ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I attempted to delineate a picture of the unevenness of human development in India. In this chapter I will try to apply the social power perspective I discussed in Chapter 1 to the analysis of that unevenness. As I elaborated in Chapter 1, the social power perspective has three major components: it treats basic structure as a central element of the analysis of human development; it understands difference as structural difference and structural inequality, rather than as identity; it understands agency as collective attempts to reconfi gure matrices of social power. Of course, all this underlies a specifi c notion of social power which I discussed at some length in Chapter 1. Without repeating that discussion here, let me briefl y mention that I take social power to be analytically distinct from political and economic power, and to represent an alternative form of power mobilized and accessed by those who do not typically have access to the bases from which other forms of power emanate. While the mobilization of social power may have many goals and many trajectories, I am most interested in the mobilization of social power for the redressal of structural inequality.
