Bangalore is often heralded as India’s future—a city where global technologies converge with multinational capital to produce a cosmopolitan workforce and vibrant economic growth. In this narrative the city’s main challenge revolves around its success: whether its physical infrastructure can support its burgeoning population. Most observers assume that Bangalore’s emergence as a “global city” represents its more complete integration into the world economy and, by extension, a more inclusive and cosmopolitan outlook among its growing middle class. Andrew C. Willford sheds light on a growing paradox: even as Bangalore has come to signify “progress” and economic possibility both within India and to the outside world, movements to make the city more monocultural and monolinguistic have gained prominence. Bangalore is the capital of the state of Karnataka, its borders linguistically redrawn by the postcolonial Indian state in 1956. In the decades that followed, organizations and leaders emerged to promote linguistic nationalism aimed at protecting the fragile unity of Kannadiga culture and literature against the twin threats of globalization and internal migration. Ironically, they support parochial cultural policies that impose a cultural and linguistic unity upon an area that historically stood at the crossroads of empires, trade routes, language practices, devotional literatures, and pilgrimage routes. Willford’s analysis, which focuses on the minority experience of Bangalore’s sizeable Tamil-speaking community, shows how the same forces of globalization that create growth and prosperity also foster uncertainty and tension around religion and language that completely contradict the region’s long history of cosmopolitanism. Exploring this paradox in Bangalore’s entangled and complex linguistic and cultural pasts serves as a useful case study for understanding the forces behind cultural and ethnic revivalism in the contemporary postcolonial world. Buttressed by field research conducted over a twenty-two-year period (1992–2015), Willford shows how the past is a living resource for the negotiation of identity in the present. Against the gloom of increasingly communal conflicts, he finds that Bangalore still retains a fabric of civility against the modern markings of cultural difference.

The works of F. G. Bailey (1924–2020) provide a seminal template for good ethnography. Central to this is Bailey’s ability to conceptually connect the well-described micro-contexts of individual interactions to the macro-context of culture. Bailey’s core concerns – the tension between individual and collective interests, the will to power, and the dialectics of social forces which foster both collective solidarity as well as divisiveness and discontent – are themes of universal interest; the beauty of his work lies in his analyses of how these play out in local arenas between real people. His models provide nuanced, yet explicit road maps to analysing the different leadership styles of everyday people and contemporary leaders. This volume seeks to inspire new generations of anthropologists to revisit Bailey’s seminal texts, to help them navigate their way through the ethnographic thicket of their own research.

What urban food networks reveal about middle class livability in times of transformation In recent years, the concept of “livability” has captured the global imagination, influencing discussions about the implications of climate change on human life and inspiring rankings of “most livable cities” in popular publications. But what really makes for a livable life, and for whom? Cultivating Livability takes Bengaluru, India, as a case study—a city that is alternately described as India’s most and least livable megacity, where rapid transformation is undergirded by inequalities evident in the food networks connecting peri-urban farmers and the middle-class public. Anthropologist Camille Frazier probes the meaning of “livability” in Bengaluru through ethnographic work among producers and consumers, corporate intermediaries and urban information technology professionals. Examining the varying efforts to reconfigure processes of food production, distribution, retail, and consumption, she reveals how these intersections are often rooted in and exacerbate ongoing forms of disenfranchisement that privilege some lives at the expense of others.

Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India. Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.

A UNIQUE BOOK OF SPOKEN ENGLISH WITH EXERCISES.

Bangalore is looked at in depth in Supriya Baily's exploration of one of India’s most dynamic cities. Booklist praises the book, saying, "This deeply researched book is especially timely in light of recent gender-based violence in India.” Through the stories of a group of school girls in what used to be India’s most progressive city, Bangalore Girls reveals how the freedom women once enjoyed in the “Silicon Valley of India” has been eroded by the rising tide of right-wing nationalism, misogyny, and religious fundamentalism. Author Supriya Baily explores one of India’s most dynamic cities through the eyes of a group of women who grew up and went to school together in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As they enjoyed the trappings of a burgeoning middle class, these classmates also watched their country move to the right politically and socially, spurred on by the Ayodhya riots that tore down the Babri Masjid Mosque in 1992 and the sectarian violence that followed—a Hindu nationalist tide that continues to rise today. The book offers us a window into these women’s lives and shows us how they are responding to the breakdown of progressivism across multiple domains. They discuss not only their own safety and the educational opportunities and challenges confronting their families; they also talk about such society-wide issues as anti-Muslim sentiment, the backlash against science, and the dangers of independent thinking. Baily gives voice to their worries about political cults of personality and government policies that seek to marginalize and ostracize anyone who speaks out against the authorities, but especially women. As Indian prime minister Narendra Modi now consecrates the new Ram Temple in Ayodhya, it has never been more important to understand the wave of nationalism that began in 1992. The stories of these women told by Supriya Baily are a must-read tale of extremism’s threat to women’s rights and human rights.