India's Politics in Its Vernaculars

It is extraordinary that, given the significance of India as the world’s largest democracy and a Rising Power, we know so little about the conceptual foundations of its political life. Much has been written about political ideas and institutions imported from Europe. And yet no focused, consecutive effort has gone into understanding the ideas that guide most ordinary Indian citizens’ engagement in their political lives. Analyses conducted through Euro-American categories and theoretical frames elevated to the status of universals – rights, identity, public sphere, secularism or indeed ‘politics’ – only generate paradoxes. This project will be a pioneering exploration of India’s demotic political ideas, which it will examine through a close ethnographic and historical scrutiny of the vernacular languages of its political life. Bringing together a team of anthropologists, historians, linguists and scholars of politics, and taking inspiration from the Begriffsgeschichte inquiry into German political concepts, it will (1) lay the empirical and analytical groundwork for a vernacular lexicography of India’s political life; (2) develop an online, open-access Concept Laboratory of Indian Political Languages; and (3) explore with scholars of European political ideas the implications of this work for global political theory. Drawing on the PI’s established work on the demotic categories and values in Indian politics, the project will break major new ground in the study of subcontinental politics; extend the methodological insights of the Begriffsgeschichte project beyond Europe; and make analytical advances towards a truly global political theory, grounded not in the analytical lingua franca of Western political theory, but in the realities of political life around the globe.