India's recent economic transformation has fascinated scholars, global leaders, and interested observers alike. In 1990, India was a closed economy and a hesitant and isolated economic power. By 2016, India has rapidly risen on the global economic stage; foreign trade now drives more than half of the economy and Indian multinationals pursue global alliances. Focusing on second-generation reforms of the late 1990s, Aseema Sinha explores what facilitated global integration in a self-reliant country pre-disposed to nationalist ideas. The author argues that the impact of globalization on India has affected trade policy as well as India's trade capacities and private sector reform. India should no longer be viewed solely through a national lens; globalization is closely linked to the ambitions of a rising India. The study uses fieldwork undertaken in Geneva, New Delhi, Mumbai and Washington DC, interviews with business and trade officials, as well as a close analysis of the textile and pharmaceutical industries and a wide range of documentary and firm-level evidence to let diverse actors speak in their own voices.

This book explores India's rise on the global economic stage from the perspective of both international and domestic interests and activities. Sinha argues that the impact of globalization on India since 1990 needs to be understood not just in terms of national policy, but also in terms of changing trade capacities and private sector reform.

This is one of the earliest books to present a collection of writings on the effects of globalization on India and Indian society. The editors have assembled a team of eminent academics to present a series of critical discussions about important issues of economy and agriculture, education and language, and culture and religion, based on ethnographic case studies from different localities in India. Globalizing India is a major contribution to South Asian Studies, interrogating a topic of contemporary importance – both within the region and internationally.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of globalization on the Indian legal profession. Employing a range of original data from twenty empirical studies, the book details the emergence of a new corporate legal sector in India including large and sophisticated law firms and in-house legal departments, as well as legal process outsourcing companies. As the book's authors document, this new corporate legal sector is reshaping other parts of the Indian legal profession, including legal education, the development of pro bono and corporate social responsibility, the regulation of legal services, and gender, communal, and professional hierarchies with the bar. Taken as a whole, the book will be of interest to academics, lawyers, and policymakers interested in the critical role that a rapidly globalizing legal profession is playing in the legal, political, and economic development of important emerging economies like India, and how these countries are integrating into the institutions of global governance and the overall global market for legal services.

Liberalization’s Children explores how youth and gender have become crucial sites for a contested cultural politics of globalization in India. Popular discourses draw a contrast between “midnight’s children,” who were rooted in post-independence Nehruvian developmentalism, and “liberalization’s children,” who are global in outlook and unapologetically consumerist. Moral panics about beauty pageants and the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day reflect ambivalence about the impact of an expanding commodity culture, especially on young women. By simply highlighting the triumph of consumerism, such discourses obscure more than they reveal. Through a careful analysis of “consumer citizenship,” Ritty A. Lukose argues that the breakdown of the Nehruvian vision connects with ongoing struggles over the meanings of public life and the cultural politics of belonging. Those struggles play out in the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism; reconfigurations of youthful, middle-class femininity; attempts by the middle class to alter understandings of citizenship; and assertions of new forms of masculinity by members of lower castes. Moving beyond elite figurations of globalizing Indian youth, Lukose draws on ethnographic research to examine how non-elite college students in the southern state of Kerala mediate region, nation, and globe. Kerala sits at the crossroads of development and globalization. Held up as a model of left-inspired development, it has also been transformed through an extensive and largely non-elite transnational circulation of labor, money, and commodities to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Focusing on fashion, romance, student politics, and education, Lukose carefully tracks how gender, caste, and class, as well as colonial and postcolonial legacies of culture and power, affect how students navigate their roles as citizens and consumers. She explores how mass-mediation and an expanding commodity culture have differentially incorporated young people into the structures and aspirational logics of globalization.

Nearly four decades ago, Dilip Hiro's Inside India Today, banned by Indira Gandhi's government, was acclaimed by The Guardian as simply “the best book on India.” Now Hiro returns to his native country to chronicle the impact of the dramatic economic liberalization that began in 1991, which ushered India into the era of globalization. Hiro describes how India has been reengineered not only in its economy but also in its politics and cultural mores. Places such as Gurgaon and Noida on the outskirts of Delhi have been transformed from nondescript towns into forests of expensive high-rise residential and commercial properties. Businessmen in Bollywood movies, once portrayed as villains, are now often the heroes. The marginal, right-wing Hindu militants of the past now rule the nominally secular nation, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi as their avatar, one whose electoral victory was funded by big business. Hiro provides a gripping account of the role played by Indians who have settled in the United States and Britain since 1991 in boosting India's GDP. But he also highlights the negatives: the exponential growth in sleaze in the public and private sectors, the impoverishment of farmers, and the rise in urban slums. A masterful panorama, The Age of Aspiration covers the whole social spectrum of Indians at home and abroad.

Ever since the dramatic airlifting of all 67 tonnes of India's gold from the Reserve Bank of India to the vaults of British and Swiss banks in May 1991 as collateral for a $2.2 billion emergency loan, India has never been the same. The New Economic Policy (NEP), which followed two months later and has been pursued with varying degrees of commitment by later governments, heralded a new chapter in India's history. In Indians in a Globalizing World, acclaimed journalist and historian Dilip Hiro shows that the redistribution of the extra wealth created by the spurt in growth caused by economic liberalization has been skewed, grossly favouring those who are already well off. The author of Inside India Today - a modern classic described as 'the best book on India' by the Guardian - Hiro seamlessly combines research with grassroots reporting. In his riveting narrative, he moves from glitzy office tower blocks and prohibitively expensive apartments in the gated enclaves of Gurgaon - the Poster City of New India - to the embattled Maoist stronghold of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh. He is as much at ease narrating the tales of the great and good in California's Silicon Valley as he is in outlining the lifestyle of the residents of Delhi's New Seelampur or Dehradun's Bindal River slum. Above all, he shows how life in rural India, home to seven out of ten Indians, has been affected by globalization. Only a tiny minority of villages near urban centres have prospered because of rapid urbanization while the vast majority have stagnated or fallen behind. Finally, Indians in a Globalizing World explains how accelerated urbanization and financial globalization have led to an explosive growth in corruption which emerged as the primary concern of voters in the 2014 general election.