Pub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1177/2321023021999218
A. Guha
Jyotiprasad Chatterjee and Suprio Basu. Left Front and After: Understanding the Dynamics of Poriborton in West Bengal. New Delhi, India: Sage. 2020. 255 pages. ₹1,195. Suman Nath. People-Party-Policy Interplay in India: Micro-dynamics of Everyday Politics in West Bengal, c. 2008–2016. New Delhi, India: Routledge. 2020. 221 pages. ₹995.
{"title":"Book Review: Jyotiprasad Chatterjee and Suprio Basu. Left Front and After: Understanding the Dynamics of Poriborton in West Bengal and Suman Nath. People-Party-Policy Interplay in India: Micro-dynamics of Everyday Politics in West Bengal, c. 2008–2016","authors":"A. Guha","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999218","url":null,"abstract":"Jyotiprasad Chatterjee and Suprio Basu. Left Front and After: Understanding the Dynamics of Poriborton in West Bengal. New Delhi, India: Sage. 2020. 255 pages. ₹1,195. Suman Nath. People-Party-Policy Interplay in India: Micro-dynamics of Everyday Politics in West Bengal, c. 2008–2016. New Delhi, India: Routledge. 2020. 221 pages. ₹995.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"139 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999218","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48311632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Madhav Khosla. India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy","authors":"Alisha Dhingra","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999216","url":null,"abstract":"Madhav Khosla. India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2020. 219 pages. ₹599.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"137 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999216","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47656520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-08DOI: 10.1177/2321023021999140
Jean‐Thomas Martelli
This ethnographic account chronicles the journey of one of the largest anti-government protests since India’s independence. It examines the pivotal role of students—initially activists and then first-time participants—in crystallizing challenges to the ruling dispensation, not only by opposing it directly, but through subverting its way of claiming representation. More specifically, it is the strategic reuse of the pervasive anti-institutional and anti-elite discourse at the top—while replacing its majoritarianism with inclusiveness—that enabled protesters to disembody the populist modality of the current Indian Prime Minister. Protesters’ short-lived success was achieved through an enactment of the popular, embodied in a diffused fashion by faceless, peaceful and feminized protesting masses. The popular successfully appropriated the claim to be the people through invoking a ‘derivative’ nationalist repertoire in part shared by the government, emptying its anti-minorities subtext through appropriating floating signifiers of patriotic belonging such as the Indian constitution, the flag and the anthem. By engaging on how relatively small communities of politicized students used the campus ecology and its neighbouring spaces as territorial and ideational nodal points for the mobilization of less politicized cohorts, the article underlines their significance in the political articulation of dissent in contemporary Indian democracy.
{"title":"Can the Popular Disembody Populism? Students and the Re-appropriation of the Nationalist Floating Signifier in Contemporary Indian Politics","authors":"Jean‐Thomas Martelli","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999140","url":null,"abstract":"This ethnographic account chronicles the journey of one of the largest anti-government protests since India’s independence. It examines the pivotal role of students—initially activists and then first-time participants—in crystallizing challenges to the ruling dispensation, not only by opposing it directly, but through subverting its way of claiming representation. More specifically, it is the strategic reuse of the pervasive anti-institutional and anti-elite discourse at the top—while replacing its majoritarianism with inclusiveness—that enabled protesters to disembody the populist modality of the current Indian Prime Minister. Protesters’ short-lived success was achieved through an enactment of the popular, embodied in a diffused fashion by faceless, peaceful and feminized protesting masses. The popular successfully appropriated the claim to be the people through invoking a ‘derivative’ nationalist repertoire in part shared by the government, emptying its anti-minorities subtext through appropriating floating signifiers of patriotic belonging such as the Indian constitution, the flag and the anthem. By engaging on how relatively small communities of politicized students used the campus ecology and its neighbouring spaces as territorial and ideational nodal points for the mobilization of less politicized cohorts, the article underlines their significance in the political articulation of dissent in contemporary Indian democracy.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"7 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999140","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47904475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-08DOI: 10.1177/2321023021999177
P. Jha
This article identifies two main perspectives on flood control: the traditional and the modern hydrological. The objective here is to look at the contest between them from the point of view of the politics of knowledge. The traditional perspective views floods as a part of life and focuses on people’s wisdom or local knowledge of flood control. The hydrological approach, on the other hand, is mostly concerned with taming a river and views floods as a disaster that ought to be controlled and possibly eliminated. This perspective dominates the policy of the post-colonial state in India. There are five vantage points, such as historical context, state policy, political economy, collective action and epistemology, to understand the politics of knowledge around floods. In the first section, through history we discuss the transition from the colonial to post-colonial India on the issues of floods, dams and embankments. The second section of this article describes the flood policy and politics around it, from Patna Flood Conference (1937) to Disaster Management Act, 2005. In Political Economy section the article explores the link between land-holdings, tenancy and floods and also observes how agriculture has changed due to floods. The fourth section, Forms of Collective Action, explores the politics of collective action. Epistemology section presents the debate of lokvidyavs versus rajyavidya or living with floods versus hydrological knowledge.
{"title":"State, Floods and Politics of Knowledge: A Case of the Mahananda Basin of Bihar","authors":"P. Jha","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999177","url":null,"abstract":"This article identifies two main perspectives on flood control: the traditional and the modern hydrological. The objective here is to look at the contest between them from the point of view of the politics of knowledge. The traditional perspective views floods as a part of life and focuses on people’s wisdom or local knowledge of flood control. The hydrological approach, on the other hand, is mostly concerned with taming a river and views floods as a disaster that ought to be controlled and possibly eliminated. This perspective dominates the policy of the post-colonial state in India. There are five vantage points, such as historical context, state policy, political economy, collective action and epistemology, to understand the politics of knowledge around floods. In the first section, through history we discuss the transition from the colonial to post-colonial India on the issues of floods, dams and embankments. The second section of this article describes the flood policy and politics around it, from Patna Flood Conference (1937) to Disaster Management Act, 2005. In Political Economy section the article explores the link between land-holdings, tenancy and floods and also observes how agriculture has changed due to floods. The fourth section, Forms of Collective Action, explores the politics of collective action. Epistemology section presents the debate of lokvidyavs versus rajyavidya or living with floods versus hydrological knowledge.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"91 - 104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999177","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42131916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-08DOI: 10.1177/2321023021999179
Pushpa Singh
There is an existing debate on the epistemic hegemony of the knowledge system of industrial agriculture. The two sides posit a critique and offer alternatives from already existing practices of agriculture. Most often, the critique is on hard material grounds, while the alternatives are offered in terms of the recovery of a cultural set of practices. This article posits a fresh critique to complement the existing one and expands the scope of the alternative to make critical appraisals of existing knowledge systems. For the first, it critically analyses each of the presumptions that underlie the argument of the dominant vision and for the second, this article identifies, analyses and aims to foreground those perspectives that contested major policy decisions and the reasons for their subsequent marginalization. The issue of seed sovereignty—that of women farmers specially, retaining the authority to breed and propagate seeds for farming—is the focal point of this study.
{"title":"Politics of Knowledge in Development: Explorations in Seed Sovereignty","authors":"Pushpa Singh","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999179","url":null,"abstract":"There is an existing debate on the epistemic hegemony of the knowledge system of industrial agriculture. The two sides posit a critique and offer alternatives from already existing practices of agriculture. Most often, the critique is on hard material grounds, while the alternatives are offered in terms of the recovery of a cultural set of practices. This article posits a fresh critique to complement the existing one and expands the scope of the alternative to make critical appraisals of existing knowledge systems. For the first, it critically analyses each of the presumptions that underlie the argument of the dominant vision and for the second, this article identifies, analyses and aims to foreground those perspectives that contested major policy decisions and the reasons for their subsequent marginalization. The issue of seed sovereignty—that of women farmers specially, retaining the authority to breed and propagate seeds for farming—is the focal point of this study.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"105 - 117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999179","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45833031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-08DOI: 10.1177/2321023021999176
Madhulika Banerjee
The parameters of modern knowledge systems are clearly showing fault lines—that if there is a continuation of the technological systems at the heart of development, neglecting the twin issues of ecology and equity—there is a serious threat to human existence. This article seeks to answer a specific question: in the context of the twenty-first century search of offering alternatives to the hegemonic development paradigm, what kind of knowledges of production in society could possibly be best developed at this point in history? It argues that the answer lies in ‘already existing knowledge systems ( AEKS)’, accompanied by critical thinking on production, distribution and consumption systems. Locating the production of knowledge in five spaces—historical context, policy formulation, political economic structures, forms of collective action and articulation of contested epistemologies—it argues that when AEKS are understood both in form and transformation in these spaces, that the possibilities they offer for substantial alternatives can be explored.
{"title":"The Politics of Knowledge in Development: An Analytical Frame","authors":"Madhulika Banerjee","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999176","url":null,"abstract":"The parameters of modern knowledge systems are clearly showing fault lines—that if there is a continuation of the technological systems at the heart of development, neglecting the twin issues of ecology and equity—there is a serious threat to human existence. This article seeks to answer a specific question: in the context of the twenty-first century search of offering alternatives to the hegemonic development paradigm, what kind of knowledges of production in society could possibly be best developed at this point in history? It argues that the answer lies in ‘already existing knowledge systems ( AEKS)’, accompanied by critical thinking on production, distribution and consumption systems. Locating the production of knowledge in five spaces—historical context, policy formulation, political economic structures, forms of collective action and articulation of contested epistemologies—it argues that when AEKS are understood both in form and transformation in these spaces, that the possibilities they offer for substantial alternatives can be explored.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"78 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999176","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46403320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-27DOI: 10.1177/2321023021999142
Anamika Ajay
Literature on Indian politics has largely under-examined the role of the family in shaping party politics with the exception of the studies on dynasticism. There is a paucity of research that looks at the complex ways in which intimate lives and party politics are intertwined. This article contributes to the existing feminist analyses of Indian party politics by conceptualizing politics and political labour in a way that does not exclude the role of the family. It presents the case study of a village in northern Kerala, which has been witnessing heightened political conflicts to show how personal experiences and family disputes get politicized. As domestic and political spheres bleed into each other, political parties become hugely dependent on feminine ideals and women’s everyday labour, affects and sociality to survive electoral competitions. Yet, the patriarchal family and masculinized local party leadership use gender ideologies to celebrate hypermasculine political participation, undervalue women’s labour and limit their political aspirations.
{"title":"Engendering Political Labour: Findings from a Kerala Village","authors":"Anamika Ajay","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999142","url":null,"abstract":"Literature on Indian politics has largely under-examined the role of the family in shaping party politics with the exception of the studies on dynasticism. There is a paucity of research that looks at the complex ways in which intimate lives and party politics are intertwined. This article contributes to the existing feminist analyses of Indian party politics by conceptualizing politics and political labour in a way that does not exclude the role of the family. It presents the case study of a village in northern Kerala, which has been witnessing heightened political conflicts to show how personal experiences and family disputes get politicized. As domestic and political spheres bleed into each other, political parties become hugely dependent on feminine ideals and women’s everyday labour, affects and sociality to survive electoral competitions. Yet, the patriarchal family and masculinized local party leadership use gender ideologies to celebrate hypermasculine political participation, undervalue women’s labour and limit their political aspirations.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"37 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999142","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48787167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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