Abstract

Why has India’s astonishing economic growth not reached the people at the bottom of its social and economic hierarchy? Travelling the length and breadth of the subcontinent, this book shows how India’s ‘untouchables' and ‘tribals' fit into the global economy.

India’s Dalit and Adivasi communities make up a staggering one in twenty-five people across the globe and yet they remain amongst the most oppressed. Conceived in dialogue with economists, Ground Down by Growth reveals the impact of global capitalism on their lives. It shows how capitalism entrenches, rather than erases, social difference and has transformed traditional forms of identity-based discrimination into new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression.

Through studies of the working poor, migrant labour and the conjugated oppression of caste, tribe, region, gender and class relations, the social inequalities generated by capitalism are exposed.
'Highly recommended for its careful attention to ethnographic detail, its systematically comparative approach and its grasp of political economy'
Journal of Contemporary Asia
'An exceptional book coming from researchers who lived with the most marginalised people to present the India of dislocation and despair'
Anand Teltumbde, writer, civil rights activist and Senior Professor of Business Management, IIIT Hyderabad
'Undoubtedly a high quality contribution to the field of anthropological research'
International Labour Review
'Explodes the myth of the modernising power of capitalism. This sensitive and acute analysis shows that, far from doing away with inherited inequalities of power, Indian capitalism uses and intensifies them'
Jayati Ghosh, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
'A kaleidoscopic view of how established social forms morph and realign to produce deepening inequality and persistent, patterned disadvantage. Super-rich material and compelling analysis'
Tania Murray Li, Anthropology, University of Toronto