New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2022. xx, 404 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 9788194534815.
From Hegel and James Mill’s denigrations to Jawaharlal Nehru’s nationalist recovery, the putative “suitability” or “unsuitability” of the Indian populace for popular self-governance—well aside from its theoretical centrality to the Indian freedom movement—remained a long and constant referent in the theorizing of democratic forms in the modern world. As Victorian theory yielded to postcolonial practice, new accounts of Indian constitutionalism, like Granville Austin’s The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1966), shared conceptual space with the theoretical frameworks offered by W. H. Morris-Jones, whose glossary of Indian democracy—its “saintly idioms,” “mediating framework,” and “bargaining federalism”—set the stage for further explorations by another generation of political theorists, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph most influential among them.
By the 1990s, the study of Indian democracy and Indian political society, once largely the domain of political science, had splintered across multiple disciplines and domains. As the fissures of the Indian political project—never singular, but once read with greater coherence—grew stark, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians took vastly different approaches in their accounts of how Indian political subjectivity and practice had been transformed over the first half-century of postcolonial nationhood. The study of Indian democracy is, in 2022, a cacophonous project, where a flourishing of accounts of democratic and anti-democratic practice offer competing models for the study of Indian popular politics. Two very fine and somewhat recent volumes—the more staid Oxford Companion to Politics in India (eds. Niraja Gopal Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), and the rather more expressive Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations (eds. Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and Anand Vaidya, London: Pluto Press, 2019)—explore Indian democracy’s consolidation and fracture with great breadth.
To a flourishing of new literature on Indian democracy and popular politics comes The Hunger of the Republic, an admirable if uneven collection of canonical and less-canonical studies of Indian political life, divided into three broad sections. The first, “Narratives of State,” is the most theoretically moored, anchored around accounts of democracy and modernity in the twentieth-century Indian context; this section includes the most well-known of the book’s collected texts. A second section grounded primarily in media theory, “Disappearances,” offers accounts of the changing Indian public sphere, casting the end of a population notion of “the people” as finding new forms in cinema, language, “cyberpublics,” and public space. The third section, “Surface / Depth: Meanings of the Heroic and the Ordinary,” foregrounds questions of violence and suffering, from the 1985 Bhopal disaster to the Gujarat pogroms to the structural violence which permeates caste relations.
The volume, “a text and visual assemblage,” reads as several projects in one. It is, at first blush, a compilation of 19 short pieces on Indian democracy, exceptionally broadly conceived. At the same time, it is something of an archival project, representing a wide, if not comprehensive, range of approaches to the transformation of questions of welfare, justice, citizenship, and peoplehood in India in the 1990s and early 2000s. (This temporal framing is the author’s; in fact, the essays here span from 1975 to 2017, making an implicitly provocative case for something like the “long 1990s” as an analytical framework for Indian political life.) A rich collection of visual references— photography and collage art, but also book covers, legal judgements, album covers, maps, letters, and film stills—represents the book’s third intertwined project, a set of assemblages which serve as visual counterpoint to the book’s various political provocations.
Some of these pieces, frequently reproduced or referenced elsewhere, will be familiar ones to contemporary students of Indian political life. Rajni Kothari’s Democracy: In Search of a Theory (2005), Sudipta Kaviraj’s The Imaginary Institution of India (1992), Utsa Patnaik’s The Republic of Hunger (2004), Hamza Alavi’s India and the Colonial Mode of Production (1975), Gyanendra Pandey’s In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India (1991), and Veena Das’s Suffering, Legitimacy and Healing (1995) are staple essays in courses on Indian democracy, history, and political life.
The essays by theorists who are less well known to readers outside of South Asia will perhaps be of greater marginal value for audiences in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Sharmila Rege’s “Interrogating the Thesis of ‘Irrational Deification,’” an account of Dalit mass gatherings in honour of B. R. Ambedkar, is a critical essay by a pioneering Dalit feminist sociologist not read widely outside of India. M. S. S. Pandian’s “Void and Memory: Story of a Statue,” a short account of the removal of a statue of Kannagi, the female protagonist of the Tamil epic Silappathikaram, is an elegant mediation on memory and erasure in Dravidian history. Jayanth Kaikini’s “Unframed” is the volume’s standout piece, a 1993 short story translated from the Kannada, recounting the scenes of normalcy in a frame-makers’ shop against the back of communal rioting, which refracts the uneasy tensions of those long 1990s as well as many of the more analytic contributions.
The Hunger of the Republic is a valuable albeit difficult collection. Its curation is inspired, though its audience is somewhat unclear, with familiar and foundational texts side-by-side with more obscure selections. (The book is a result of a collaboration between Tulika Books, an ambitious Delhi publisher, and West Heavens, a joint Indian-Chinese project comparing political and cultural modernity in both contexts; both are done a disservice by a curious choice of blurry typeface rendering the book not only conceptually but also visually daunting.) Such flaws aside, this is a rich and well-curated selection of analyses of Indian democracy’s radical transformations since the 1980s—of value as both an unorthodox collection and as an archive of Indian political thought in a transformative set of decades.
Benjamin Siegel
Boston University, Boston