This collection of essays empirically examines new actors and emerging forms of urban politics in contemporary India. Shatkin and Vidyarthi open the book with an overview of the state of the field, finding that scholarship on urban India is polarized between two perspectives -the neoliberal and the postcolonial. The neoliberal perspective emphasizes the convergence of urban social change in India with neoliberalization unfolding in the rest of the world. By contrast, the postcolonial perspective emphasizes local resistance to and subversion of neoliberal projects imposed by the state and the private sector. The book argues that urban political change in India is not simply a story of neoliberalization or subaltern resistance, but rather, that it exhibits certain trends that make urban politics today qualitatively different from the past. The eleven chapters address three major themes: new actors competing for local political power; new configurations of inequality and exclusion; and fragmentation of urban governance. Overall, the book is an excellent collection of urban ethnography from a new generation of Indian scholars.First, Weinstein, Semi and Shatkin provide a sweeping historical account of the colonial and postcolonial roots of weak municipal power in India in Chapter 2. They identify a number of overlapping forces that have systematically weakened city governments in India. These include, for example, the vested interests of the propertied class in the colonial period, who resisted any attempt on the part of municipal governments to solidify power; the anti-local bias among colonial and postcolonial elites, many of whom believed that the less local, the more democratic India could be; fear of fragmentation of the Union among national elites, and therefore the reluctance of devolving power to local authorities; and the lack of investment in political and human capital in municipal governments. In an attempt to strengthen municipal institutions, the national and state governments set up special-purpose organizations, such as development authorities, but these para-statal agencies further weakened the authority of municipal corporations.Secondly, within this power vacuum new actors have emerged at the local level, and the chapters examine a variety of political and economic entrepreneurs, such as real-estate developers (Searle), elite urban task forces (Sami), civil-society groups representing the middle class (Ghertner) and private consultants (Weinstein). These chapters offer fascinating ethnographic details about the movers and shakers of Indian cities today, as well as about their dreams, ambitions, frustrations, social networks and party affiliations. The larger theme emerging from these accounts is the difficulty for any individual or organization to overcome the fragmentation of governance, and therefore the new actors have to build ad hoc alliances based on personal connections in order to pursue their agenda.The last major theme of the book covers new forms of marginality and exclusions. For example...
