State of Democracy: Essays on Life and Politics of Contemporary Times

Collections on Indian democracy are plentiful. Yet rarely do they question the impact of the ongoing democratic mobilizations on the mundane, everyday lives of ordinary citizens and the world they see around them. Borrowing insights from new research in cultural studies, contemporary literary theory, visual politics, biopolitics, meteorology, to cite a few, State of Democracy in India covers the ground cast aside by existing narratives and analyses of Indian democracy. Pivoted on the experiences of the people and not necessarily the institutions of governance, this collection examines a vast array of markers of democracy under the rubrics of populism, disaster migration, caste contestations, new developments in feminism, and the act of culture. Towards the end of the volume, a meditation on the meaning of writing in COVID-19 induced precarity reflects on the individual and social experiences of living through the pandemic. The guiding principle of the contributions in this volume is that democracy is not merely a psephological number game of vote sharing and swings but encompasses worldviews, touching every department of life, collective and individual. This innovative collection reconfigures our vision of democracy as a force-field of interests and new imaginations, full of possibilities and yet fraught with deep fissures and contestations of views and practices.