India's emergent urban formations

India’s countryside is experiencing a major socio-spatial transformation. We can estimate that hundreds of millions of people are eking out a living at the rural-urban transition, seeking to shift their livelihoods out of agriculture and into “urban”-based occupations due to agrarian distress or to improve their well-being. Very little is known about the spatial, social, cultural, and economic transformations that are occurring. Drawing on extensive and rare primary data collected in two remote regions in western Bihar and central West Bengal, this book provides a comprehensive investigation of this transition. The findings call into question how we conceive and theorize the urban and processes of urbanization, and are more generally relevant to our understanding of urbanization in the global South.