Review of The Social and the Symbolic edited by Edited by Bernard Bel, Jan Brouwer, Biswajit Das, Vibodh Parthasarathi, Guy Poitevin; Sage, New Delhi; 2007, pp 481, Rs 895.

Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra, a large highly industrialised, progressive state that until a decade ago, reported remarkable progress on social and economic indices. Today, it is still a leading state, but its social indices have deteriorated. This is evidence of its poor performance on...