India is perhaps the world’s most complex and intricate society, and this complexity makes the production of knowledge of this nation intellectually challenging but also fascinating and absorbing. The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India contains essays by the field’s foremost scholars who deal with the current transformations of Indian culture and society.

Introduction Contemporary India: Foundation, Relations, Diversity and Innovations Part I Foundation 1. Dreams, Memories and Legacies: Partitioning India 2. Symbiosis and Resilience: The Dynamics of Social Change and Transition to Democracy in India 3. Foundations for a Sustainable Growth: India’s Constitution and its Supreme Court 4. Economic Foundation of India 5. Equity, Quantity and Quality: The Precarious Balancing act in India’s School Education 6. Agriculture and the Development Burden Part II India and the World 7. Politics, Security and Foreign Policy 8. Is India a South Asian or an Asian Power? 9. India's Role as an International Development Actor 10. Dispersals, Migrations, Diversity of Communities and the Notion of an Indian Diaspora 11. Yoga and Physical Culture: Transnational History and Blurred Discursive Contexts 12. Modernised Ayurveda in India and the West Part III Society, Class, Caste and Gender 13. Politics of Economic Reforms in India 14. Divided We Stand: The Indian City after Economic Liberalisation 15. India’s Middle Classes in Contemporary India 16. Caste: Why Does It Still Matter? 17. Corruption and Anti-Corruption in Modern India: History. Patronage, and the Moral Politics of Anti-colonialism 18. Regional Perspective: Gujarat and the Contradictory Co-existence of Economic Enterprise and Political Illiberalism 19. Intimate Spaces of Struggle: Rethinking Family and Marriage in Contemporary India 20. Adivasis in Contemporary India: Engagements with State, Non-State Actors and the Capitalist Economy Part IV Religion and Diversity 21. Myth as History and History as Myth: The Instructive Case of India 22. Matters That Matter: Material Religion in Contemporary India 23. Hindu Pilgrimage Sites and Travel: Infrastructure, Economy, Identity and Conflicts 24. Ambedkar's Life and His Navayana Buddhism 25. Religion, Identity and Empowerment: The Making of Ravidassia Dharm (Dalit Religion) in Contemporary Punjab 26. Muslims in Contemporary India: Socio-religious Diversity and the Questions of Citizenship R. Santhosh 27. Religious Violence, Crime Statistics and India’s Muslim Minority 28. Christians in India: Living on the Margins with a Diverse and Controversial Past Part V Cultural Change and Innovations 29. Combative Constructions of Femininity in the Late Twentieth Century Narratives of India 30. The New Indian Male: Muscles, Masculinities and Middle-Classness 31. Changing Food Habits in Contemporary India: Discourses and Practices From the Middle Classes in Chennai (Tamil Nadu) 32. Coping with the Diseases of Modernity: The Use of Siddha Medical Knowledge and Practices to Treat Diabetics

Included in Editors’ Top 75 Community College Resources for June 2016 from CHOICE"Routledge continues to make a remarkable contribution to South Asian studies through its journals, monographs, and edited books. This is another volume that South Asianists will embrace. Jacobsen and his international, five-member editorial board have divided the 32 chapters into five sections: "Foundation", six chapters on various topics from partition to the economy and the constitution; "India and the World" (six chapters); "Society, Class, Caste and Gender", eight chapters on topics large and small; "Religion and Diversity", eight chapters, including coverage of Hindu pilgrimage sites, Ambedkar, Muslims, and Christians; and "Cultural Change and Innovations", whose four chapters deal with femininity, the "new Indian male", food, and Siddha medical knowledge. In short, topics that appeal strongly to postmodernists and postcolonialists, written in language using terminology that appeals to them. The editor's introduction summarizes the volume's contents and writes about population and economic growth. [...] this is a major contribution. Highly recommended. All levels/libraries." R. D. Long, Eastern Michigan University, CHOICE