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KEYWORDS FOR MODERN INDIA. By Craig Jeffrey and John Harriss. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii, 200 pp. US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-19-966564-8.
The demand for comprehensive and accessible reviews of modern Indian society and political economy has intensified of late, fuelled by the growing geo-economic significance of the sub-continent. The transitional status of India from a more or less abject object of developmental studies to the more favoured status of an "emerging economy" in neo-liberal parlance has made older and new paradoxes appear both more visible and acute: the co-presence of democratic stability alongside steepening inequality, the persistence of radical social movements alongside a revitalized Hindu right, the widening of systemic corruption alongside a critical moral political economy of state/ economy relations. Keywords for Modern India, co-authored by Craig Jeffrey and John Harriss, does not attempt a comprehensive review nor does it offer a critical history of the present. Instead it offers an accessible, well-researched, and often lively portal into modern and contemporary Indian politics, economy, and society via a kind of curated glossary of major concepts and categories of public debate and practice. The explicit inspiration is Raymond Williams's profoundly innovative 1976 work, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Attempting to replicate this template, Jeffrey and Harriss offer entries that range across social sectors, temporal...