• ISBN13: 9780197508602
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: Sociology and Anthropology
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: April 16, 2019
• Pages: 320
• Original Price: INR 1100.0
• Language: N/A
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 2000 grams

India remains a country mired in poverty, with two-thirds of its 1.3 billion people living on little more than a few dollars a day. Just as telling, the country's informal working population numbers nearly 500 million, or approximately eighty percent of the entire lab or force. Despite these figures and the related structural disadvantages that imperial the lives of so many, the Indian elite maintain that the poor need only work harder and they, too, can become rich. The results of this ambitious ten-year ethnography at exclusive golf clubs in Bangalore shatter such self-serving illusions. In narrow fairways, Patrick inglis combines participant observation, interviews, and archival research to show how social mobility among the poor lower-caste golf caddies who carry the golf sets of wealthy upper-caste members at these clubs is ultimately constrained and narrow the book highlights how elites secure and extend Class and caste privileges, while also delivering a necessary rebuke to India's present development strategy, which pays far too little attention to promoting quality healthcare, education, and other basic social services that would deliver real opportunities to the poor.

Patrick Inglis is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College. He teaches and writes on matters of global development, labor, and inequality.