive theoretical framework on civil society, this book examines how Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) contribute towards democratization in India and what conditions facilitate or inhibit their contribution. It assesses three different kinds of politics within civil society – liberal pluralist, neo-Marxist, and communitarian – which have had different implications in relation to democratization. By making use of in-depth empirical analysis and comparative case studies of three developmental NGOs that work among the tribal communities in the socio-historical context of south Rajasthan, the book shows that civil society is not necessarily a democratizing force, but ...
Focusing on notions of diaspora, identity and agency, this book examines ethnicity in war-torn Sri Lanka. It highlights the historical development and negotiation of a new identification of Up-country Tamil amidst Sri Lanka's violent ethnic politics. Over the past thirty years, Up-country (Indian) Tamils generally have tried to secure their vision of living within a multi-ethnic Sri Lanka, not within Tamil Eelam, the separatist dream that ended with the civil war in 2009. Exploring Sri Lanka within the deep history of colonial-era South Asian plantation diasporas, the book argues Up-country Tamils form a "diaspora next-door" to their ancestral homeland. It moves beyond simplistic Sinhala-Tam...
Using a case study of Bangladesh, and based on a long term participatory observation method, this book investigates claims of the success of microcredit, as well as the critiques of it, in the context of women’s empowerment. It confronts the distinction between women’s increasing wealth as a consequence of the success of microcredit programmes and their apparent non-commensurate empowerment, looking at two organisations (the Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) as they operate in two localities in rural Bangladesh, in order to discover how enrichment and empowerment are often confused. The book goes on to establish that the well-publicised success stories of the m...
Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cinema has been adopted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh. At the same time, this has been the period for the articulation of modern nationhood and cultural identity of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This book analyses the relationship between cinema and modernity in Bangladesh, providing a narrative of the uneven process that produced the idea of "Bangladesh cinema." This book investigates the roles of a non-Western "national" film industry in Asia in constructing nationhood and identity within colonial and postcolonial predicaments. Drawing on the idea of cinema as public sphere and the postcolonial notion of formatio...
In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act hastened the process of South Asian migration to postcolonial Britain. Half a decade later, now is an opportune moment to revisit the accumulated writing about the diasporas formed through subsequent settlement, and to probe the ways in which the South Asian diaspora can be re-conceptualised. Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas takes a fresh look at such matters and will have multi-disciplinary resonance worldwide. The meaning and importance of local, multi-local and trans-local dynamics is explored through a devolved and regionally-accented comparison of five British Asian cities: Bradford, the East End of London, Manchester, Leicester and Bi...