The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. This volume sheds light on how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. Through ethnographically grounded case studies, the authors portray the contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of sociopolitical change. ‘Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India’ moves the debate on gender and social transformation into the domain of everyday life to arrive at locally embedded and detailed, ethnographically informed analyses of gender relations in real-life contexts that foreground both subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations and contestations.

Rural sociology research papers on social change in rural area India - explains research methods; analyses popular participation, impact of the green revolution on poverty-stricken rural workers, social role of castes and tribal peoples, credit cooperatives for agricultural workers (harijans), etc.; examines obstacles to rural mobilization; discusses peasant movements and rural worker organizations, the role of rural cooperatives in social development, and approaches to land reform. References, statistical tables.

The doctoral students of the economist and teacher Venkatesh B. Athreya organized a seminar in his honor in January 2016. This book is a collection of the papers presented at that seminar and a few invited contributions on the theme of agriculture and rural India with special emphasis on the experience of economic reforms since the 1990s.

In A Village Goes Mobile, Sirpa Tenhunen examines how the mobile telephone has contributed to social change in rural India. Tenhunen's long-term ethnographic fieldwork in West Bengal began before the village had a phone system in place and continued through the introduction and proliferation of the smartphone. She here analyzes how mobile telephones emerged as multidimensional objects which, in addition to enabling telephone conversations, facilitated status aspirations, internet access, and entertainment practices. She explores how this multifaceted use of mobile phones has affected agency and power dynamics in economic, political, and social relationships, and how these new social constellations relate to culture and development. In eight chapters, Tenhunen asks such questions as: Who benefits from mobile telephony and how? Can people use mobile phones to change their lives, or does phone use merely amplify existing social patterns and power relationships? Can mobile telephony induce development? Going beyond the case of West Bengal, Tenhunen develops a framework to understand how new media mediates social processes within interrelated social spheres and local hierarchies by relating, media-saturated forms of interaction to pre-existing contexts.

It explores the formation of India's rural middle class, which rests on a complex, and often contradictory, set of processes that began unfolding with growing industrialisation in rural areas. It examines its composition, characteristics and social identification from the perspectives of three major class theorists: Marx, Weber and Bourdieu.