Beyond the Metropolis—Regional Globalisation and Town Development in India: An Introduction

Abstract

Despite the rapid transformation of India over the past 25 years and a swathe of publications dealing with the impact of globalisation on the culture and economy of the subcontinent, and on its large metropolitan cities, we contend that relatively far less is known about the regional impacts of globalisation and the localised impacts of neo-liberal development policies. Significantly, we seek to understand and analyse how globalisation is transforming smaller, regional towns in India. Based on social scientific research exploring the development and changes taking place in two distinctive, middle towns-Anand, Gujarat and Darjeeling, West Bengal-we highlight the social and political forces at work that are re-making these towns, the local issues residents contend with, and the external drivers of change that influence the unique growth and development of these towns.

Urban Transition in West Bengal, India

“…Besides these metro cities/UAs, there are a large number of small cities and towns which by and large are stagnating owing to the lack of investment and job creation (Kundu, 2003). However, some of the current studies (Gupta, 2013: 172–174; Robinson, 2013: 73–74; Scrase et al, 2015; Verstappen and Rutten, 2015, etc.) challenge the aforesaid view and argue that because of the availability of cheaper land and labour, small cities and towns with locational advantages are attracting many local (and/or global) firms and offering employment opportunities, and thereby growing rapidly.…”

Communal living

“…The focus on cities has been justified by the idea that the city occupies a central place in the history of Indian Muslims (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012: 13-18). 2 However, lost in these discussions is the fact that many urban residents of India live in small-and medium-sized towns (Scrace et al 2015), where segregation may take somewhat different shapes than in the metropolis (Tidey 2012) and where connectivity to the wider region beyond the town might be an important feature of social life. 3 In Gujarat, where a distinguishing feature of the 2002 violence in comparison with earlier communal violence was that attacks were widespread in rural parts of the state, affecting a total of 151 towns and 993 villages 4 in 19 districts, it is pertinent to look at the situation of Muslims in towns and villages.…”

Introduction: Reconsidering the Region in India

“…As a large body of work has shown, regions are made through diverse political, material and semiotic practices of place-making, which are increasingly reworked in transnational or trans-regional spaces. Provincial towns are key sites of such region-making processes, due to their position as nodes connecting their rural hinterlands with other sites as well as their long-standing trans-regional or global connections (Parthasarathy, 2013;Scrase, Rutten, Ganguly-Scrase, & Brown, 2015). More recently, provincial landscapes have been altered by ongoing processes of urbanization, which are often intersected by transnational flows and diasporic aspirations (Verstappen & Rutten, 2015; also see contributions by Upadhya and Verstappen, this issue).…”