Book Review: S. Narayan. 2018. The Dravidian Years: Politics and Welfare in Tamil Nadu.

Narayan’s book The Dravidian Years provides a rare glimpse of the political economy landscape of the most transformative period in Tamil Nadu’s social history from an insider’s perspective of a former public administrator who has served for three decades in the Indian bureaucracy. The book depicts the southern Indian state’s evolution from a deeply casteist British province to one with a radical social justice agenda, which over time however mutates into a more diluted hybrid amalgamation of capitalistic economic development with an ingrained ethos of populist social welfare.