The Changing Village: M.N. Srinivas and the Transformation of Rural India
Core Reading: M.N. Srinivas. ‘The Changing Village’, in Indian Society Through Personal Writings. Pp 138-162.
The Man Who Walked the Dusty Paths
Before we talk about the changing village, we need to talk about the man who wrote about it. M.N. Srinivas was not one of those sociologists who sat in air-conditioned offices and read books about India. He walked the dusty paths of Indian villages. He lived among farmers, potters, washermen, and priests. He ate their food, listened to their disputes, and watched their lives change over decades.
Srinivas was born in 1916 in Mysore. He studied at Oxford, where the great sociologist Radcliffe-Brown taught him. But Srinivas realized something important: if you want to understand India, you cannot do it from England. You must get your hands dirty. So, in 1948, he went to live in a village called Rampura, in Karnataka. For nearly two years, he watched, listened, and wrote. Then, over the next three decades, he kept going back.
What he produced was The Remembered Village, first published in 1976. It is not a dry academic text. It is a book about people. About their quarrels and their kindnesses, their stubborn traditions and their surprising openness to change. The eighth chapter of that book is called “The Changing Village,” and it is the focus of what follows.
This section is organized around three analytical dimensions. First, what stays the same and what changes when we look at village social structures over time. Second, how modernization and state policies have reshaped rural life. And third, the specific shifts in caste, kinship, and who owns the land.
Part One: Continuity and Transformation — The Village That Never Stood Still
The Myth of the Unchanging Village
There is a romantic image of the Indian village that many people carry in their heads. The village is ancient. The village is timeless. The villagers have been doing the same things for thousands of years.
Srinivas wants to shatter this image. The village, he insists, has never been static. Even before independence, before electricity, before the bus route, the village was changing. Populations grew and shrank. New cast members arrived. Old occupations disappeared. Famine came and went. Kings rose and fell.
What changed after independence was not the fact of change itself. It was the speed of change and the direction of change. For the first time, the state was actively trying to transform village life. Land reforms, cooperative societies, development programs, universal adult franchise—all of these were aimed at breaking the old hierarchies and creating a new kind of rural society.
Srinivas wants us to understand both things at once: the deep continuities that still shape village life, and the real transformations that have occurred. He does not want us to romanticize the village as unchanging. But he also does not want us to imagine that everything has been swept away. The old and the new live side by side, often in the same person, the same family, the same village.
What Stays the Same
When Srinivas returns to Rampura in the 1960s and 1970s, he finds some things remarkably unchanged.
Caste still matters. It matters in marriage—almost everyone still marries within their caste. It matters in social interaction—people still know who above who is. It matters in the daily round of life—who visits whose house, who eats whose food, who speaks first at a village meeting. Srinivas argues that the caste has not disappeared. It has simply changed its form. The old ritual hierarchy has weakened, but caste as a source of identity, as a network of mutual support, as a political resource—this has if anything grown stronger.
The joint family survives. Many scholars predicted that the joint family would collapse under the weight of modernization. Srinivas finds that while joint families are less common than before, they are still very much alive. What has changed is that they are more flexible. A joint family that becomes too quarrelsome can split into nuclear units, only to re-form later. Young men may work in the city and send money home, but they still think of themselves as part of the family. The joint family, Srinivas argues, is not a relic. It is an adaptation.
Agriculture remains in the center. Even with migration to cities, even with new non-farm jobs, most villagers still depend on the land for their survival. The seasons still dictate the rhythm of life. The rain still matters more than any government policy. Srinivas notes that this continuity is often forgotten by urban intellectuals who assume that everyone wants to leave the village. Many villagers do not want to leave. They want their village to have better roads, better schools, and better electricity. But they do not want to become city people.
What Changes
But Srinivas also finds dramatic changes.
The old village council is gone. In the past, disputes were settled by the panchayat—a council of elders from the dominant castes. Their word was law. If you disobeyed, you could be outcasted, forced to leave the village. Now, the state has introduced elected panchayats with reserved seats for lower castes and women. The old elders still meet informally, but their decisions carry less weight. People go to the police, to courts, to politicians. The village is no longer a self-contained legal world.
Money has replaced the grain. In the old days, many transactions were in kind. The barber got a share of the harvest. The priest got a handful of rice for each ritual. The washerman got a portion of the grain at a threshing time. Now, almost everything is paid for in cash. The barber charges a fee. The priest expects a cash donation. The laborer works for daily wages. This shift from grain to money has changed the texture of relationships. They are less personal and more contractual.
Education has changed aspirations. When Srinivas first arrived in Rampura, very few children went to school beyond the primary level. Now, families are desperate to educate their children—especially their sons, but increasingly their daughters as well. A degree can mean a government job, a ticket out of manual labor, and a chance at a different life. This has created new tensions. Educated young people often want things their parents never dreamed of—and are less willing to accept the old hierarchies.
Part Two: Modernization and State Policies — The Hand of Government
Land Reforms: Promise and Reality
After independence, the government promised to redistribute land to the landless. The idea was simple: break the power of the big landlords, give land to those who worked it, and create a class of prosperous small farmers.
The reality, Srinivas finds, is much messier. In some places, land reforms worked. Dalit and lower-caste families got title to land they had cultivated for generations as tenants. In many more places, the reforms were evaded. Landlords transferred land to relatives. They filed false cases. They used their political connections to delay and obstruct them.
Srinivas argues that the failure of land reforms is one of the great disappointments of independent India. The old structure of land ownership—a few big landowners, many landless laborers—remains largely intact. And this has perpetuated caste inequality, because land ownership and caste status are still deeply connected. The dominant castes remain dominant partly because they still control most of the land.
The Green Revolution: Boon and Bane
The Green Revolution brought new seeds, chemical fertilizers, and irrigation to Indian villages. The result was a dramatic increase in food production. India went from a country that depended on food aid to a country that could feed itself.
But Srinivas also notes the costs. The Green Revolution benefited big farmers much more than small ones. New seeds and fertilizers are expensive. Only those with capital could afford them. Small farmers often went into debt, lost their land, and became laborers. The gap between rich and poor widened.
Also, the Green Revolution changed village relationships. In the old days, farmers depended on each other in complex ways—sharing bullocks, exchanging labor, and borrowing grains between harvests. Now, relationships are more commercial. You buy what you need. You hire labor when you need it. The old mutual obligations have weakened.
Panchayati Raj: Democracy Comes to the Village
One of the most dramatic changes in Srinivas documents is the introduction of elected local government. The Panchayati Raj system, launched in the late 1950s, gave villages the power to elect their own councils and make decisions about local development.
Srinivas finds that this has been genuinely transformative. For the first time, lower-caste people can hold official positions of power. Women too, because seats are reserved for them. A Dalit woman as village council president—this was unimaginable in the 1940s. By the 1970s, it happened.
But Srinivas also notes the limits of this change. Real power often remains with the same families, the same castes. The elected council may have a Dalit president, but the upper-caste landowners still control the village economy, still settle disputes informally, still expect deference. Democracy has not abolished hierarchy. It has added a new layer on top of the old one.
One study by K. Ranga Rao and K. Radhakrishna Murthy, building on Srinivas’s work, shows how traditional power structures persist even within the new democratic forms. The hereditary village headman’s caste often manages to capture the elected panchayat presidency. Lower castes may hesitate to challenge them because they feel, deep down, that the dominant caste has the “right” rule.
Part Three: Shifts in Caste, Kinship, and Agrarian Relations
The Dominant Caste
One of Srinivas’s most famous concepts is the “dominant caste.” He noticed that in many villages, the caste at the top of the ritual hierarchy—the Brahmins—did not actually hold the most power. Instead, power belonged to a caste that combined several advantages: numerical strength, land ownership, political influence, and access to modern education.
Srinivas first developed this concept in his earlier work Caste in Modern India, but it runs throughout The Remembered Village as well. The dominant caste in Rampura was the Lingayats. They were not the highest in ritual terms—Brahmins were above them. But they owned most of the land. They had the most votes. They dominated the village council. They were the people you had to please if you wanted something done.
Over time, Srinivas observed that the composition of the dominant caste can change. A caste that acquires land, or political power, or education, can rise. A caste that loses these things can fall. Dominance is not fixed. It is a matter of resources, constantly shifting.
The Fragmentation of Kinship
Srinivas also notices changes in how kinship works. In the old days, kinship was a dense web of obligations. You helped your cousin plant his fields because you knew he would help you at harvest time. You attended every wedding, every funeral, every naming ceremony because your presence affirmed the bonds of the family.
Now, with migration and urbanization, these bonds are stretching. Young people move to the city. They miss ceremonies. They send money instead of showing up. The obligations become less immediate, more abstract.
Srinivas does not romanticize the old kinship system. It was also a system of control—of young people by old, of women by men, of lower-status relatives by higher-status ones. But he notes that its weakening has left a gap. Who takes care of the elderly when their children have moved away? Who resolves disputes when the old panchayat has lost its authority? Who helps a family in crisis when the web of kinship has frayed? The new structures—the state, the market, the political party—have not yet fully filled that gap.
The Rise of Agricultural Labor
One of the most significant shifts of Srinivas documents is the growth of the landless labor class. In the old days, most families had at least some land. Even Dalit families often had small plots or customary rights to cultivate village land.
Over the decades, this has changed. Population growth has meant smaller plots. Debt has forced many small farmers to sell their land. The Green Revolution favored big farmers, pushing small farmers out. The result is a growing class of people who own no land at all and survive by working for others.
Srinivas notes that these landless laborers are almost always from the lower castes. The connection between caste and class has not been broken. In fact, in some ways, it has become tighter. In the old days, lower castes had at least some claim to land through customary rights. Now, they have nothing to do. They are pure proletarians, owning nothing but their labor power.
Putting It All Together: The Village That Is Always Becoming
So, what does Srinivas teach us about the changing village?
First, the village is not a relic of the past. It is a living, changing institution. The idea that villages are static, traditional, and untouched by history is a colonial myth. Villages have always changed. What is different now is the speed and nature of change.
Second, change is uneven. Some things change quickly political institutions, legal frameworks, educational aspirations. Other things change slowly—caste endogamy, kinship obligations, and the rhythms of agricultural life. The result is a society in which old and new coexist, often uneasily.
Third, the state matters. The policies of independent India—land reforms, the Green Revolution, Panchayati Raj—have reshaped village life. Not always in the ways intended. Not always fair. But dramatically.
Fourth, caste persists, but in new forms. The old ritual hierarchy has weakened. But caste as a source of identity, as a political resource, as a network of mutual support—this has if anything grows stronger. Srinivas’s metaphor of caste as a flowing river, quoted in a recent tribute, captures this perfectly: it is always changing, sometimes slowly, sometimes with great speed.
Fifth, the village is not disappearing. There is a tendency, especially among urban Indians, to see the village as a dying thing, a place people are desperate to escape. Srinivas challenges this. Many villagers do not want to leave. They want their village to be better. They want roads, electricity, schools, and hospitals. But they want to remain villagers. The village, in their eyes, is not a problem to be solved. It is a home to be improved.
A Final Thought
Srinivas ends “The Changing Village” with a quiet observation. He says that after all his years of studying Rampura, after all the charts and tables and analyses, what stays with him is not the data. It is the people.
He remembers the old farmer who told him, “In my father’s time, we knew our place. It was hard, but we knew it. Now, nobody knows anything. The young people think they can be anything. Maybe they are right. Maybe that is progress. But it is also confusion.”
Srinivas does not offer an easy judgment. He does not say that change is good or bad. He says that change is real, that it is happening, that it is complicated. The village is not what it was. It is not yet what it will become. It is between—in that messy, confusing, hopeful space where all human societies actually live.
That is the gift of Srinivas’s work. He does not give us answers. He gives us the tools to ask better questions. And he reminds us that behind every statistic, every concept, every theory, there are real people—people named and remembered, people who laughed and quarreled and loved and died, people whose lives were the village, and whose village was always, in every moment, changing.
The City as Metaphor for Modern India: Sandeep Pendse and the Many Lives of Bombay
Core Reading: Sandeep Pendse. ‘Toil, Sweat and the City’, in Sujata Patel & Alice thorner. Bombay: Metaphor for Modern india. Pp 2-25
Why Call a City a Metaphor?
Think about the word “Bombay.” What comes to mind? For some, it is the dream of Bollywood—glittering parties, movie stars, and a life of glamour. For others, it is the nightmare of overcrowded trains, pavement dwellers, and monsoon floods. For still others, it is the memory of arriving as a young migrant, stepping off a train with nothing but hope and a small bag, ready to work any job, live anywhere, just to survive.
The city is all of these things. That is what Sandeep Pendse, the author of our core reading, wants us to understand. Bombay—now officially called Mumbai—is not just a place. It is a metaphor. It stands for modern India itself: the opportunities and the exploitation, the dreams and the disappointments, the energy and the exhaustion.
Sandeep Pendse is a scholar who has spent years studying in the working class of Bombay. He is not an outsider looking in. He has walked the streets, sat in the chawls (tenement housing), listened to the stories of mill workers, taxi drivers, construction laborers, and domestic servants. His essay, “Toil, Sweat and the City,” appears in a famous collection edited by Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner called Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India. That book, published in the mid-1990s, brought together some of the best minds writing about the city. It was an attempt to understand Bombay not as a tourist destination or a financial hub, but as a living, breathing, suffering, celebrating organism.
This section is organized around three analytical dimensions. First, migration and working-class struggles—why do people come to the city and what happens when they get there. Second, industrialization and urban poverty—how the factories that built the city also created its slums. And third, the city as a metaphor—what Bombay teaches us about modernity and inequality in contemporary India.
Part One: Migration and Working-Class Struggles — The Long Journey to the City
Why People Leave Home
Nobody wakes up one morning and decides, casually, to move to Bombay. Migration is almost always an act of desperation. A drought destroys the crops. A landlord evicts a family from their land. A father cannot afford to feed his children. A young man or woman dreams of a life that does not exist in the village.
Pendse describes the migrants he met in his research. They come from Uttar Pradesh, from Bihar, from Tamil Nadu, from Kerala, from Gujarat, from Maharashtra’s own drought-prone districts. They come by train, often sitting on the roof or hanging from the doors because there are no seats. They arrive at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) or Dadar station, disoriented, exhausted, carrying a small bundle of possessions. They have the address of a relative or a caste-mate who came before them. Or they have no address at all.
The reasons for leaving are always economic, but they are also social. A Dalit family may leave a village where they are forced to live outside the boundary, where their children are beaten for drawing water from the wrong well. Where the police look the other way when their shops are looted. A young woman may leave a home where she is promised to an old man, or where her mother is beaten, or where there is simply no room for another mouth to feed.
Pendse argues that migration is never just about money. It is about dignity. It is about the search for a life where you are not constantly reminded that you are low, that you are unclean, that you do not matter. The city offers anonymity. In the village, everyone knows your caste, your family history, and your shame. In the city, you can become someone new. You can be just a worker, not a Dalit. Just a woman, not a daughter expected to obey.
The Shock of Arrival
But the city is not a dream. It is a shock.
Pendse describes the first days of a migrant in Bombay. You arrive with optimism. Within hours, you discover that there is no magic job waiting for you. You walk for miles, from factory to factory, from workshop to workshop. You learn the geography of rejection. You sleep on the pavement, or in a crowded chawl room with ten strangers, or under a bridge. You learn to find water, to find a toilet, and to find a place to wash.
You learn about the brutal economics of the city. A job, any job, is a privilege. A room, any room, is a fortune. A meal, any meal, is a victory. The city does not care about your dreams. It cares about whether you can work.
Pendse tells the story of a young man named Baburao, who came from a village in Ratnagiri district. Baburao had heard that Bombay was a city of gold. He arrived with fifty rupees in his pocket. Within a week, the money was gone. He slept on the footpath outside Crawford Market. He washed himself at a public tap. He ate one meal a day, from a temple that gave free food. He walked from one construction site to another, asking for work. Finally, a thakur (labor contractor) picked him up. Baburao would work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, carrying bricks and mixing cement. He would live in a makeshift hut on the site. He would send money home to his mother. He would see his wife and children once a year, in Diwali. This was not the gold he had imagined. But it was survival.
Building Solidarity: The Working-Class Fights Back
Not all migrants accept their fate passively. Pendse documents the long history of working-class struggle in Bombay. The textile mills of Girangaon (the “village of mills”) were the heart of this struggle. For decades, mill workers organized unions, went on strike, risked their jobs—and sometimes their lives—to demand better wages, shorter hours, safer conditions.
Pendse writes about the great textile strike of 1982, led by the legendary union leader Datta Samant. Over two hundred thousand mill workers walked off the job. They stayed out for more than a year. They sacrificed their savings, their health, and their families’ stability. And in the end, they got lost. The strike was broken. Many workers never got their jobs back. The mills, already declining, never recovered. Today, the great chimneys of Girangaon stand silent, or have been torn down to make way for shopping malls and luxury apartments.
But Pendse argues that the strike was not a failure. It was a testament to the fact that workers can organize, can resist, can say no. The memory of the strike lives on in the chawls of Parel and Lalbaug, passed down from fathers to sons, from mothers to daughters. It is a memory of dignity, even defeat.
One recent analysis of the 1982 strike notes that mill workers’ unions have now had to adapt to new realities—the decline of formal employment, the rise of casual labor, and the fragmentation of the working class. But the spirit of solidarity persists, finding new forms of new struggles.
Part Two: Industrialization and Urban Poverty — The Two Faces of Progress
The Mill Economy: Building the City
Bombay’s textile mills were not just workplaces. They were the engine of the city’s growth. The reason millions of migrants came, the source of the city’s identity as “Maximum City” — a phrase popularized by Suketu Mehta to capture Bombay’s overload of everything: people, ambition, noise, chaos.
Pendse describes the rhythm of mill life. The great steam engines hissing. The looms clattering. The air is thick with cotton dust. The workers, mostly men, moving in shifts, their bodies trained to the machine’s demands. The mill was a world unto itself. It had its own canteens, its own clinics, its own housing. It had its own hierarchy—skilled weavers above unskilled laborers, permanent workers above temporary workers; union members above non-members.
The mills also created a culture. The chawls (multi-story tenements) built by mill owners housed generations of workers. The galli (alley) was where children played, women cooked and gossiped, men argued politics. The tamasha (street theater) and bhai-bhatijawad (nepotism networks, but also mutual aid) were the social glue that held this world together.
But the mills were also sites of exploitation. The wages were low. Hours were long. Accidents were common. And the workers had no power beyond what they could fight for. Pendse notes that the mill owners, many of them from the same communities as the workers—Gujarati, Marwari, Parsi—lived in a different Bombay. Their Bombay was Malabar Hill and Walkeshwar, not Parel and Dadar. Their children went to private schools, not municipal ones. Their world and the workers’ world touched only in the transaction of labor.
The Informal Economy: The City That Is Not Counted
The mills, as important as they were, never employed most of Bombay’s workers. The majority have always worked in the informal sector—jobs that are not registered, not protected by labor laws, not covered by social security.
Pendse describes this invisible economy. The vegetable vendor on the pavement, who wakes at 4 AM to go to the wholesale market and returns to sell until 11 PM. The domestic servant who works in six different homes, cleaning bathrooms, washing dishes, ironing clothes, for wages that add up to less than a minimum wage. The construction worker who builds luxury apartments but sleeps on the bare concrete floor of the unfinished building. The rag-picker sorts through garbage to find recyclables, her hands bleeding, her children playing among the rats.
These workers are not counted on official statistics. They have no contracts, no unions, no paid leave, no pensions. They can be fired for any reason, or for no reason. They live in constant insecurity. One illness, one injury, one festival that requires extra expenses—and they are plunged into debt from which they may never escape.
Pendse argues that the informal sector is not a remnant of the past. It is the future. As formal manufacturing declines, as the state retreats from its role as employer, more workers are pushed into this precarious world. The distinction between “worker” and “unemployed” becomes blurred. You are not unemployed. You just do not have a real job. You have a series of small tasks, small payments, and small hopes.
The Slum: Home and Hell
The most visible symbol of urban poverty in Bombay is the slum. Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums, has been studied, photographed, romanticized, and demonized. Pendse wants us to see it clearly.
A slum is not just a collection of huts. It is a settlement, often with its own internal economy, its own social networks, its own politics. In Dharavi, you can find potters, leather workers, embroiderers, recyclers, bakers, and small-scale manufacturers. The annual turnover of Dharavi’s informal economy is estimated in hundreds of millions of dollars. People are not just surviving. In some cases, they are thriving.
But a slum is also a place of extreme deprivation. The huts are small, often one room for a family of six or eight. There is no private bathroom. The toilets, if they exist, are shared and often blocked and filthy. The water comes from a common tap, and you wait in line for hours. The electricity is stolen or unreliable. The lanes are narrow, dark, and prone to flooding. Disease spreads quickly. Fires can wipe out thousands of homes in a single night.
Pendse argues that slums are a metaphor for the city itself. It is a place of incredible energy and incredible suffering. It is a place where people build something from nothing, where community forms in the most unlikely conditions. It is also a place where the state has abandoned its citizens, where the basic services of a civilized society—clean water, sanitation, healthcare, education—are absent or inadequate.
Part Three: The City as Metaphor — Modernity and Inequality
The Dream and the Nightmare
Bombay has always been a city of extremes. The richest people in India live there. The poorest people in India live there, sometimes on the same street. The tallest buildings in India cast their shadows over some of the oldest slums.
Pendse uses the city as a metaphor for modern India because modern India is also a land of extremes. Economic growth has created immense wealth, but that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. The middle class has grown, but most Indians still struggle to meet basic needs. Technology has connected the country in unprecedented ways, but it has also created new forms of exclusion.
The city, Pendse argues, is where you can see these contradictions most clearly. The call center worker and the construction laborer pass each other on the street every day. They breathe the same polluted air. They ride the same crowded trains. But they live in different worlds. One has air conditioning and job security and a future. The other has nothing but hope that tomorrow will bring work.
The city as a Place of Becoming
But Pendse does not want us to see only the darkness. The city is also a place to become. It is where a Dalit from a Maharashtra village can become a union leader, respected by men of all castes. It is where a woman fleeing an abusive marriage can find work and build a new life, free from the surveillance of her village. It is where a young man with nothing, but ambition can, through luck and determination, rise from the pavement to a small room to a flat of his own.
Pendse tells the story of a woman he calls Tai (a respectful term for an older sister). Tai came to Bombay from a village in the Satara district. Her husband had abandoned her. She had two children and no money. She started working as a domestic servant. She saved every rupee. She sent her children to school. Her daughter became a nurse. Her son became a clerk in a government office. Tai now lives in a small but clean room in a municipal colony. She is not rich. But she is safe. Her children will never have to sleep on the pavement. The city did not give her a golden life. It gave her a chance. And she took it.
The Limits of the Metaphor
Pendse is careful not to push the metaphor too far. Bombay is not the whole of India. It is a particular kind of city—a port city, a commercial city, a city that has always looked outward. Its experience of migration, industrialization, and poverty is not the same as that of a smaller city like Pune or Lucknow, let alone a village.
But the metaphor works, Pendse argues, because Bombay condenses in one place what India is experiencing in a more dispersed way. The tension between tradition and modernity is important. The persistence of caste and class. The failure of the state to provide basic services is important. The incredible resilience of ordinary people in the face of extraordinary hardship. These are not just Bombay’s problems. They are India’s problems. Bombay just makes them visible, in the way that a fever makes visible about an illness that was already there.
Putting It All Together: Toil, Sweat, and the city
So, what does Sandeep Pendse teach us?
First, the city is built on the bodies of migrants. Every skyscraper, every road, every mall, every office is constructed by people who came from somewhere else, who work long hours for low wages, who live in conditions that the people who occupy those buildings would never tolerate. The city is a monument to their laborers.
Second, the working class fought back. The history of Bombay is not just the history of mill owners and politicians. It is the history of strikes, of unions, of men and women who risked everything to demand better lives. Even when they lost—as the textile workers lost in 1982—they left a legacy of resistance.
Third, poverty and progress coexist. The Green Revolution, the tech boom, the rise of the middle class—all of these have happened alongside the growth of slums, the expansion of the informal sector, and the deepening of inequality. The city does not resolve these contradictions. It contains them.
Fourth, the city is a metaphor for modern India. The extremes of wealth and poverty. Energy and desperation. Dreams and disappointments. The constant arrival of new migrants, still hoping, still believing that the city will give them what the village could not. This is India, compressed into one sprawling, chaotic, beautiful, brutal metropolis.
A Final Thought
Sandeep Pendse ends “Toil, Sweat and the City” with quiet observation. He says that the city never sleeps. Even at 3 AM, there are people moving women sweeping the streets, men unloading trucks, children picking through garbage, drivers waiting for passengers. The city is a machine that runs on human exhaustion. And yet, at the same time, it is a place of possibility. Every person on the street at 3 AM is there because they believe, or once believed, that the city would give them something.
Pendse does not offer a solution. He does not say, “Do this, and the city will become just.” He is not a politician or a planner. He is a scholar. His job is to see clearly and to tell the truth. And the truth is that Bombay—and India—is a place of incredible toil and incredible sweat. The city asks everything about its people. And they gave it to me. Not because they have no choice. But because they have hope.
That is the metaphor. Modern India is a country where millions of people are working themselves to exhaustion, living on the edge of disaster, because they still believe that tomorrow will be better than today. Whether that belief is justified—whether the city will finally reward their labor—is the question that Pendse leaves us to answer.
The Indian City After Liberalization: Nandini Gooptu on a World Turned Upside Down
The Moment Everything Changed
Imagine you are walking through a city in India in 1990. Then imagine you walking through the same city in 2005. The difference would be so dramatic that you might think you had entered a different country.
Fifteen years ago, there were no shopping malls. No multiplex cinemas. No branded showrooms. No call centers. No gated communities with swimming pools and guards. The cars on the road were old Ambassadors and Premier Padminis—clunky, boxy, relics of another era. The shops were small, family-owned, with dusty shelves and indifferent service.
Fifteen years later, the city is almost unrecognizable. Glass-and-steel towers rise where there were once empty plots. Young people in polo shirts sit in air-conditioned coffee shops, laptops open, talking about “deliverables” and “timelines.” The roads are clogged with new cars—Maruti Suzuki’s, Hyundais, and Toyotas. The malls are full of global brands: Zara, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks.
What happened? The short answer is liberalization. In 1991, India faced a severe economic crisis. It had almost run out of foreign exchange. The government pledged its gold reserves to avoid defaulting on loans. In response, it launched a series of reforms: opening the economy to foreign investment, reducing tariffs, dismantling the license-permit raj that had strangled business for decades.
The long answer is more complicated. Nandini Gooptu, a scholar at the University of Oxford who has spent years studying urban poverty and politics in India, argues that liberalization did not just change the economy. It changed the very fabric of the city—how it looks, who lives where, who has power, who is left behind.
Her chapter, “Divided We Stand: Indian City after Economic Liberalization,” appears in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India, edited by Knut A. Jacobsen. It is a powerful, sobering analysis of a country that became richer and more unequal at the same time.
This section is organized around three analytical dimensions. First, the growth of consumer culture and middle-class spaces—the shiny new city that everyone talks about. Second, the fragmentation and inequality that have accompanied this growth—the dark side of the story. And third, the politics of urban governance—who makes decisions, who benefits, and who is excluded.
Part One: Consumer Culture and Middle-Class Spaces — The Shiny New City
The Mall as Cathedral of Consumption
Gooptu begins with the most visible symbol of the post-liberalization city: the shopping mall. Before 1991, malls did not exist in India. There were markets—busy, chaotic, open-air places where you haggled over prices, and the shopkeeper knew about your family. The mall was something you saw in American movies, not something you expected to find in Delhi or Mumbai.
Today, malls are everywhere. In every major city, in many smaller cities, even in some towns. They are not just places to shop. They are spaces of aspirations. For the middle class, the mall is where you go to feel modern, to feel that you belong to the global mainstream. Air conditioning is a luxury in a hot country. The clean floors and polite security guards are a relief from the chaos of the street. The food court offers pizza, noodles, burgers—food that does not smell spices; that does not require you to eat with your hands, that marks you as cosmopolitan.
Gooptu notes that the mall is also a space for exclusion. The security guard at the door is there to keep out “undesirables”—the poor, the shabbily dressed, the hawkers and beggars who populate the streets outside. Inside, the prices are beyond the reach of most Indians. A single meal at a food court might cost what a construction worker earns in a day. A single pair of jeans might cost a month’s wages.
The mall, Gooptu argues, is a physical manifestation of the new class to divide. It is a space designed for the middle class, by the middle class, to protect them from the messy, poor, noisy reality of the Indian city. Inside the mall, you can pretend that India is a developed country. Outside, the real India waits.
The Multiplex: A New Way of Watching Movies
The multiplex cinema is another symbol of the new city. Before liberalization, movie theaters were large, single-screen, often run-down. You bought a ticket for a few rupees, sat on hard benches, and watched a film with a hundred other people. The experience was collective, noisy, and democratic.
The multiplex changed that. It is a multi-screen complex, often inside a mall, with comfortable seats, air conditioning, and high-ticket prices. The audience is smaller, more segregated by class. You can choose from multiple films, showtimes, and languages. You can buy overpriced popcorn and soda. You can sit in the dark and feel like you are in a private screening.
Gooptu points out that the multiplex has become a site of political controversy. In 2007, when the Hindi film Jodhaa Akbar was released, some Hindu nationalist groups objected to its portrayal of a Muslim emperor. They threatened to disrupt screenings. The multiplexes, nervous about losing business, withdrew the film in some states. This incident, Gooptu argues, showed the fragility of the new consumer culture. It depends on a state that can maintain order and enforce the law. When the state is weak or complicit, the malls and multiplexes are not safe havens. They are just another front in the culture wars.
The Call Center: 24/7 Globalization
No symbol of post-liberalization India is more potent than the call center worker. Young, educated, English-speaking, working nights to serve customers in the United States or the United Kingdom. The call center represents everything that globalization promised: integration into the global economy, good salaries, modern lifestyles, freedom from traditional constraints.
Gooptu describes the call center culture. The offices are brightly lit, open plan, with posters on the walls celebrating “excellence” and “teamwork.” The workers are trained to speak with an American or British accent. They adopt Western names—”Hi, this is Jennifer speaking”—even if their real name is Jyoti. They learn about American football and British weather and Canadian holidays. They live in a strange in-between world, neither fully Indian nor fully Western.
But Gooptu also notes the costs. Call center work is stressful. The hours are brutal. Workers face constant surveillance—calls are recorded; bathroom breaks are timed; performance is measured to the second. The high salaries come with high pressure, and burnout is common. Many workers develop health problems—insomnia, anxiety, and digestive issues. They feel disconnected from their families, their communities, their own sense of self.
The call center, Gooptu argues, is a metaphor for the Indian middle class after liberalization. It is globally connected but locally unmoored. It is prosperous but anxious. It is modern but not free.
The Gated Community: Fortress Living
The most extreme expression of the new middle-class lifestyle is the gated community. These are housing complexes enclosed by walls, guarded by private security, with their own water supply, electricity backup, parks, swimming pools, and sometimes even their own schools and shops.
Gooptu describes the rise of gated communities in cities like Gurgaon (a suburb of Delhi), Noida, Pune, and Bengaluru. These are not neighborhoods in the traditional sense. They are enclaves—fortresses designed to keep the outside world out. The poor, the homeless, the hawkers, the beggars—all the visible signs of urban poverty that make the middle class uncomfortable—are excluded at the gate.
Inside, life is sanitized and controlled. You can walk your dog without stepping in garbage. Your children can play without being harassed. You can swim in a clean pool instead of bathing at a public tap. The guards know your name and wave you through. You feel safe.
But the safety, Gooptu argues, is an illusion—or at least, a privilege purchased at the expense of others. The water that fills the swimming pool is water that someone else does not have. The electricity that powers the air conditioners is electricity that someone else is not getting. The guards who protect the gate are themselves poor, working long hours for low wages, living in slums on the other side of the highway.
The gated community, Gooptu writes, is a physical and social wall between the new India and the old India, between the haves and the have-nots, between the globalized middle class and the rest.
Part Two: Fragmentation and Inequality — The Other Side of the Story
The Slum: Invisible but Everywhere
While the middle class enjoys its malls and gated communities, the poor live in a different city. Gooptu calls it the “informal city”—the city of slums, pavements, and unauthorized colonies.
The numbers are staggering. In Mumbai, more than half of the population lives in slums. In Delhi, the figure is close to 40 percent. In Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, and other major cities, the proportion is similar. The slums are not small pockets. They are entire neighborhoods, often vast, housing millions of people.
Gooptu describes what life is like in a slum. The houses are small—one room, often shared by six or eight people. The walls are made of corrugated tin, plastic sheeting, or salvaged wood. The floors are dirt, or concrete if you are lucky. There is no private bathroom. The toilets, if they exist, are shared and often broken. The water comes from a common tap, and you wait in line for hours, sometimes in the middle of the night. The electricity is stolen or unreliable. The lanes are narrow, dark, and prone to flooding.
But Gooptu also notes that slums are not just places of deprivation. They are also places in the community. People know each other. They share food, loan money, and watch each other’s children. They have their own shops, their own temples and mosques, their own political networks. The slum is a world unto itself, with its own rules, its own hierarchies, its own forms of dignity.
The problem, Gooptu argues, is not the slum itself. It is the relationship between the slum and the rest of the city. Slum dwellers are the ones who build skyscrapers, clean the offices, drive taxis, cook food, and care for the children of the middle class. They are essential to the functioning of the city. But they are invisible. They are not counted. They do not have secure tenure—they can be evicted at any time; their homes bulldozed to make way for a shopping mall or a flyover.
The Fragmentation of the Working Class
Before liberalization, the Indian working class was concentrated in large factories—textile mills, steel plants, engineering works. These factories employed thousands of workers, who were organized in unions, who had some bargaining power, who could go on strike and bring production to a halt.
Liberalization changed that. The factories closed or downsized. The workers were laid off. The new jobs—such as they were—were in the informal sector: construction, domestic service, street vending, small workshops, courier delivery. These jobs have no contracts, no benefits, no job security. They are casual, precarious, and low-paid.
Gooptu argues that this has fragmented the working class. In the old days, mill workers from different castes and religions stood together on the picket line. They had a common identity as workers. Now, a construction laborer has little in common with a domestic servant, who has little in common with a street vendor, who has little in common with a call center employee. They compete for scarce work. They undercut each other’s wages. They do not trust each other.
This fragmentation, Gooptu writes, is one of the great successes of liberalization from the perspective of capital. A fragmented working class cannot be organized. A fragmented working class cannot strike. A fragmented working class cannot demand higher wages or better conditions. The workers are divided, and they are easier to exploit.
The New Poor: Casual, Invisible, Forgotten
Gooptu introduces a concept that is crucial for understanding the post-liberalization of the city: the new poor. These are people who were not poor before, or not as poor. They were workers in the formal industry, small shopkeepers, or lower-level clerks. They had stable jobs, modest but secure incomes, and some hope for the future.
Liberalization destroyed their livelihoods. The factory is closed. The shop could not compete with the new mall. The government department privatized, and the clerk was laid off. These people did not become rich. They became poor. But they are not “the poor” of the old imagination—landless laborers, beggars, slum dwellers. They are people who once had dignity, who once had a place, who once believed that their children would do better than them.
Gooptu describes the shame of the new poor. They cannot bring themselves to stand in line for free food. They cannot ask for charity. They still wear their old clothes, still speak in the accents of the lower-middle class, and still hope that tomorrow something will turn up. But tomorrow never turns up. And they sink, slowly, into a poverty that is even more painful because they remember what it was like not to be poor.
Part Three: Politics of Urban Governance — Who Rules the City?
The Retreat of the State
Before liberalization, the state played a central role in the city. It built housing, ran transport, provided water and electricity, managed schools and hospitals. It was not always effective. It was often corrupt. But it was a present.
After liberalization, the state retreated. Gooptu argues that this retreat was not accidental. It was a deliberate policy, encouraged by international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The idea was that the private sector could do things better, more efficiently, more cheaply.
The result is that basic services in the city are now provided by a patchwork of private actors. Water is tankered in by private companies, at prices that the poor can barely afford. Electricity is supplied by private distributors, who cut off supply when bills are unpaid. Schools are private, charging fees that exclude the poor. Healthcare is private; the best hospitals reserved for those with money or insurance.
The state, Gooptu writes, has become a minimalist state. It provides security—meaning; it protects the property of the wealthy from the poor. It builds infrastructure—highways, flyovers, metro lines—that benefit the middle class and facilitates the movement of capital. But it has abandoned the poor. The poor are left to fend for themselves.
The New Urban Politics: Elite Capture
The retreat of the state has created a vacuum. And into that vacuum have stepped up new actors: resident welfare associations, business improvement districts, NGOs, and political parties that have reinvented themselves as champions of the middle class.
Gooptu is particularly interested in the role of resident welfare associations (RWAs). These are organizations of middle-class homeowners in a particular neighborhood. They lobby the government for better services—more police, cleaner streets, better garbage collection. They also organize to exclude “undesirables”—street vendors, slum dwellers, homeless people—from their neighborhoods.
RWAs, Gooptu argues, are not democratic. They represent the interests of property owners, not all residents. They are often dominated by the wealthiest residents, the ones with the most time and resources to participate. And they have disproportionate influence on urban policy, because politicians know that the middle-class votes, while the poor often do not.
Gooptu gives an example of the campaign against street vendors in Delhi. In the 2000s, RWAs in South Delhi lobbied the municipal government to remove street vendors from their neighborhoods. The vendors argued, created congestion, dirt, and crime. The government is obliged. Thousands of vendors were evicted, their carts confiscated, their livelihoods destroyed. The vendors had no voice in this decision. They were simply removed.
The Politics of Eviction: Bulldozing the Poor
The most brutal expression of the new urban politics is the eviction—the forced removal of poor people from their homes to make way for “development.” Gooptu documents several major evictions drives in post-liberalization India.
In 2004, the Delhi government evicted tens of thousands of slum dwellers from the banks of the Yamuna River. The stated reason was to clear the land for the Commonwealth Games, which Delhi hosted in 2010. The real reason was to make the city look modern, clean, and world-class. The evictions were carried out at night, without notice, without compensation. Bulldozers flattened homes while families slept. People lost everything—their homes, their possessions, their documents, their sense of security.
In Mumbai, similar evictions have taken place. In 2005, the government demolished 90,000 slum dwellings in the lead-up to the monsoon, claiming they were “encroaching” on public land. In 2014, another round of evictions cleared land for a coastal road. In 2022, more evictions made way for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train.
Gooptu argues that these evictions are not just about land. They are about visibility. The poor make the middle class uncomfortable. They remind the middle class of the inequality that makes their comfort possible. Removing the poor from sight—behind walls, or outside the city entirely—the middle class can pretend that inequality does not exist.
Putting It All Together: Divided We Stand
So, what does Nandini Gooptu teach us about the Indian city after liberalization?
First, the city is more unequal than ever. The middle class has grown richer, but the poor have not grown richer at the same rate. The gap between them has widened. And this gap is visible everywhere—in contrast between the mall and the slum, the gated community and the pavement.
Second, the middle class has retreated into enclaves. The mall, the multiplex, the gated community, the call center—these are spaces designed to protect the middle class from the poor. They are fortresses of privilege in a sea of poverty.
Third, the working class is fragmented. The old factories are gone. The old unions are weak. The new jobs are casual, precarious, and informal. Workers no longer have a common identity or a common struggle. They compete, and capital wins.
Fourth, the state has retreated. It no longer provides basic services to the poor. It no longer protects the right to housing or livelihood. It has become a minimalist state, focused on security and infrastructure, serving the interests of the middle class and capital.
Fifth, the poor are excluded from politics. They do not vote in the same numbers. They do not have resident welfare associations. They do not have any lobbyists. They are evicted, bulldozed, and forgotten. The city is not for them.
A Final Thought
Gooptu ends her chapter with a quiet observation. She says that the post-liberalization Indian city is a city of walls. Walls around malls. Walls around gated communities. Walls around the homes of the rich. Even walls in the mind—a refusal to see, to acknowledge care.
But the walls she reminds us of are also a sign of weakness. You do not build a wall if you are not afraid. The middle class builds walls because they are afraid of the poor—afraid that the poor will demand their share, that the poor will disrupt their comfort, that the poor will remind them of what they have chosen to forget.
The question that Gooptu leaves us with is not whether the walls will hold. It is whether the people on the other side of the walls will continue to accept their exclusion. And if they do not—if they one day decide that they have had enough—then all the walls in the world will not be enough to protect the fortress city.
Conclusion
This section highlights the interplay between rural and urban transformations in India. It underscores how villages and cities are both sites of continuity and change, reflecting broader processes of modernization, industrialization, and globalization.Â
