This essay is intended to be a guide to further reading. It is not an exhaustive survey of literature.
The available literature on the history and nature of globalization is vast. Jan Aart Scholte’s Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave, 2005) provides an excellent overview of contending theories of globalization. Other books that left a significant impression on the analysis offered here include: Colin Leys, Market-Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and Public Interest (Verso, 2003), David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2007), and Gabor Steingart, The War for Wealth (McGraw Hill, 2008).
The analysis of the changing political economy of India offered here has been influenced by the following authors: Achin Vanaik, The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India (Verso, 1990), Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation (Oxford, 2002), Amit Bhaduri, Development with Dignity (National Book Trust, 2005), Barbara Harriss-White, India Working (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Ronald J. Herring and Rina Agarwal (eds), Whatever Happened to Class? (Dannish Books, 2008).
Those interested in developing a better understanding of the arguments of Indian neo-liberals can learn a lot from Arvind Panagariya’s data-packed book, India: The Emergent Giant (Oxford, 2008). Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound (Knopf, 2000) is indispensable. Other useful references include Daniel Lak’s India Express (Penguin, 2008), and Edward Luce’s The Strange Rise of Modern India (Doubleday, 2007). Dipankar Gupta’s The Caged Phoenix: Can India Fly? (Penguin-Viking, 2009) is a thoughtful meditation on India’s inability to convert economic growth into development.
Deepak Lal’s survey of the economic philosophy of the Hindu right is somewhat dated but still useful: ‘The Economic Impact of Hindu Revivalism’, in Martin Marty and Scott Appleby (eds) Fundamentalism and the State (Chicago, 1993). Richard Fox’s book Gandhian Socialism (Beacon, 1989) on the shared ground between Gandhian socialism and the Sangh Parivar is thought-provoking.
While one can fill a large enough library with books about Hindu philosophy and spirituality, there are not enough books on the contemporary trends in popular religiosity. This reflects the fact that Indian universities don’t have a tradition of a serious and rigorous sociology of religion. Milton Singer’s well-known When a Great Tradition Modernizes (Chicago, 1972) contains many useful suggestions. By revisiting the same Chennai industrialist families that Singer had studied 25 years earlier, John Harriss has done a wonderful job of bringing us into the 21st century and debunking some of the erroneous assumptions made by Singer. His ‘When a Great Tradition Globalizes’, Modern Asian Studies (2003) is a must-read.
Christopher Fuller’s The Camphor Flame (Princeton, 1992) remains an indispensable guide to contemporary Hinduism. Those interested in understanding modern gurus cannot afford to ignore Lawrence Babb’s The Redemptive Encounters (Berkeley, 1986) and Lise McKean’s Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (University of Chicogo Press, 1996). Agehananda Bharati’s writings, even though slightly dated, offer crucial insights into modern Hinduism. His Hindu Views and Ways and Hindu–Muslim Interface (Ross-Erikson, 1981) and The Ochre Robe (Ross-Erikson, 1980) are essential reading.
The literature on the Indian middle class is beginning to grow. Pavan Varma’s The Great Indian Middle Class (Penguin India, 2007) is a popular and useful book to start with. A good analysis of the changing cultural tastes of the great Indian middle class can be found in: Christopher Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer (eds), Patterns of Middle-class Consumption in India and China (Sage, 2008), Jackie Assayag and Christopher Fuller (eds), Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below (Anthem Press, 2005), and Imtiaz Ahmad and H. Reifeld (eds), Middle-class Values in India and West Europe (Social Science Press, 2007). There is simply no better guide to the political/electoral behaviour of the middle classes than Suhas Palshikar, whose essay ‘Politics of Indian Middle Classes’ appears in the volume edited by Imtiaz Ahmad and H. Reifeld.
The idea of banal or everyday nationalism is from Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism (Sage, 1995). How this everyday nationalism works in India is beginning to be explored. Some recent representative writings include: Badri Narayan, Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilization (Sage, 2009), Christopher Fuller, ‘The Vinayak Chaturthi Festival and Hindutva in Tamil Nadu’ (Economic and Political Weekly, May 12, 2001), and Meena Kandaswamy’s online essay, ‘Doing it Everyday’ at boloji.com.
Moving on to the literature on Hindu nationalism, two books by Jyotirmaya Sharma are very illuminating: Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalker, the RSS and India (Penguin-Viking, 2007), and Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (Penguin-Viking, 2003). Essays by Cynthia Mahmood in her A Sea of Orange (Xlibris, 2001) are worth reading. Christopher Jaffrelot’s The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (Columbia University Press, 1993) is a classic.
The phenomenon of ‘ethnocratic liberalism’ is of crucial importance in understanding the dangers of Hindu nationalism which uses the language of liberalism to assert Hindu supremacy. Important are the writings of Roger Griffin, ‘Interregnum or Endgame? The Radical Right in the “Post-fascist” Era’ (Journal of Political Ideologies, 5[2], 163–178), and Richard Wolin, Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism, from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 2004). Tamir Bar-On’s Where Have All the Fascists Gone? Ashgate, 2007) is an excellent critique of the European New Right.
Most of the classics on secularism have been discussed in Chapter 5. For the Indian context, Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1999) is indispensable. Mukul Kesavan’s The Secular Commonsense (Penguin, 2001) is thought-provoking.