The economic liberalization of India changes in global structures and the rapid emergence of
India on the global landscape have been accompanied by the dramatic rise in popular public
and elite discourses that offer the promise to imagine India. Written mostly in the future
tense these discourses conceive of India through specific frames of global change and
simultaneously offer prescriptive suggestions for the pathways to fulfilling the vision. Both
as summary accounts of the shifts taking place in India and in the relationships of India with
other global actors as well as roadmaps for the immediate and longer term directions for India
these discourses offer meaningful entry points into elite imaginations of India. Engaging these
imaginations creates a framework for understanding the tropes that are mobilized in support of
specific policy formulations in economic political cultural and social spheres. Connecting
meanings within networks of power and structure help make sense of the symbolic articulations
of India within material relationships.
