India Becoming: Stories of change told through individuals
When Harvard-trained social anthropologist Akash Kapur decided to narrate the remarkable process of historical change in India, he did so through stories of a bevy of individuals including a farmer, a BPO employee, a cow broker and a rag picker.
Kapur grew up and now lives in the countryside outside Puducherry. "India Becoming: A Journey through a Changing Landscape" is the result of his effort to understand the changing landscape of India, transformed by rapid economic growth, which he first encountered on his return from the US in 2003.
"I grew up in the countryside outside Pondicherry, so the villages and small towns of India, and especially South India, was the landscape that I knew best. I also knew that it was a landscape generally under-represented in contemporary writing about India," he says.
"But really, the main reason I wanted to write about small towns is because I felt like I understood that world, and because I felt like the process of transformation playing
out in India was particularly complex and nuanced in that world," Kapur said.
He says the title "India Becoming" captures the "sense of a nation that is still undergoing a process of transition – a nation on the move, becoming something, but we don't know yet just what".
According to the writer, the key and only indisputable fact of modern India is that it is a nation undergoing a dramatic process of change.
"That change is still playing out; we have by no means reached an end point yet."
While writing the book,
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