CID214 | Indian Democracy: Foundations and Transformations

The course follows a chronological sequence and takes a combination of approaches to include concepts, narrative history and with a strong focus on the major themes that have animated, driven and made Indian democracy the world’s largest, and most diverse and contentious democracy.

A primary focus will be an interrogation of India’s experiments and remaking of some of the biggest questions of global political modernity. These include affirmative action and social justice, linguistic diversity, territorial sovereignty, religious and cultural recognition, and the ways ideologies were thought anew in India. Scholars writing in the last four decades have consistently described Indian democracy as in a state of crisis,

but this course seeks instead to understand this ‘crisis’ in terms of the often conflictual democratization of Indian society, and to understand how conflict and crisis, in this sense, is generative of democratic change.

By highlighting the role of ideas in driving historical change in India, the course will explore important thinkers of India’s political modernity, including but not limited to prominent figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar. While most scholarship has approached India as a ‘culture’ or ‘society,’ this course will explore India as a locus of the generative and transformative potential of political ideas and their impact in making India an enduring if contested democracy.

The course develops new perspectives on the history of democracy and the Indian remaking of twentieth century ideologies including socialism and conservatism.

The power of narrative and personality will be further contextualised as the key themes of gender, violence, corruption and the role of liberalisation of the economy and the law will be studied in detail.

India boasts one of the highest levels of voter action in the world and the state is an important site of democratic competition that have unsurprisingly held the attention of scholars — primarily anthropologists and political scientists — of Indian democracy. In a departure from those approaches, this paper takes a historical approach to explore the life and nature of democracy beyond elections and the state in India. The mass anti-colonial mobilizations of the interwar period informed and, in many ways made possible the radical and ambitious project of republican democracy. Further, the Constitution of India adopted in 1950 to inaugurate and found the Republic has had lasting consequences for democracy, both in regard to the state and society. The role of new political parties, the Supreme Court, elites, political leadership and mobilizations, press, campaigns and election manifesto rhetoric will be explored in this Paper.

You will be expected to read approximately 100-125 pages a week.