RESEARCH PROJECT

ON
BOOK REVIEW
CONTEMPORARY INDIA -A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW

Submitted to
MAHARASHTRA NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY,
AURANGABAD

Submitted by
NAMAN KUMAR
B.A.LL.B .(HONS) SEMESTER - I
R0LL NO- 2022/BALLB/80
Subject: PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY

UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF

DR. RAHUL KOSMABAI
ASSISTANT PROFEESOR OF SOCIOLOGY

Maharashtra National Law University,Aurangabad

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Satish Deshpande, M.A. (Economics) (J.N.U.), M.A., Ph.D. (California), is Professor of Sociology.
His research interests include caste and class inequalities, contemporary social theory, politics and
history of the social sciences and south-south interactions. He is the author of Contemporary India:
A Sociological View (2003) and (with Ghanshyam Shah, Harsh Mander, Sukhadeo Thorat and
Amita Baviskar) Untouchability in Rural India (2006). He has co-edited with Patricia Uberoi and
Nandini Sundar Anthropology in the East, Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology (2007)
and Class Inequalities, Contemporary Social Theory, Politics and History of the Social Sciences and
South- South Interactions.

Satish Deshpande currently teaches at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics,
University of Delhi. Previously, he has worked at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
and the Institute of Economic Growth (both in Delhi), and the University of Hyderabad. He began
his academic career as a teacher of Economics but abandoned his first doctoral thesis for another in
Sociology. He is the author of Contemporary India: A Sociological View (Viking Penguin 2003),
which was translated into Malayalam and excerpted in Hindi and Marathi. He has co-authored,
edited and coedited books on caste; Hindu-Muslim violence; inclusion in Indian higher education;
the disciplinary history of Indian sociology and social anthropology; and untouchability in
contemporary rural India. His research interests include caste and class inequalities in India; higher
education today; the history and politics of the social sciences; issues of language in academia; and
contemporary social theory. He is happy that, to the best of his knowledge, he is not on any social
media platforms.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

• Deshpande Satish, 2022. “Constructing ‘the people in India today”, in Seminar

n.756, pp.62-66.
• Deshpande Satish, 2022. “Democratizing higher education in the twenty-first
century: The road beyond access”, in D.D. Nampoothiri, T.Y. Vinod Krishnan, Ashley Paul
and Anoop Jayaprakash (eds), Nationhood, Social Justice and Unequal Transformations:
Essays for K.R. Narayanan, Delhi, Primus Books, pp.115-127.
• Deshpande Satish, 2022. “Representations of electoral politics: Notes on the
conceptual career of the ‘vote bank’”, in Manu Goswami and Mrinalini Sinha (eds),
Political Imaginaries in Twentieth Century India, London, Bloomsbury, pp.181-97.
• Deshpande Satish, 2022. “Foreword: Politics and the People”, in Ravinder Kaur
and Nayanika Mathur (eds), The People of India: New Indian Politics in the 21st Century,
Penguin Viking, pp.xxv-xxix.
• Deshpande Satish, 2021. “Shiksha, gyaan aur samaj ka samkaal”, interview
(with Ramashanker Singh, in Hindi) in Samajiki, Praveshaank (inaugural issue), pp.105-
18.
BOOK REVIEW

Professor Satish Deshpande’s Contemporary India: A Sociological View.

What drew me to this book instead of the other ones was the scale of the subject matter –
contemporary India, as well as my own enmeshment in some of the themes which this book
explores such as globalization and it’s consequent portability of cultures and identities. What made

this endeavour a pleasure was the fact that Professor Deshpande doesn’t constrain his form of
expression to the scholastically academic and writes with a sensitivity to the general reader while
still maintaining a certain critical distance from their own commonsensicaly immediate outlook.
Such a position ought to be emphasized given that Professor Deshpande thinks of Sociology as
almost the critique of common sense.
Central to the book and the themes which it chooses to ‘squint ’at is a certain narrative which
develops about the nation at large and the forces which were at play in the historical processes
which shaped the contours of its society. The multi-facetted engagement of an emerging third world
nation such as India, which had recently won its freedom from an Imperial Power, with the anxiety
as to how to place itself vis-a-vis modernity expresses the conditions prevalent within that historical
context which made the Nehruvian vision of India such a dominant force in the decades to come.
The tension at the heart of such a condition was how one were to locate oneself within the axis of
tradition and ‘modernity’. I use the word in inverted commas here as what precisely is designated
by it seems to be a contested notion (M.N Srinivas is quoted asking whether modernization is the
same as westernization – curiously the footnote to this quote says that M.N Srinivas actually
preferred westernization to modernization as he believes that modernization endorses an ultimate
judgement in terms of values and goals whereas he sees westernization to be the more neutral
concept.)
Leaving the contestations as to what precisely constituted modernity – one of its least contested
elements (in as much as it belongs to it) is that of the nation state. As the central institution which
provides the geo-economic networks and ideological coherence to a people, nations according to
Benedict Anderson needs to be thought of in its ‘anthropological spirit ’or the style in which they
are imagined. The cornerstone of this imagination as Deshpande demonstrates was the imagining of
the Nehruvian national economy. It was here that we see varying ideologies strive for their
expression in what would constitute the popular public imagination and also what kind of
development this nation would take. We can see a bifurcation of roughly two possible alternatives
post-independence; one of Gandhian panchayati-raj with its deep seated cultural moorings and the
other of Nehruvian modernized economy which functions as a powerful image being constructed
into the future for people to strive towards. Gandhi’s vision is actually more radical – of having a
culture govern an economy, yet its nostalgia for certain cultural relations brings with it a suspicion
for technology and mass production – essential features of any developing nation. the true triumph
of the Nehruvian vision over the Gandhian nostalgic ideal is seen in its ability to infuse this
modernizing process with an almost religious significance, a telling sign as to how this project come
to step into the place of what religion and tradition were once imagined to be in the country. The
fact that a people were willing to respond to the ambition of this project is a sign of their subjection
to the force of its direction during the post-independence period.
The protagonist of this modernizing process is seen to be the secular producer-patriot acting in
service to the nation and constituting what is generally referred to as the ‘Nehruvian Middle Class’.
The very ‘national ’character of this formation however which reflected the position of a centralist
nation also served (perhaps inadvertently) to displace various regional interests. Further, the secular
credentials of the Nehruvian middle class are met with a degree of scepticism given the fact that
Deshpande’s empirical findings demonstrate that its secularity aside, it was primarily the upper
castes Hindus who were able to constitute themselves as the protagonists of the modernizing
process and reap the benefits of its endeavours. It is here, more than any other section where
Deshpande distances himself from common sense. The urban ‘upper-middle ’class assumption that
caste discrimination is an archaic and largely rural phenomena is critiqued by bearing witness to the
fact that this urban elite which has had the privilege to leave its caste credentials behind were able
to do so themselves largely because of they themselves constituting the upper castes.
Analysing this terrain brings with it unique challenges. Given the derogatory baggage which
modernity has brought to caste as a category, it is no longer actively sought as a means of status by
an increasingly urban diaspora – which would rather constitute its status in terms of class. This
however effectively invisibilizes the fact that it has been primarily the upper castes who were in a
position to leave the ‘baggage ’of caste behind and reconstitute the means of their status in class
terms. What this has resulted in is that the category of upper caste Hindus is fast becoming
increasingly difficult to quantify given that it is an identity which they would rather not associate
with themselves. On the other hand the oppressed castes are put in a position where they need to
assert their (lower) caste credentials to give voice to a certain structural inequality which is fast
becoming invisiblized. This was particularly so after the Mandal Commission and its resulting
structural interventions. Deshpande does however acknowledge an element of truth in the
commonsensical notion of the caste card being used strategically at times.
It is in these set of conditions (the displacement of regional interests, the regionalizing of
communalism along with the invisibilization of certain caste inequalities) where one sees in India
an aggressive ‘return of the repressed ’expressed in the resurgence of Hindu communalism in the
1980’s. Deshpande overviews the spatial strategies Hindu communalism takes up to entrench its
interest and re-constitute an idea of India in a different direction from that of the Nehruvian secular-
modernist vision. It broadly has been described as a process of ‘competitive de-secularization ’of
the public sphere and a re-sacralization of the nation as pace. Genealogically it draws from the
writings of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a militant Hindu nationalist. Symptomatic of its efforts are
the events of 1992 Ayodhya – being the demolition of the Babri Mazjid by carders of the Hindu
right by claiming that the mosque was originally the site of an ancient Hindu temple. The
displacement
of the other from the public space via an aggressive symbolic intrusion into it for its own privilege
by claiming a mythic historical right over the site has characterized the political spatial strategy of
resurgent Hindu communalism.
Alongside such developments the book takes a keen look at the class which seems most embroiled
in the factors being discussed – the middle class. It historicizes the notion of this category by
bringing to bear how it has been thought of in the past and what it may be becoming today.
Marx’s initial dismissal of the middle class is re-contextualized using a Gramscian understanding
of how the middle class perpetuates and regulates the dominant ideology serving the present social
structures – which in some ways accounts for the historical conservativeness of this section. The
section then takes a close look at just how large this section may be and considers the possibility
that the commonsensical notion of the middle classes now constituting the majority of the country is
again a gross misunderstanding. Rigorous quantitative analysis done on the basis of earning,
expenditure and consumption demonstrate that the middle class is actually much smaller than we
suppose. Having established its relatively smaller size than supposed it then explores as to how this
entity is in a position to see itself as the repository of the true moral legitimacy of civil society.
Fundamental to this position (as already noted) is the fact that it is the middle class which
articulates the hegemony of the ruling bloc, hence the class most dependent on cultural capital (this
seems to be as true in the Nehruvian period as it is in the subsequent ones). The post-independent
project of developing the state via the Nehruvian middle class also invested this group with the
added moral legitimacy they seem to command. Hence functioning as the class which effectively
regulates the relationship between the ruling bloc and the others it is in a position to command for
itself a measure of clout far beyond its sheer size.
A book on contemporary India would be incomplete without a section on globalization and
Deshpande examines the curious and superficially contrary relationship between what globalization
apparently seems to do to cultures and Hindutva’s claims of the regional essentialism of a ‘Hindu ’
culture. One of the effects of globalization is that of cultural portability – the fact that today it is
possible to be a soccer fan who supports Manchester United to do so in any of the five continents,
hence de-essentialyzing the very ‘English ’nature of this phenomena – but with this increasing

portability and the rupture between a culture and it’s indegenousity to a geographical location
also arises the condition of what a number of theorist refer to as an ‘anxiety of identity ’born out
of the void of the non-essential identity which we have for ourselves today (by the sheer fact that
the
culture I imbibe is increasingly less determined by where I am). Further, this deteritorrialization of
culture has also provided a marketable opportunity which media and the tourism industry cash in on
by selling an ‘authentic exoticism – ’the ‘real ’Indian experience etc. This anxiety in many ways
fuels the need to construct an essential and diasporic identity, such as Hindutva which in itself
becomes a cultural affectation which can be marketed to people in the globalized market place
(bhajans on tv, etc). The most striking development which illustrates the extent of this
deteritorrialization is the emergence of a non-resident Hindutva – a transnational force which may
actually influence local phenomena.
This constitutes my review of the book. I have attempted not merely to paraphrase it (which would
be impossible without reducing chapters to bullet points) by trying to account for a narrative of the
political developments of the nation which emerges out of the analysis of various factors which
Deshpande looks at over the course of ‘Contemporary India ’and by emphasizing and relating the
continuities that one can trace such as the evolving role of the middle class, their relationship with
the category of caste and its cultural negotiations with globalization. This cannot hope to be an
exhaustive account or analysis of what Professor Deshpande does in the book and hence is also a
reflection of what this student found interesting in it. This book would certainly be of interest to
anyone interested in contemporary India history, as well as the reader who seeks a more nuanced
yet generalist understanding of the formations of the political forces which influence their lives
today.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS

IN the book, Satish Deshpande, a sociologist with the Institute of Economic Growth undertakes the
task of examining critically what common sense tells us about the transformation of the social and
economic landscape in contemporary India. These are: "the strange mixture of anxiety and
ambivalence that modernity provokes in India; the shaping of the nation by the ideologies of
Hindutva and development; the pivotal role of the middle class in independent India; and the
relative invisibility of caste inequality despite the public prominence of caste inequality."

While "mapping a distinctive modernity" Deshpande observes that the themes of modernity and
tradition are firmly embedded in our psyche. We not only believe that there are many ways to be
modern, but also claim that our "distinct" way involves "blending modernity with tradition" to get
"the best of both worlds”.

The concept of "nation as an imagined economy" comes up for rigorous scrutiny. Deshpande
observes that in the beginning Indian nationalism mainly had an economic focus, even though
Hindu communalism exerted an equally powerful influence. The change came in the seventies due
to the failure of the development model to fulfill the promises it made. After two decades of "a
protracted transition", India has been witness to "the resurgence of Hindu communalism in an
overall context dominated by globalisation.”

The Hindutva way of imagining the nation has coincided with its "new ways of thinking about the
social aspects of space." He refers to three distinct spatial strategies that contemporary Hindutva
has employed in recent history. These centre around sacred sites (like the campaign for the
liberation of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi in Aydhoya), areas (the ‘Idgah maidan flag
hoisting ’controversy at Hubli), routes (Advani’s rathyatra to Ayodhya, Joshi’s Kanyakumari to
Kashmir yatra, and Narendra Modi’s Gaurav Yatra in Gujarat; also processions like the Ganesh
utsav in Hyderabad and Shiv jayanti procession in Bhiwandi).

Reflecting on the sudden visibility of caste among the supposedly ‘casteless’, homogenised urban
middle classes in the aftermath of the agitation against reservation, Deshpande examines the four
elements of the popular view on the subject: First, caste inequality has lessened considerably over a
period of time as a result of the reservation policy though only a minority within the SC-ST-OBC
group has cornered most of the benefits.
Second, the concept of caste has undergone a process of politicisation with the numerically
stronger backward and middle castes dominating the electoral politics. This implies reverse
discrimination against upper castes.

Third, given the great degree of variation in the economic and social status of members of every
caste group, it is misleading to use caste per se as an objective criterion to decide backwardness
or forwardness of individual members.

Fourth, the main aspect of caste discrimination, namely untouchability, has been outlawed and
adequate legislative measures have been undertaken to remove caste inequalities. Ironically, it is
the middle castes and not the upper castes that are the main perpetrators of the caste system.

Deshpande agrees that the conditions of the marginal caste groups have improved but then asks
whether this improvement has been sufficient. Drawing upon the data collected by the National
Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) the author holds that "caste continues to be a major fault
line of economic inequality in contemporary India." He concludes that, contrary to what
commonsense holds, even after more than half century of independence "caste inequality has
been and is being reproduced in independent India."

Then Deshpande moves to the "centrality of the middle class`85a product of the developmental
regime." Deshpande, however, sarcastically remarks that with the gradual eclipse of the idea of
development "one could no longer be confident that the middle class, the developmental state, and
the nation were marching in step." The middle classes have since then gradually distanced
themselves from the idea of nation state and its development.
The processes of globalisation and localisation have seen the emergence of subnational loyalties as
well as the lure of transnational identities among the ‘new ’middle classes seeking ‘adjustment’.
Thus having consolidated its social, economic and political standing, this new class, especially its
upper segment, is all set to corner the benefits of globalisation. All the issues like modernity, the
nation, Hindutva, or the middle class, seem to veer around to the overarching theme of
"globalisation and the geography of cultural regions." Deshpande suggests that the processes of
globalisation that produce "a sort of identity anxiety" should be accompanied by the growth of
"particularistic cultural identities of all kinds."

The book is extremely readable and reflects a refreshing approach. It succeeds in its endeavour
to persuade the readers to go "beyond commonsense" to understand the critical issues relating
to contemporary India. Drawing liberally from the recent literature on relevant themes it comes
across as an original work that can easily be hailed as among the best in its genre.