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Mukulika Banerjee focuses on both India's institutional form and its democratic culture, arguing that the project of democracy is incomplete unless it is accompanied by a continual cultivation of active, republican citizenship. Covering the period from 1998-2013, Cultivating Democracy provides an anthropological analysis of the relationship of formal political democracy and the cultivation of active citizenship in a rural setting in India. Banerjee's analysis shows how India's agrarian village society produces the social imaginaries required for democratic and republican values. More broadly, she shows that democracy is not simply a product of institutional design but also requires continual civic cultivation by both parties and the citizens themselves.
Table des matières
- Preface
- I. The Event and Democracy
- II. Context: The village in a democracy
- III. Scandal: Cultivating competition
- IV. Harvest: Cultivating solidarity
- V. Qurbani: Cultivating faith
- VI. Election: Cultivating citizenship
- VII. Cultivating democracy
- Acknowledgements
A propos de l'auteur
Mukulika Banerjee is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her books include Why India Votes?, The Pathan Unarmed, The Sari, and the edited volume Muslim Portraits.
Résumé
An ethnographic study of Indian democracy that shows how agrarian life creates values of citizenship and active engagement that are essential for the cultivation of democracy.
Cultivating Democracy provides a compelling ethnographic analysis of the relationship between formal political institutions and everyday citizenship in rural India. Banerjee draws on deep engagement with the people and social life in two West Bengal villages from 1998-2013, during election campaigns and in the times between, to show how the micro-politics of their day-to-day life builds active engagement with the macro-politics of state and nation. Her sensitive analysis focuses on several "events" in the life of the villages shows how India's agrarian rural society helps create practices and conceptual space for these citizens to be effective participants in India's great democratic exercises. Specifically, she shows how the villagers' creative practices around their kinship, farming and religion, while navigating encounters with local communist cadres, constitute a vital and continuing cultivation of those republican virtues of cooperation, civility, solidarity and vigilance which the visionary Ambedkar considered essential for the success of Indian democracy. At a time when so much of that constitutional vision is under threat, this book provides a crucial scholarly rebuttal to all, on Right or Left, who dismiss rural citizens' political capacities and democratic values. This book will appeal to anyone interested in India's political culture and future, its rural society, or the continuing relevance of political anthropology.
Texte suppl.
Mukulika Banerjee's book Cultivating Democracy makes a significant, if quieter intervention into a moment of complex crisis that Indian democracy finds itself in-a crisis in which free and fair elections are largely upheld alongside the serious erosion of democratic institutions and norms. The relentless attack on civil and political liberties, of Muslim minorities in particular, backed by an intensifying Hindu nationalism, makes Ambedkar's words prescient: "democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic".
