Periodic Reporting for period 2 - POLIVERNACULARS (India's Politics in Its Vernaculars)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-08-01 al 2023-01-31
India’s Politics in Its Vernaculars is a study in India’s everyday political language across India’s seventeen vernaculars. The project’s central aim is a fundamental re-orientation of India’s political theory away from the terms of Western Political Theory and towards conceptual terms used in India’s actual political life. Analyses conducted through Euro-American categories and theoretical frames – rights, identity, public sphere, secularism or indeed ‘politics’ – often leave analysts puzzled about the course of India’s political life. The project is a field-changing exploration of India’s demotic political ideas, examined through a close ethnographic and historical scrutiny of the vernacular languages of its political life. Taking inspiration from the Begriffsgeschichte inquiry into German political concepts, the team (1) is laying the empirical and analytical groundwork for a vernacular lexicography of India’s political life; (2) developing an online, open-access Concept Laboratory of Indian Political Languages; and (3) exploring comparatively the implications of this work for global political theory. The project promises to solve a number of deep puzzles that the application of Western Political Theory to India’s actual political life generates. Why do the poor vote more that the rich, the illiterate more than the educated, villagers more than urban elites? Why do illiteracy and destitution fail to spawn electoral apathy? How can political mobilisation go hand in hand with politician-worship? Why do strident anti-corruption campaigns fail to prevent voters from electing criminals into public office? And how can such a deeply hierarchical society form the foundation for one of the world’s most vibrant democracies? Our broader aim is not only to reorient analysis of local politics towards demotic political language and thought, but also to work out methods to do so in other regions. The implications of this profound decolonisation of India’s political theory, for understanding Indian politics as much as for thinking about politics in the wider world, reach far beyond academia. It will vastly improve the comprehension of India’s politics among audiences ranging from educated non-specialists to India’s own globalised elites, as well as diplomats and representatives of international organisations. It shall also inspire scholars working on other regions to begin decolonising their political analyses.
Despite the project’s start being delayed by the 24 months of the Covid-19 pandemic, which made it impossible to conduct ethnographic and archival work in India before February 2022, we have done a great deal of conceptual, digital, preparatory and coordination work. We launched the project website (https://politicalvernaculars.net/about) and are currently working on the architecture of the Concept Lab, which is its chief component, refining our ideas for the inward and outward-facing parts of the website, ones to be used by members of the research team and those for broader audiences. The website is now ready to receive content that will emerge out of the research we embarked upon since February 2022. Throughout this time, we ran a series of on-line seminars, entitled Fugitive Words (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/series/fugitive-words-indias-political-ideas-in-its-vernaculars) during which members of the research team as well as guests of the project spoke about features of political lexicons they have encountered in prior research, and discussed methods for their analysis. The seminars served the important purpose of team building at a time when we could not meet one another in person, and of familiarising team members with one another’s work. We launched a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC15IwzeVmSjGFLs0l1__N4A) where most of these seminars (some authors chose to keep theirs in-team) are available. The project’s Core Team held a regular fortnightly reading group, during which we read a number of key theoretical texts, which were also discussed at the project launch conference in June 2022.
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.
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.
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.
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.