Essays on modernization in India

The essays included in this volume, deal both with conceptual and substantive issues in the process of modernization in India. Each essay offers a treatment of this process in both contexts on a selected theme, be it political structure and process, academic role structures, industrialization or cotemporary cultural patterns. Since the essays were written at different periods of time with individual thematic orientations, each one of them offers a more or less rounded perspective. Yet, one would notice a strong thread of conceptual and methodological unity running through all the essays. The emphasis on historicity in preference to universality defining the context of modernization, the pre-eminence of structural changes in society to render the adaptive process of modernization successful in the developing countries particularly India and the eclectic nature of cultural and ideological response of India to the challenges of modernization represent some of the unifying principles that bind these essays into a copositive cognitive approach to modernization. We have attempted to highlight this together with some other significant questions about modernization in the introduction.