Full Description
This volume traces how the discourse of skill evolved in colonial and postcolonial India, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present neoliberal era. It introduces the concept of skill ecology to capture the broader political, economic, and social environment within which skills emerge, transform, and acquire meaning. Skill is examined here not merely as a technical attribute but as a historically contingent category, shaped by state policy, capitalist ideologies, and hierarchies of power.
Focusing on industrial training from the late colonial period - particularly the 1930s - through Nehruvian state-led industrialisation and into the era of neoliberal reform, the book explores how skilling became a terrain of collaboration and contestation between the state and the capital. It also reveals how social relations influence the legitimacy of skills, determining what forms of labour are seen as 'skilled' or 'unskilled' and for whom.
Combining perspectives from history, political science, and colonial and postcolonial studies, this interdisciplinary work offers fresh insights into the politics of labour and development in South Asia. It will be essential reading for scholars and researchers in modern history, political science, sociology, economics, social policy, and Asian studies.
Contents
1. Introduction Section I: Historical approaches to the study of the skill ecology 2. Skilling and mis-skilling managers: The Indian Institute of Management, business education, and Indian capitalism, 1964 - 1980 3. Having time passed: Education, skill development, control, and labour in prisons of colonial India 4. Practicing skills, processing skins: Urdu manuals on developing tanning as a rural trade (1940-1946) Section II: Skill as making, producing, doing 5. Skills, caste, and class in an eastern Indian steel town, 1950s-2000s 6. Haptic knowledge: Artisanal skills, labour, and embodied knowledge practices 7. Skilling as a mode of doing: Techniques and trajectories of street vending in Delhi's weekly bazaars Section III: Skilling at the margins of the skill ecology 8.The skills of 'city-makers': Waste-work in small-town India 9. Beyond the algorithm: The significance of skill in platform work 10. "Learning computers": Skilling, working, and waiting in Seelampur Section IV: Sociology of vocational training 11. Towards a gender transformative vision of TVET in India: Student experiences and labour market trajectories in India's contemporary TVET 12. Perceptions of teachers in Indian polytechnics: An exploratory study of the attractiveness in India in the higher vocational sector 13. Employment challenges of the Indian youth: An overview of the Indian VET sector
