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    Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India

    Cultivating Democracy by Banerjee, Mukulika;

    Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India

    Series: Modern South Asia;

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    Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
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    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP USA
    • Date of Publication 9 November 2021

    • ISBN 9780197601877
    • Binding Paperback
    • No. of pages256 pages
    • Size 157x236x20 mm
    • Weight 363 g
    • Language English
    • 153

    Categories

    Short description:

    Mukulika Banerjee focuses on both India's institutional form and its democratic culture, arguing that the project of democracy is incomplete unless it is accompanied by a continual cultivation of active, republican citizenship. Covering the period from 1998-2013, Cultivating Democracy provides an anthropological analysis of the relationship of formal political democracy and the cultivation of active citizenship in a rural setting in India. Banerjee's analysis shows how India's agrarian village society produces the social imaginaries required for democratic and republican values. More broadly, she shows that democracy is not simply a product of institutional design but also requires continual civic cultivation by both parties and the citizens themselves.

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    Long description:

    An ethnographic study of Indian democracy that shows how agrarian life creates values of citizenship and active engagement that are essential for the cultivation of democracy.

    Cultivating Democracy provides a compelling ethnographic analysis of the relationship between formal political institutions and everyday citizenship in rural India. Banerjee draws on deep engagement with the people and social life in two West Bengal villages from 1998-2013, during election campaigns and in the times between, to show how the micro-politics of their day-to-day life builds active engagement with the macro-politics of state and nation. Her sensitive analysis focuses on several "events" in the life of the villages shows how India's agrarian rural society helps create practices and conceptual space for these citizens to be effective participants in India's great democratic exercises. Specifically, she shows how the villagers' creative practices around their kinship, farming and religion, while navigating encounters with local communist cadres, constitute a vital and continuing cultivation of those republican virtues of cooperation, civility, solidarity and vigilance which the visionary Ambedkar considered essential for the success of Indian democracy. At a time when so much of that constitutional vision is under threat, this book provides a crucial scholarly rebuttal to all, on Right or Left, who dismiss rural citizens' political capacities and democratic values. This book will appeal to anyone interested in India's political culture and future, its rural society, or the continuing relevance of political anthropology.

    Cultivating Democracy will be essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of citizenship in contemporary India, and in political change in West Bengal. It also serves as an effective reminder of the profound changes to Indian and West Bengal democracy and politics over the past decade.

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    Table of Contents:

    Preface
    I. The Event and Democracy
    II. Context: The village in a democracy
    III. Scandal: Cultivating competition
    IV. Harvest: Cultivating solidarity
    V. Qurbani: Cultivating faith
    VI. Election: Cultivating citizenship
    VII. Cultivating democracy
    Acknowledgements

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