It became abundantly clear at the project launch conference that we are setting up an entirely new way of thinking about Indian politics, and that this will help to plot the outlines of a new field of “vernacular political theory” for the wider world. As field and archival research has been delayed by two years, at the conference most members of the research team presented analyses of material gathered during previous research. In their pieces, they appealed to matters of vernacular method and analysis that we discussed in the Fugitive Words seminar series, and which the Core Team had discussed in the course of its reading groups. Every scholar involved noted that these new methods and forms of analysis were yielding a large number of new insights, enlivening their analyses previously stuck in circles of Western Political Theory – from “secularisation theory” to “governmentality” – and offered few new insights into India’s political life. Most enlivening was the very focus on the vernaculars – on the language of everyday political life – as the source of both empirical and analytical insights.
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.
