Rethinking Postcolonial Democracy: An Examination of the Politics of Lower‐Caste Empowerment in North India

Abstract

With this article, I seek to contribute to an anthropological understanding of democracy through an examination of the politics of lower-caste empowerment in Bihar, a populous state in north India. I argue that democracy has to be examined within the context of historical processes that have shaped the larger political economy within which democratic practice unfolds, revealing the specificities of India's postcolonial democracy.Caste as political identity extends democratic practice into the relations of everyday life, challenging routine forms of violence and inequality and collapsing any pretense to a separate "political sphere." An explicitly lower-caste politics generated political subjectivities based on a notion of popular sovereignty as rule by the lower-caste majority, and I show the ways in which this disruptive politics transformed village life. This underscores that Bihar represents an "alternate democracy" but also that we need alternate frameworks for understanding the multifarious experience of democracy today. [democracy, postcolonial, caste, India]

Does ‘Landlordism’ Still Matter? Reflections on Agrarian Change inIndia

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The rhetoric of women and children's rights in Indian psychiatry

“…As such, they drew upon the liberal democratic conceptions of personhood in which individual freedom and equality are essential. Yet, studies of political processes in North India suggest that liberal democratic ideas are not central to the consciousness of non-elite participants; rather, the rights of the (caste or religious) community tend to be ideologically pre-eminent (Witsoe 2011). To Indian elites, such as the psychiatric professionals discussed in this paper, the democratic communalism of the non-elite 'masses' is fed by the irrationalities of superstitious 'tradition' (Hansen 1999, 200).…”

Postdemocracy and a politics of prefiguration

“…Although these vary from context to context, they often share basic features: one is individualized, one's voice carries equal weight to everyone else in society, one is able (and even expected to articulate ones own interests and desires, but is also expected to be deliberative and considerate of others' points of view. A key finding of anthropological studies of democracy is that while these modes of personhood may be embraced in some sociocultural contexts (Banerjee 2014;Witsoe 2011), in others they may be rejected, and seen as being in deep tension with local ideas about personhood, authority, and how decisions should be made (Ferme 1998;Hickel 2015).…”