Anindita Chakrabarti – författare

India is developing as a global gold powerhouse. Yet its intricate web of trade and transformations remains largely overlooked in scholarly research. This book delves into the economic significance and cultural currency of gold in India. Drawing on insights from economic sociology, political economy and history, it combines comprehensive fieldwork with archival research to explore the circuits of gold - looking at legal and illegal imports, refining, trade, craft and mechanised production, retail and re-export. Through multidisciplinary research, it relates the roles of gold in the building and sharing of familial and gendered wealth, in the diversity of rural economic life and in women's sexuality, subordination and agency to a range of issues in state policy. It shows how exploring the quiddity of gold offers a perfect plot to deepen our understanding of the socially regulated Indian economy.

How do we understand the multitude of faith movements in our post-secular world? Faith and Social Movements explores this question by analyzing the theology and practice as well as the transformation of two discrepant religious movements in contemporary India. The research opens up a conversation between the sociology of religion and social movements. Using a comparative lens, two different movements - a Hindu and an Islamic reform movement - have been studied in ethnographic detail. The book is divided into two parts. The first part dwells on Svadhyaya, a Hindu reform movement, and the second part on the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic reform movement. Focusing on the internal dynamics of these movements and the 'unintended consequences' of piety, the author argues that it is only by raising new questions vis-...-vis religion, secularity and civil society that their entanglement could be uncovered. This book aims to raise some of these questions.