This book is an ambitious attempt to bring together the diverse interpretations of the modern that have shaped the realities of Indian society. It undertakes not one, but multiple conceptual frameworks to explain the journey of the making and experiencing of the modern. It also points to the loopholes of the modern project and describes the innovations and adaptations and the intended and unintended makings of the modern. This volume takes on a multidisciplinary perspective and fosters an expansive focus as it brings together works from political science, international law and jurisprudence, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, visual studies, history of art, social geography, and the specific lens these fields use to unveil and analyse the ‘modern’ in Indian society. Divided into three parts: Imagining the modern, Experiencing the modern, and Narrating the modern, this book showcases the multiple ways of being modern, without necessarily expressing the modern as a rational, egalitarian and neat category. Instead, it highlights the ideas of progress and gain and also of nostalgia and loss that mark the practices of modern in India. Most importantly, it explains that there is not one imagining, practice, or vision of the modern for India, but that the modern is constantly constructed, practised, and lived in changing and contested spheres. Bringing together original papers from renowned as well as upcoming scholars, this book crosses the boundaries of the Indian subcontinent to support the development of a new social sciences scholarship both globalized in its vision and outreach and localized in its approach. CONTENTS 1. Understanding the Modern in India / Leïla Choukroune and Parul Bhandari Part I: Imagining the Modern: Ideas, Institutions, and Challenges 2. Transgressions, Demosprudence, and Justice / Upendra Baxi 3. From Without to Within: Indian International Law as Modernizer / Leïla Choukroune 4. The Political Economy of Being ‘Modern’ in 21st Century India / Jayati Ghosh 5. Political Innovation in the Working of Indian Democracy: A Study of the Group of Ministers Device (1999–2014) / Balveer Arora and K. K. Kailash 6. Three Languages of the Discourse of Modernity in India / Savita Singh Part II: Experiencing the Modern: Makings and Practices 7. Makings of Modern Marriage: Choice, Family, and the Matchmakers / Parul Bhandari 8. Modern Bombay: The Making of an Art Territory from 1850s to 1950s / Christine Ithurbide 9. Modern Mixes: The Hybrid and the Authentic in Indian Cuisine / Ishita Banerjee-Dube 10. Ritual at the Cutting Edge: Everyday Animal Slaughter as Practice and Symbol / Rita Brara Part III: Narrating the Modern: Texts and Travels 11. Religion and Hospitality in the Modern: Thinking with Abdul Bismillah / Simona Sawhney 12. Modernity’s Nightmares: Narrating Sexuality in Kerala / Navaneetha Mokkil 13. Exploring Modernism as Reflected in Post-partition Hindi/Urdu Fiction / Sukrita Paul Kumar 14. Latin American Travellers in Modern India / Minni Sawhney 15. Chinese and Indian Attitudes Towards the Past: A Paradoxical Appropriation / Nicolas Idier 16. From ‘Savages’ to ‘Saviours’: Genealogy of Santal Portrayal in Colonial Modernity / Anshul Avijit ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Leïla Choukroune is Director of the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), New Delhi India, the French National Research Centre (CNRS) Unit on South Asia. She is a visiting Professor at the World Trade Institute (Bern), the University Paris II Panthéon-Assas, the Trade Policy Training Centre in Africa (Arusha, Tanzania), the China-EU School of Law (Beijing), and the University of Geneva. When associate Professor of international economic law with the Faculty of Law of the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, she was Deputy Director of the Institute for Globalization and International Regulation (IGIR) and Director of the Advanced Master in international economic law. Her research focuses on the interactions between trade, investment and human rights and is applied to emerging countries, China and India in particular. She has published numerous scientific articles and authored several books including (with Sangeeta Khorana) Global Health and the Emerging World: An Integrated International Trade Approach, (Springer, forthcoming 2015). She is the Editor of the Springer book series International Law and the Global South and member of the Editorial Board of China Perspectives. Leïla Choukroune is regularly solicited as an independent expert on international economic law and business and human rights issues. She is an independent adviser to the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and a Member of the French National Books Commission (CNL). Before taking the responsibility of the CSH directorship, she was Associate Professor with the Law Faculty of Maastricht University, Assistant Professor with HEC Paris, Consultant with the OECD, Lecturer with Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and Researcher with the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in Hong Kong. She holds a Doctorate in international law (Summa cum laude – highest honor) from the University Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne and is a qualified lawyer to the Paris Bar. She is fluent in French, English and Spanish, speaks Chinese and German and learns Hindi. Parul Bhandari is currently a Visiting Scholar at St. Edmund’s College and the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS), University of Cambridge. She is also an affiliated to the Centre of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), the South Asia research unit for the French National Centre for Research (CNRS), where she previously was a Post Doctoral Fellow (2014-2016). She has held Guest Faculty positions at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, and the Indian Institute of Technology, (IIT, Delhi). Dr. Bhandari completed her PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 2014. Her PhD was supported by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. Her main research interests lie in the field of social class, gender, marriage, and family. Her doctoral thesis explained the makings of middle class identities through the processes of spouse-selection. For her post-doctoral research she has shifted attention to the study of elites, particularly the rich housewives of Delhi, focusing on their relationship with money and exploring the themes of honour and humiliation in their everyday lives.