Periodic Reporting for period 2 - POLIVERNACULARS (India's Politics in Its Vernaculars)
Período documentado: 2021-08-01 hasta 2023-01-31
Several members of the research team have already started on ethnographic and archival work in India. I spent the project’s very first pre-Covid month in Rajasthan, as has Core Team Member Lisa Mitchell and Member of the Research Team, Piers Vitebsky. Since travel became possible in the winter of 2021/22, several team members have set out for the field (some are in India now). The rest are planning research trips this autumn and winter.
In June 2022, we were finally able to hold an in-person project launch conference for the entire research team. This was a pivotal event, which underscored the importance of face-to-face meetings. During the three days of intensive conversations we have convened around some core ideas and made plans for the project’s key printed output: a series of edited volumes, which will gather together some of the most historically and linguistically resilient political terms.
Let me offer an example. Across several papers, given by members of the research team during the launch conference, yatra, or “sacred journey,” emerged as a crucial concept. Several studies of our team members showed that yatra does not merely describe the popular practice of political marching in India, but that the act of marching is an essential aspect of India’s political structure and process, just as it is a crucial conceptual element of India’s religious and ritual structure and process. As an articulation of corporate life and a structuring force within a polity, yatra expresses the idea that polity is not something static and transcendent ¬– like ‘the state’, a cognate of standing, status and stasis ¬– but that polity is in essence forward movement, whose enactment is central to the way that it is conceived and engaged with in everyday life. This has a range of heuristic implications, from grasping the significance of India’s political processions to a broader understanding of ‘the political’ in India. The project is already transforming the individual research of each scholar on our team (see publications), but it will also result in a substantive glossary of such key conceptual terms and in a series of volumes (I intend to have three in print before the project’s end in 2027) we plan to publish with Cambridge University Press. The glossary and volumes will be a major pivot in re-orienting the study of India’s politics away from exogenous terms to the locally meaningful.