This book examines instances of transformative dissent, turning points or shifts in popular mobilisation patterns in contemporary India, while adopting a historical approach and analysing past events. Exploring the different continuities and discontinuities in mobilising patterns and dissident agency in India, the authors present a heterogeneous insurrectional pattern that pivoted around issues of caste, class, religion, land reform, labour, taxation and territorial control, with anti-colonialism movements becoming prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. The authors move beyond this to explore more recent templates of mobilisation which surfaced towards the end of the twentieth century, during India’s liberalisation period. With growing marketisation and technological advancement, unprecedented changes in social relations, growing economic opportunities and cultural transfusion taking place, the country became a ‘New India’ - one which aspired to be a global player in the wider technological public sphere. Tracing the historical trajectories of social movements in India, this book examines recent trends in digitised dissidence and explores new frontiers of protests, providing fresh insights for those researching the history of social movements, South Asian and Indian history and postcolonial studies.

This book delves into the concept and definition of social movements from different perspectives with relevance to India. It offers critical insight into the fundamental and ongoing debates and treatises around the struggle for rights and welfare. The book covers discussions on a wide range of movements varying in locus and spatial spread--from movements that highlight environmental issues to those that articulate the voices of women, Dalits, the queer community, persons with disabilities and farmers. It explores the origins of people's movements, what a collective is and how communities mobilise and organise. The authors also provide a history of the key social movements in India, examining the social, political and cultural contexts in which they were born and continue being relevant in contemporary India. This revised and updated edition is an essential volume for students and researchers of social movement studies, sociology, political science and history, protest movements, sociological theory, the history of sociological thought, contemporary social theory, social policy, and international and globalization studies.

This book is a collection of 12 essays on three interrelated themes of Nation, Civil Society and Social Movements organized in three parts each having four chapters.

This book introduces the readers to the dynamics of various kinds of social movements. It examines how social movements have become an instrument of social change including assertion of identity and protest against marginalisation. This book describes three major domains – conceptual, experiential, and the impact of globalisation on social movements. The volume begins by locating social movements within broad and contemporary social processes and explores the intrinsic and complex patterns of dynamics among state, market, and social movements from a critical sociological perspective. It explains the meaning, basic features, origins and types, leadership and ideology, and perspectives of social movements and probes into major experiences of eight social movements in India, namely, peasant and farmers, tribal, Naxalite and Maoist, Dalit, working class, women, ethnic, and environmental movements. This book also analyses the role of information technology, media, and civil society in the spread and continuation of such movements. The experiences of queer, new religious, anti-systemic, and anti-displacement movements would also help readers understand how globalisation has offered new avenues of protest to diverse sections of the population. Lessons of anti-globalisation movements across the world provide a futuristic perspective in assessing the strength of social movements in a global society. This book will be useful to the students, researchers, and faculty working in the field of political science, sociology, gender studies, and post-colonial contemporary Indian politics in particular. It will also be an invaluable and interesting reading for those interested in South Asian studies.

Civil Society has emerged as one of the most celebrated concept of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. It offers practices that are the means and certain normative ideals that are the ends to be achieved for the preservation of democracy and expansion of the process of democratization. When available practices fail, reasons have been sought in the ideals being too lofty, and when the ideals looked minimalist, the blame has been shifted to the nature of practices being free-floating and bereft of definitive borders. Politics of Post-Civil Society is an attempt to map the discourse and politics of contemporary political movements in India that have been negotiating with the hegemonic effects born out of the insidious co-habitation of political principles and practices in the domain referred to as the civil society. In course of constructing the political landscape of these movements, the book foregrounds the various strategies through which they are pushing and nudging towards a new politics of post-civil society.

A comprehensive textbook that deals with the issue of social movements from both theoretical and contextual points of view and analyses major cognitive concerns of social movements across disciplines. In contemporary times, social movements are a matter of everyday discourse among researchers, teachers, planners and politicians, administrators and law-enforcing machineries, social activists and common people alike. The book begins by locating social movements within broad and contemporary social processes. It explains the meaning, basic features, origins and types, and the basic perspectives of social movements. It goes on to deal with the major experiences of nine social movements in India, namely, peasant, tribal, Naxalite, Dalit, working class, women, ethnic, student and youth, and environmental movements. The book also analyses the role of information technology, media, civil society, NGOs and the middle class in the spread and continuation of such movements. The experiences of queer, new religious, and anti-systemic and anti-displacement movements would also help readers understand how globalization has offered new avenues of protest to diverse sections of the population. Key Features: - Analyses the major theoretical concerns of social movements and uses them to analyse specific social movements in India and other parts of the globe - Provides the genealogy, growth and impact of prominent social movements in India and abroad - Includes pedagogically rich content, which closely follows UGC course curriculum guidelines for the subject