Against the backdrop of the recent revival of academic interest in elites and wealth inequalities (Savage & Williams, 2008; Piketty, 2013; Savage, 2015), my research aims to provide an empirical understanding of the reconfiguration of regional and local elites in India. This paper deals with the question of social mobility and the renegotiation of power relations within different factions of the elite. Drawing on qualitative interviews, institutional history and ethnographic observations, this paper seeks to identify the internal divisions within the regional elite in Bikaner town, India. Broadly speaking, regional elites comprise business managers and industrialists, political leaders, and bureaucrats. Bourdieu’s concepts of the field of power and forms of capital are applied to conduct a ‘field analysis’ of elites in India. With the growing differentiation in the market and political fields, new economic and political elites from non-elite backgrounds have emerged. These analyses would enrich our understanding of the new sources of power as well as challenges in the process of elite reproduction. It has produced a highly competitive set of elites in Bikaner. This change has led old elites to adopt new practices of social closure and simultaneously reconfigure their relations with new players in the field of power.
