Journal ArticleDOI
HEGEMONIC ASPIRATIONS: New Middle Class Politics and India's Democracy in Comparative Perspective
Leela Fernandes,Patrick Heller +1 more
TLDR
In this paper, the authors used an analysis of the rise of India's New Middle Class (NMC) to develop a class analytics of democratic politics in India and found that the dominant fraction of the middle class plays a central role in the politics of hegemony.Abstract:
This article uses an analysis of the rise of India's New Middle Class (NMC) to develop a class analytics of democratic politics in India. The article locates the politics of India's democracy within the framework of comparative class analytics and integrates class analysis with the politics of caste, religion, and language. The article develops two central arguments. The first is that the dominant fraction of the middle class plays a central role in the politics of hegemony. These hegemonic politics are played out both as attempts to coordinate the interests of the dominant classes and to forge internal unity within the highly diverse fragments of the middle class. But rather than producing the classical pattern of liberal hegemony (in which the ruling bloc actively elicits the consent of subordinate classes) in India these projects have been marked by middle-class illiberalism, and most notably a distancing from lower classes. Second, we argue that the contours of the NMC can be grasped as a cla...read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India
TL;DR: In this paper, Chandra's parsimonious and general model explains why ethic parties in India, riding on Hindu or, for that matter, Tamil nationalism, succeed in some contexts but not in others.
Development and the State: A Reply to Critics: Forum on Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India
TL;DR: Chibber as discussed by the authors argued that despite a democratic framework and a state commitment to economic growth, India failed to reach the levels of economic development that South Korea reached in the 1950s and 1960s.
Journal ArticleDOI
Timepass: Youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India
TL;DR: The authors examined the experiences and strategies of unemployed young men in the north Indian city of Meerut and argued for an ethnographically sensitive political-economy approach to the study of youth, culture, and neoliberal transformation, attuned to both the durability of social inequalities and counterintuitive cultural practice.
Journal ArticleDOI
Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the hackathon rehearses an entrepreneurial citizenship celebrated in transnational cultures that orient toward Silicon Valley for models of social change, which aligns, in India, with middle-class politics that favor quick and forceful action with socially similar collaborators over the contestations of mass democracy or the slow construction of coalition across difference.
Journal ArticleDOI
Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a “New” India
TL;DR: In this article, a study of professional software women in urban India examines practices of respectable femininity and discourses of the Indian family to understand the changing and abiding aspects of a seemingly new national culture.
References
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Book
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
TL;DR: In this article, a social critic of the judgement of taste is presented, and a "vulgar" critic of 'pure' criticiques is proposed to counter this critique.
Book
Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
TL;DR: The first selection published from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks to be made available in Britain, and was originally published in the early 1970s as discussed by the authors, was the first publication of the Notebooks in the UK.
BookDOI
The nation and its fragments : colonial and postcolonial histories
TL;DR: The Nation and its Peasants and its Outcasts173Ch. 10The National State200Ch. 11Communities and the Nation220Notes241Bibliography263Index273.
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Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe
Juan J. Linz,Alfred Stepan +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a comparative analysis of the process of democratization looks at Southern Europe, South America and post-communist Europe, and the authors reconceptualize the major types of modern non-democratic regimes and the consequences of each type for the paths available to democratic transition and consolidation.
Book
Capitalist development and democracy
TL;DR: In this article, the authors find that the rise and persistence of democracy cannot be explained either by an overall structural correspondence between capitalism and democracy or by the role of the bourgeoisie as the agent of democratic reform.