Mukulika Banerjee delivered a lecture on ‘Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India’. It was chaired by Ravi Sundaram.
This lecture will present anthropological study of democracy in India. It will draw on deep ethnographic engagement with the people and social life in two villages in India over a period of 15 years, both during elections and in the time in between them, to show how these two temporalities connect. The ethnographic microscope on a single paddy growing setting allows us to examine how the various social institutions of kinship, economy, and religion are critical sites for the continual civic cultivation of cooperation, vigilance, redistribution, inviolate commitment, and hope-values that are essential for democracy.
Mukulika Banerjee was inaugural Director of the LSE South Asia Centre from 2015-2020 and is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her books include Why India Votes? (2014), The Pathan Unarmed (2001) and The Sari (2003) and edited Muslim Portraits (2007). Her monograph Cultivating Democracy: Politics and citizenship in agrarian India has just been published by OUP (New York).
Ravi Sundaram is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Tuesday, 8 March 2022, 4 pm, Zoom https://bit.ly/3v8bPu3
