India Connected

Former chief CNN India correspondent and award-wining journalist Ravi Agrawal takes readers on a journey across the Subcontinent, through its remote rural villages and its massive metropolises, seeking out the nexuses of change created by smartphones, and with them connection to the internet. As always with India, the numbers are staggering: in 2000, 20 million Indians had access to the internet; by 2017, 465 million were online, with three Indians discovering the internet every second. By 2020, India's online community is projected to exceed 700 million, and more than a billion Indians are expected to be online by 2025. In the course of a single generation, access to the internet has progressed from dial-up connections on PCs, to broadband access, wireless, and now 4G data on phones. The rise of low-cost smartphones and cheap data plans has meant the country leapfrogged the baby steps their Western counterparts took toward digital fluency. The results can be felt in every sphere of life, upending traditions and customs and challenging conventions. Nothing is untouched, from arranged marriages to social status to business start-ups, as smartphones move the entire economy from cash-based to credit-based. Access to the internet is affecting the progress of progress itself. As Agrawal shows, while they offer immediate and sometimes mind-altering access to so much for so many, smartphones create no immediate utopia in a culture still driven by poverty, a caste system, gender inequality, illiteracy, and income disparity. Internet access has provided greater opportunities to women and changed the way in which India's many illiterate poor can interact with the world, but it has also meant that pornography has become more readily available. Under a government keen to control content, it has created tensions. And in a climate of hypernationalism, it has fomented violence and even terrorism. The influence of smartphones on "the world's largest democracy" is nonetheless pervasive and irreversible, and India Connected reveals both its dimensions and its implications.

Connected Histories of India and Southeast Asia unravels the fascinating history of cultural interactions, of outstanding and universal significance, between India and Southeast Asia, with special emphasis on artistic expressions. India's connections with Southeast Asian countries, namely, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam are seen not only in trade and commerce but also in cultural and religious exchanges. Such histories are well-documented in their monuments, icons, narratives, inscribed artefacts, texts, and ritual paraphernalia. The first part of the book offers an overview of the nature of cultural and artistic interactions and the trade routes that facilitated an exchange of ideas, objects, people, and knowledge systems since ancient times. The second part addresses issues relating to architectural forms, motifs, and mobility across long distances and time periods. The final segment includes essays that discuss narratives and iconographies arising from cross-cultural artistic exchanges. With contributions by eminent scholars and over 170 colour photographs, maps, and illustrations, this book is an invaluable resource for understanding connected histories, which play a key role in revitalizing cultural connectivity and people-to-people contacts between India and Southeast Asia.