Introduction to e-Symposium: Urbanisation, gender, and social change in north India

Urbanisation in India is reshaping established social and economic patterns of behaviour, in ways that scholars are yet to fully comprehend. India’s rapid urbanisation invites several pressing questions: What does the transformation of settlement patterns mean for social cleavages and hierarchies in the country? Will some hierarchies be amplified, and others attenuated or transformed? In particular, how will urbanisation affect the social norms and practices that govern the economic, political, and social agency of women? This e-symposium will locate answers to these questions, drawing on a unique survey of 15,000 households across four urban clusters in north India.