Handbook of Modernity in South Asia—Modern Makeovers

Is modernity new to India, involving the transformation only in recent decades of an apparently timeless traditional society through global networks of banking and industry, migration and information, and trade and technology? Or have different groups on the Indian subcontinent variously participated in processes of modernity over a much longer time period? How is modernity itself to be understood and what forms have its expressions taken?

Modern Makeovers explores the depths and surfaces which are constitutive of modernity and its representations. It sheds light on the historical aspects of modernity during colonial times. The volume also examines the conditions, limitations, and possibilities of modernity-and the modern-in contemporary contexts, including politics, culture, and the arts. The handbook approaches formations of modernity as always particular yet already global, all the while drawing on a range of South Asian experiences. The contributors map prior routes and chart novel pathways in discussions of modernity in the different regions of the subcontinent. They attend to prior, inherited understandings of modernity that are based on pre-figured, modular projections of the traditional and the modern, the non-West and the West.

Saurabh Dube is Professor, Department of History and Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico.