Democrazy! Politics in postcolonial India

Undergraduate / Graduate

India is famously known as the world's largest democracy. This course investigates what constitutes democracy in the Global South, the preconditions that have informed its development in India over the last seven decades, and the impossibility of a unidimensional definition for a phenomenon that affects the lives of one and a half billion people every day. We will take up themes which address the elements that goes into the creation of a democratic state - such as the constitution and elections; governance and international relations; law and questions of identity; people and popular culture. With each category, we will ask - What is so distinctively democratic about it? How does it relate to and deviate from conventional understanding of democracy (that is, the rule of the people)? How are they informed by India's colonial and precolonial past? Who are the stake holders of such democracy and whose voice remains marginalized in the process? By attending to some of the most crucial events in independent India - from wars, Emergency, globalization, and emergence of varying shades of political ideologies - we will collectively seek to understand the many lives of democracy that exists from the corridors of the parliament house to a roadside tea stall. In the process, we hope to grasp the extent of the heterogeneity of postcolonial India.