Rule of Law, Rule of Life: Caste, Democracy, and the Courts in India

Gilmartin, David

doi:10.1086/ahr.115.2.406

Cited by 5 publications

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“… See Bayly 1999;Dirks 2001;Gilmartin 2010;Gupta 2000;Jaffrelot 2003;Kothari 1970; and Rao 2009. 8 Similarly, the popular understanding of race as a political force in the United States is now typically understood through racial minority politics rather than through the reproduction of white privilege.…”

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Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste

Subramanian

2015

Comp Stud Soc Hist

146

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The politics of meritocracy at the Indian Institutes of Technology illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. I argue that the IIT graduate's status depends on the transformation of privilege into merit, or the conversion of caste capital into modern capital. Analysis of this process calls for a relational approach to merit. My ethnographic research on the southeastern state of Tamilnadu, and on IIT Madras located in the state capital of Chennai, illuminates claims to merit, not simply as the transformation of capital but also as responses to subaltern assertion. Analyzing meritocracy in relation to subaltern politics allows us to see the contextual specificity of such claims: at one moment, they are articulated through the disavowal of caste, at another, through caste affiliation. This marking and unmarking of caste suggests a rethinking of meritocracy, typically assumed to be a modernist ideal that disclaims social embeddedness and disdains the particularisms of caste and race. I show instead that claims to collective belonging and to merit are eminently commensurable, and become more so when subaltern assertion forces privilege into the foreground. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, we are witnessing the re-articulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper-casteness.

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“… 7 See Bayly 1999; Dirks 2001; Gilmartin 2010; Gupta 2000; Jaffrelot 2003; Kothari 1970; and Rao 2009.…”

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Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste

Subramanian

2015

Comp Stud Soc Hist

146

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“…Human knowledge in the democratic context is of democratic connotations (Holden, 1974), whereby democratic values are fundamental in American life, ingrained by socio-political rights (Berlin, 1975;Feinberg, 1978;Jordan, 2010;Leonardo, 2003;Rawls, 1999;Ripstein, 2009;Sjoberg, Gill & Williams, 2001). Equality has been considered critical in creating justice (Gilmartin, 2010;Overstreet, 1915;Rogers, 1921;Todd, 1920;Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) even if the realities reveal the tendency to contraflow toward the reproduction of inequality (Howe, 1997;Kahne, 1994;MacLean, 2006;Powell, Kearney, & Kay, 2004;Shaw, 2001;Superine, 2010), measured by the factors, such as race, socioeconomic status (SES), and school success.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Freedom and equality have been the existential touchstones of human dignity and democratic education since the Declaration of Independence (1776), and sequently the substantive bases of the educational interpretations of social equality since the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). However, the two concepts are too macroscopic to propound the fundamental significance in human rights and to signify the substantive relationship between freedom and equality as the principles of democratic life (Dewey, 1966;Gilmartin, 2010). There have been different opinions regarding whether the two ideas are compatible (Burbules, 1982;Howe, 1992;Ripstein, 2009) or discrete (Iannaccone, 1987;Rodriguez, 1986;Smith, 2001;Taylor & Singh, 2005;Wells, Slayton, & Scott, 2002) although either of the positions hardly explains what bearings the inequalities that persist in the educational field have essentially on democratic ideas?…”

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Microscopic Discourse on Democratic Knowledge: The Knowledge of Freedom Unto Equality

Choi¹

2019

Proceedings of the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting

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This paper is to scrutinize the existential nature of the democratic knowledge through the function of freedom with equality in order to demonstrate that democratic contextual life rests on one's awareness of the democratic knowledge in the democratic-capitalistic-multicultural society. For this study of the knowledge of freedom unto equality are initially examined the contextual nature and the conceptual functions entailed in human existence in the capitalistic-multicultural society. Human nature and social existence are examined in the temporal-spatial context, whereas the conceptual function of freedom with equality is analyzed based on a criterion. Further, the nature of the democratic knowledge is specified into the ontological-contextual continuum and in the epistemological-axiological continuum, each of which is discussed in terms of self-knowledge and the knowledge of the good and the evil to take into account of better choice for the individual good and common good in the capitalistic-multicultural society.

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“…But noteworthy about India's system, in a broader worldwide context, was the deep ongoing tension between the actual politics of elections, in which the pressures of caste, religion, and patronage in popular electioneering remained extremely powerful, and a structure of law that put the autonomy of the enchanted individual at its theoretical heart, however limited its actual reach in transforming elections. It is in fact tempting to see India's electoral structure as designed precisely to keep the two poles of sovereignty's conundrum in tension, thus in practical effect acknowledging, in Heesterman's terms, its fundamental insolubility ( [32], pp. .…”

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Towards a Global History of Voting: Sovereignty, the Diffusion of Ideas, and the Enchanted Individual

Gilmartin

2012

Religions

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This article suggests a framework for moving toward a global history of voting and democracy that focuses less on the diffusion of European ideas (however important those ideas were) than on embedding the history of voting within a worldwide history of ideas on sovereignty. The article posits a general framework for such a history focusing on a -conundrum of sovereignty‖ grounding legitimate rule in a space imagined as simultaneously within and outside worldly society. Rooted in a -secular theology‖ such ideas shaped in the 19th and 20th centuries the establishment of systems of mass voting (including the secret ballot), and the sovereignty of the -people‖ both in Europe and other parts of the world alike, in the process producing an image of the individual voter as an -enchanted individual.‖ The article looks at developments within Europe and in India in these terms.

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Rule of Law, Rule of Life: Caste, Democracy, and the Courts in India

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste

Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste

Microscopic Discourse on Democratic Knowledge: The Knowledge of Freedom Unto Equality

Towards a Global History of Voting: Sovereignty, the Diffusion of Ideas, and the Enchanted Individual

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