India is often described through scale. A vast population, a huge democracy, a major economy, a civilisation-state, a technology hub, a place of extreme wealth and stubborn poverty existing side by side. All of that is true, but scale alone does not explain India. What makes India especially interesting is that it is not one system. It is a dense layering of systems that overlap, compete, reinforce, and sometimes obstruct one another: federal politics, informal labour, digita