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India is being widely seen as an emerging economic and political power on the global scene. Despite having the largest population of chronically poor in the world today, it is home to a sizeable number of thriving rich and flourishing middle classes. They are reshaping the country’s popular image and its self-imagination. Equally important are its political dynamics. With increasing participation of erstwhile-marginalized sections in the electoral process, the social profile of India’s political elite has been changing, making way for those coming from the middle and lower strata of the traditional social order, thus broadening the social base of political power.

Mapping the Elite seeks to expand the understanding of processes of formations and transformations of the Indian elite. The contributors explore the emergent elite spaces, the new idioms of power and inequality, the diverse strategies in which symbolic boundaries of privilege are traced in everyday lives, as well as the class mobilities in an age of proclaimed meritocracy. They do so by using the sociological frames of caste, class, gender, community, and their intersections.

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Exploring India’s Elite: This series provides a platform to scholars working on elite dynamics in India. It seeks to enable an understanding of the nuances of inequality, power, and other emerging social structures.

Contents: Foreword. Preface. Introduction. I. Merit, Privilege, and Entitlement: 1. The Meritocrats: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste/ Ajantha Subramanian. 2. Heirs, Corporate Aristocrats, and ‘Meritocrats’: The Social Space of Top CEOs and Chairpersons in India/Jules Naudet, Adrien Allorant, and Mathieu Ferry. 3.Issues of Entitlement/Saurabh Dube. II. Indian Elites and the Global Scene: 4. Artefacts and Artifices of the Global: Practices of US Architects in India’s National Capital Region/Namita Vijay Dharia. 5. Kula Gauravam, Transnational Migration, and Class Mobility: Reconfiguring the Dominant Caste Status in Coastal Andhra/Sanam Roohi. 6. ‘Take This Land’: A Brief History of the Karnataka Golf Association/Patrick Inglis. III. Women at the Top: Gender Intersections: 7. Reproducing Elite Lives: Women in Agarwal Family Businesses/Ujithra Ponniah. 8. For Things to Remain (Sort of) the Same, Everything Must Change: India’s First-Generation Professional Elites and the Surreptitious Reproduction of Hierarchy/Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen. 9. The Secret Lives of Money: Understanding Elite Women of Delhi/Parul Bhandari.