| A close look at the meanings and practices of democracy in India deepened understanding of India’s politics and history and helped identify non-Western forms of democracy. |
Indian politics have become an ever more important object of study for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Indian democracy has long been considered an exceptional case—an unlikely political system for a society marked by high levels of inequality and remarkable fragmentation and diversity. But despite all misgivings, India’s democracy has deepened, broadened, and transformed over the past seven decades, often in ways that belie standard assumptions about the nature and trajectory of democratic politics. Analyzing the meanings and practices of democracy in India therefore offers an important opportunity to rethink key concepts and categories like statehood, popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, and citizenship. Such analysis allows for new accounts of India’s own politics and history and, more broadly, helps us understand the different forms that democracy can take outside of Western Europe and North America. This project initiated a conversation on Indian democracy by bringing together an interdisciplinary team of humanists and social scientists from India, the United States, and Europe.
Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College
University of Chicago
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s research interests are in modern South Asian history and historiography, in postcolonial theory and its impact on history-writing, and in comparative studies of questions and politics of modernity.
He is a founding member of the editorial collective of...
Assistant Professor of Political Theory, Department of Political Science
UCLA
Tejas Parasher is Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. His research interests include the history of political thought; empire and political thought; political thought of anti-colonialism; modern Indian history, c. 1857-1950; comparative...
Professor and Associate Chair, Political Science
University of Chicago
Jennifer Pitts is the author of Boundaries of the International (Harvard 2018), which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the co-editor, with Adom Getachew, of W.E.B. Du Bois: International...
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
University of British Columbia
His research interests include the history of political thought (especially Indian and British), empire and anticolonial thought, popular sovereignty, and ideas of the global.
His forthcoming book, Waiting for the People: Anticolonialism and the Idea of Democracy in India,...
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Reading list for the Theorizing Indian Democracy research project at the Neubauer Collegium
Behind triumphalist narratives about the global reach and success of democracy after 1945 and the Cold War is a more complex story about the unsettled meaning of “democracy” itself, as an idea and...
Once approached primarily through a regional and historical focus on Western Europe and North America, intellectual history has in recent years come to adopt an increasingly expansive, global...
Over the past two decades, scholars in political theory, intellectual history, and related fields have approached the study of European imperialism with renewed attention. This event, sponsored by...
This conference, sponsored by the Theorizing Indian Democracy project at the Neubauer Collegium, explored...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Reading list for the Theorizing Indian Democracy research project at the Neubauer Collegium
This conference, sponsored by the Theorizing Indian Democracy project at the Neubauer Collegium, explored...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Behind triumphalist narratives about the global reach and success of democracy after 1945 and the Cold War is a more complex story about the unsettled meaning of “democracy” itself, as an idea and...
Over the past two decades, scholars in political theory, intellectual history, and related fields have approached the study of European imperialism with renewed attention. This event, sponsored by...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Once approached primarily through a regional and historical focus on Western Europe and North America, intellectual history has in recent years come to adopt an increasingly expansive, global...
