India — Globalization and Change

A political-geography and economic-development text on post-liberalisation India. Covers the macro-economic reforms of the 1990s, regional inequalities, and the social changes reshaping Indian cities and countryside.

The volume reads the post-1991 reforms through the lenses of caste, class, religion and gender rather than as a purely macroeconomic narrative, working out how liberalisation has interacted with regional identities, environmental politics, internal migration, and the changing shape of Indian cities and rural livelihoods. Chapters address the social geography of the major regions, the politics of language and federalism, and the ways in which globalisation has been experienced unevenly across the subcontinent.

Pamela Shurmer-Smith was a human geographer at the University of Portsmouth whose research and teaching centred on cultural geography, South Asia and field methods, and the volume reflects extensive Indian fieldwork. Hodder Arnold issued the title on its undergraduate human-geography and development-studies list as a single-author monograph rather than an edited reader, and it sat alongside the firm's Progress in Development Studies launch as part of a wider geography programme.