Modern South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xiv, 237 pp. US$29.95, paper. ISBN 9780197601877.
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” (180). While most of the recent scholarship on Indian democracy—much of it dominated by political science (e.g., Jaffrelot, Christophe, and Cynthia Schoch, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)—has trained its lens on understanding the nature and making of this crisis, Banerjee takes her cue from the second part of Ambedkar’s cautionary note: [C]onstitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated” (180) to ask a different, more Tocquevillian question. Is India’s soil indeed undemocratic and is it possible for democracy to take root there? The answers are surprising and offer an alternative account of what political subjectivity and associational life in this new India is and what it could look like.
The book makes deft leaps between scales and temporalities as it examines the evolution of democratic culture in two Muslim dominated villages in rural West Bengal. Banerjee’s immersion for over two decades in these villages and her close ties with many of her interlocutors over this period of time lends a remarkable depth and intimacy to the ethnography. The book traces the intersections of the “eventfulness of the everyday” with sweeping transformations in rural agrarian life in the region such as land reforms, the intensification of a more pious form of Islam under the Deoband school, decreasing productivity of agriculture, and the decline of the Left Front after nearly three and a half decades of uninterrupted rule. As changes in agrarian and party politics reconfigure local power, new solidarities are forged amongst non-dominant castes, sharecroppers, and others who have been historically disenfranchised. The exercise of voice and new modes of assertion shape how ordinary people understand their own lives as citizens and the possibilities for change towards a more democratic social imaginary. The book makes its conceptual interventions through four social dramas, all of which except one, lie outside the realm of the formal, political sphere. The book argues that it is through the enactment of these dramas that new democratic subjectivities and forms of social action come into being. However, whether these new social imaginaries are indeed democratic as each chapter suggests, is more convincing in some cases than others.
In chapter 3 for instance, a complex story of shifting allegiances and competing moral vocabularies unfolds as residents of a village decide how to deal with a sexual scandal that has erupted: an out of wedlock pregnancy and the local strongman’s (called “Comrade”) insistence that the two lovers marry despite being blood relatives. The case traces how the strengthened position of sharecroppers in the new agrarian landscape forms an effective opposition to the Comrade’s dubious dealings and monopoly over adjudicating villages disputes in order to arrive at a more just settlement for the young woman involved. Chapter 4 inverts the focus on the relationship between democracy and development as it has been conventionally viewed by political sociologists, to analyze how redistributive social policy can deepen local democracy instead of the other way round. This chapter shows how tenancy reforms in Bengal, which have altered the position of lower caste sharecroppers within the village and their relationship to upper caste landowners, gives rise to new and unlikely forms of cooperation between the two. With the weakening of feudal relations and the increasing assertion of lower caste tenants in claiming their rightful share to the harvest for example, decisions about cultivation are shared more equally, and dignity and prestige across the social hierarchy is rebalanced.
Chapter 5 is an account of how the Islamic ritual of qurbani, or animal sacrifice, and the redistribution of meat amongst neighbours and poorer families on Eid-al-Adha, fosters a more democratic ethic. The sacred values of restraint, abstinence, and giving without the expectation of reciprocity, learnt through this practice cultivates both “ethical reflection” (137) and a “wider moral economy of giving” (140). While the event of the sacrifice is an important reminder of the desirable values that the sacred can offer, it also sits uncomfortably with the rise of growing religious polarization and violence across the country including in its more extreme form of so-called beef lynchings unleashed by Hindu vigilante groups.
The fourth social drama of elections binds the other three with its explicit focus on the political. As the authority of “professional politicians” is gradually wrested away in other spheres of village life, new political settlements are created. When the Left Front government in Bengal is challenged by a new party, the Trinamool Congress, these new solidarities forged at the village level begin to take an electoral form. However, the quick return to old patterns of political violence and repression alluded to at the end seems to blunt the potentiality of active citizenship. The case does raise the question of whether challenges to the authoritarianism of the left, as seen in Bengal, versus authoritarianism of the right, produces a different kind of democratic culture?
The book builds on another recently published volume of village studies in India (Surinder S. Jodhka and Edward Simpson, eds., India’s Villages in the 21st Century: Revisits and Revisions, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020) in reclaiming the rural from its increasing marginalization in scholarship on democracy and citizenship. The village, still at the heart of Indian politics, is seen as a school for democracy where new theory and insights into modern civic life can be generated. The farmers’ protests, one of the few effective challenges to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s hegemonic political project, is just one recent testament to why this perspective matters. The book is also a moving account of how the practice of democracy is personal. It is a reminder of how inner lives and intimate social ties are elemental building blocks of republicanism, which as the last chapter emphasizes, is distinct from democracy. It is the spirit and grammar of how citizens relate to each other and not just to the state. However, whether these slower ruptures, finer recalibrations of power and brief moments of “communitas” within the Indian countryside have the potential to hold the fabric of democratic India together may be a claim where the theoretical reach of the argument may be more optimistic than its grasp.
Anindita Adhikari
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor