‘Democracy’ under the Raj: Elections and separate representation in British India

Chiriyankandath, James

doi:10.1080/14662049208447624

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…His engagement with Dr B. R. Ambedkar and the resultant Poona Pact (1932) have been the matter of scholarly works elsewhere. 65,66,67,68 Hence, this article does not delve into this issue.…”

Section: Separate Electoratementioning

confidence: 99%

Gandhi and Election: An Exploration

Kumar

2024

Indian Historical Review

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How Gandhi viewed elections? Scholars studying Gandhi have focussed on his strategies of ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagrah (insistence on truth), which produced conditions for mass mobilisation leading to successful decolonisation efforts in India. Though Gandhi recorded his views on franchise beginning with his petition to Natal Assembly in 1894, the researchers have not made much attempt to explore its nuances; those shaped Gandhi’s evolution as a democratic crusader in the context of India as a nation. His engagements with the issues of the franchise question in Natal connected him to traditions of elections in India, and his observation of suffragette in England made him conscious of the challenges of struggle in the manner of engagement with a powerful state. This article focuses on Gandhi’s engagement with various facets of elections in his early political days and argues that the ‘franchise question’ allowed him to understand India as a political possibility and the ‘suffragette’ informed his methods of mass engagement with the imperial powers.

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Section: Separate Electoratementioning

confidence: 99%

Gandhi and Election: An Exploration

Kumar

2024

Indian Historical Review

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“…Since 1919, the British colonial state had been introducing institutions of parliamentary democracy into colonial India (Chiriyankandath 1992). There were elections for legislative assembly, and members of the winning party were eligible to become ministers.…”

Section: The Colonial-period Political Field and The Formation Of Neh...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Habitus Explain Individual Particularities? Critically Appreciating the Operationalization of Relational Logic in Field Theory

Singh

2022

Sociological Theory

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Bourdieu’s concept of habitus claims to solve the problem of the individual/society duality. However, the concept of habitus appears to be inadequate to explain the idiosyncratic features of individual field actors’ practices. In this article, I argue that to explain the particularity of individual habitus, we must appreciate the operationalization of relational logic in field theory. I further argue that individuals learn to prediscursively identify certain types of practices as meaningful for a given field position (and not others) because of their embodied experiences of movements within the historically specific relational structure of the field. Thus, the same individual can exhibit multiple and even contradictory practices depending on the person’s relational position in the field. I illustrate this insight by discussing the political habitus of the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.

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“…The party wing leaders had established deep roots in rural India during the late colonial period, when ministers had only limited access to state resources. 33 However, in the postcolonial period, ministers had gained full control over state resources; thus, the party wing leaders became dependent on the ministerial wing elite in order to reproduce their popularity among the rural masses. The party wing elite used these ties to gain access to various state resources important to the agricultural economy and then used their supporters in well-organized national, regional, and grassroots-level party offices to distribute these resources to the landed caste members.…”

Section: Types Of Capitals In the Nehruvian-period Political Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Political Elites' Mass‐Linkage Strategies: Lessons from the Study of Indira Gandhi's Political Habitus

Singh¹

2020

J Historical Sociology

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In this article, I critique available elite-mass linkage theories that depict elites either as structurally determined or rational actors. Taking cues from Bourdieu's political field theory, I argue that elites' mass-linkage strategies are a product of their point of view on politics structured by their trajectory in historically specific structures of politics. I demonstrate my argument by documenting shifts in the mass-linkage strategies of Indira Gandhi, one of the most influential leaders of postcolonial India. The general lesson to be drawn from this study is that it is important to examine political elites' past mass-linkage experiences in historically specific conditions of the political structure in order to explain their current choices of mass-linkage strategies. 1 | INTRODUCTION There is a debate within the political elite-mass linkage scholarship regarding elites' choice of particular masslinkage strategies. Most studies provide structural explanations by examining the masses' socioeconomic conditions, institutional politics, or the history of state development. 1 However, while such studies aim to explain elites' mass-linkage strategies, they appear to tacitly assume a structural-deterministic approach, studying only structural conditions to explain the elites' choices while overlooking the elites' own point of view. Alternatively, they appear to assume that political elites are rational actors who choose their strategies objectively. I claim that these weaknesses of elite-mass linkage theories result from their lack of conceptualization of the relation between the political elite's point of view and structural conditions of politics. Among contemporary sociologists who have engaged with the question of relation between subjectivity and social structure, Bourdieu has provided the most innovative answer, arguing that we should neither assume that only structure exists (like structural determinists) nor assume that only social actors exist (like rational choice theorists). Instead, he claims that we must view subjectivity and social structure as one ontological unit (i.e., as extensions of each other). This unity is not simply a natural given; rather, one must investigate how this relation is formed and transformed over time by an actor's social trajectory in the historically specific structural conditions of a field.

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‘Democracy’ under the Raj: Elections and separate representation in British India

Cited by 10 publications

References 10 publications

Gandhi and Election: An Exploration

Gandhi and Election: An Exploration

Can Habitus Explain Individual Particularities? Critically Appreciating the Operationalization of Relational Logic in Field Theory

Rethinking Political Elites' Mass‐Linkage Strategies: Lessons from the Study of Indira Gandhi's Political Habitus

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