University of California Press Urban Politics in India: Area, Power, and Policy in a Penetrated System (Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies)

Urban Politics in India: Area, Power, and Policy in a Penetrated System by Rodney W. Jones provides a rare, ground-level study of how politics actually functions in a medium-sized Indian city. Focusing on Indore in the late 1960s, Jones situates local struggles within broader state and national contexts, demonstrating how urban politics is “penetrated” by outside forces―bureaucratic agencies, state governments, and national parties―that continually reshape municipal power. His analysis follows the city’s historical legacy as a princely capital, its post-independence integration into Congress Party networks, and its industrial expansion, which created fertile ground for union organizing, labor machine politics, and factional conflict. By moving across multiple arenas―municipal governance, planning bureaucracies, labor struggles, and community organizations―Jones maps a political system fragmented yet tightly bound to larger structures of authority. The study combines archival sources, newspapers, and intensive fieldwork, including extended interviews with politicians, administrators, union leaders, and community figures. This methodological depth allows Jones to reconstruct Indore’s authority structures, the shifting alignments of Congress factions, and the interplay of class, caste, and ethnicity in everyday politics. Especially vivid is his account of the municipal corporation’s supersession by the state government, which illustrates the vulnerability of local institutions to external intervention. At once a case study and a theoretical exploration, Urban Politics in India advances the comparative study of urban systems by examining how power is organized, contested, and exercised in a penetrated polity. It is indispensable reading for scholars of Indian politics, urban studies, and development, offering insights into how democratic practices are shaped by the constant negotiation between local actors and larger centers of authority. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.