How India Became Democratic explores the greatest experiment in democratic human history. It tell... more How India Became Democratic explores the greatest experiment in democratic human history. It tells the untold story of the preparation of the electoral roll on the basis of universal adult franchise in the world's largest democracy. Ornit Shani offers a new view of the institutionalisation of democracy in India, and of the way democracy captured the political imagination of its diverse peoples. Turning all adult Indians into voters against the backdrop of the partition of India and Pakistan, and in anticipation of the drawing up of a constitution, was a staggering task. Indians became voters before they were citizens - by the time the constitution came into force in 1950, the abstract notion of universal franchise and electoral democracy were already grounded. Drawing on rich archival materials, Shani shows how the Indian people were a driving force in the making of democratic citizenship as they struggled for their voting rights.
Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/how-india-became-democratic-citizenship-and-making-universal-franchise#OKcAIWpsuqo8pksC.99
Belligerent Hindu nationalism, accompanied by recurring communal violence between Hindus and Musl... more Belligerent Hindu nationalism, accompanied by recurring communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, has become a compelling force in Indian politics over the last two decades. Ornit Shani's book examines the rise of Hindu nationalism, asking why distinct groups of Hindus, deeply divided by caste, mobilised on the basis of unitary Hindu nationalism, and why the Hindu nationalist rhetoric about the threat of the impoverished Muslim minority was so persuasive to the Hindu majority. Using evidence from communal violence in Gujarat, Shani argues that the growth of communalism was not simply a result of Hindu-Muslim antagonisms, but was driven by intensifying tensions among Hindus, nurtured by changes in the relations between castes and associated state policies. These, in turn, were frequently displaced onto Muslims, thus enabling caste conflicts to develop and deepen communal rivalries. The book offers a challenge to previous scholarship on the rise of communalism, which will be welcomed by students and professionals.
Clark-Decès/A Companion to the Anthropology of India, 2011
... AGNS (Akhil Gujarat Nav Rachana Samiti with Akhil Gujarat Vali Maha Mandal) 1985 A Challenge ... more ... AGNS (Akhil Gujarat Nav Rachana Samiti with Akhil Gujarat Vali Maha Mandal) 1985 A Challenge to Reservation. Ahmedabad, Apr. 20. ... Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chatterji, Angana P. 2009 Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India's Present; Narratives from Orissa. ...
The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constituti... more The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constitution-making and democracy. Conventionally it has been analysed as a founding moment. Its success against multiple odds has been explained as resulting from a vision and consensus among the elite over what would become a pedagogical text for an ‘ignorant’ and undemocratic public. This focus among academics on political elites, and an underlying assumption that constitutional details were beyond the public’s imagination, limited the scope of investigations largely to the Constituent Assembly debates. By directing the inquiry away from these debates towards hitherto unstudied documents, this article offers a paradigm shift in the method of research and understanding of India’s constitution-making. It explores the constitution as it emerged from beyond the Constituent Assembly through engagement with its making among diverse publics. In doing so, it shows that the Indian constitution was not ...
The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constituti... more The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constitution-making and democracy. Conventionally it has been analysed as a founding moment. Its success against multiple odds has been explained as resulting from a vision and consensus among the elite over what would become a pedagogical text for an ‘ignorant’ and undemocratic public. This focus among academics on political elites, and an underlying assumption that constitutional details were beyond the public’s imagination, limited the scope of investigations largely to the Constituent Assembly debates. By directing the inquiry away from these debates towards hitherto unstudied documents, this article offers a paradigm shift in the method of research and understanding of India’s constitution-making. It explores the constitution as it emerged from beyond the Constituent Assembly through engagement with its making among diverse publics. In doing so, it shows that the Indian constitution was not simply founded and granted from above, but came about through many smaller acts of assembly away from the Constitution Hall. It was the public who set normative expectations and tried to educate the members of the Constituent Assembly, and this was critical for the constitution’s future reception and endurance.
This article explores the engagements of people and various civic organizations, even from the ma... more This article explores the engagements of people and various civic organizations, even from the margins of society, with the making of India's constitution during the early stages of its drafting. Using hitherto unstudied archival materials, it examines constitutional visions, demands, conceptions of inclusion, and constitutional proposals, as these were expressed at the time by people outside of the Constituent Assembly. The conventional understanding has been that the constitution was a product of elite consensual decision-making, and that India's nationalist leaders endowed it from above. This article shifts the historical inquiry away from the Constituent Assembly onto the ways the constitution-making process was experienced, related to, and understood from below by ‘We the People’ – those on behalf of whom the constitution would ultimately be enacted. Hence, it constructs a new perspective on the making of India's constitution. In doing so, the article throws light o...
Shani's article examines a key aspect of the rupture from colonial rule in the making of independ... more Shani's article examines a key aspect of the rupture from colonial rule in the making of independent India, which was critical to its process of democratization. This undertaking was the preparation of the first elections on the basis of universal suffrage. Implementing and planning for the enrollment of almost 174 million people was a staggering bureaucratic undertaking. This article investigates the process of devising the instructions for the preparation of the preliminary draft electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise, in anticipation of the constitution. It suggests that in effect, this process became an all-India administrative exercise in guided democratic political imagination, which diffused the notion of universal franchise within the administrative machinery around the country. This exercise resulted in instituting and operationalizing the procedural aspect of the idea of equality. It also set in motion the creation of a new national polity for India. By contrasting this process with colonial discourses on franchise and preparation of electoral rolls, focusing particularly on the enrollment of women and the attitudes toward other groups at the margins of the franchise, the article explores key changes in the bureaucratic political imagination in the transition from colonial rule to independence.
This paper explores the development of multiple conceptions of citizenship in India in an attempt... more This paper explores the development of multiple conceptions of citizenship in India in an attempt to understand how, despite profound social divisions, India's nationhood holds together. The paper advances the proposition that the Indian polity incorporated a deeply divided and conflict-ridden population by offering multiple notions of citizenship upon which a sense of membership in the nation, and a share in the enterprise of the state, could be sought. By negotiating and balancing distinct overlapping conceptions for competing membership claims in the nation, diverse social groups could find a viable place in the nation, without entirely resigning their various group identities. The analysis focuses as a lens on the Muslim citizens who are amongst the most excluded members in the whole body of Indian citizenry. It provides perspectives into how even some of the most marginalised members in Indian society found sufficient prospects for a meaningful participation within the nation. Multiple conceptions of citizenship enabled the state to manage its diverse social groups and contain many of their underlying conflicts.
This article examines Gandhi’s legacy in the shaping of citizenship in India and its implications... more This article examines Gandhi’s legacy in the shaping of citizenship in India and its implications for the resilience of Indian nationhood. I contend that a conception of citizenship that can be extrapolated from Gandhi, and that persisted as a practice, as well as a political language, instilled in the dynamics of Indian citizenship attributes that played an important role in securing the resilience of Indian unity and its democratic viability. The Gandhian conception of citizenship was developed after independence in conjunction with three other primary concomitant notions of citizenship. The ongoing multifaceted interplay between the four competing conceptions of citizenship, and the tensions and shifting balance of power between them became part of the mechanism that enabled the sustainability of some conflicts within the Indian polity to the detriment of other more threatening divisions. In the effect of this process Indian citizenship has been able to inhibit the tensions that had the potential to break the country apart.
This study explores the nature and practice of state power in ordinary times, as it developed in ... more This study explores the nature and practice of state power in ordinary times, as it developed in Gujarat from the 1980s, in an attempt to understand how the communal harnessing of the state that manifested in large parts of Gujarat in 2002 was possible. In particular, it examines everyday expressions of public corruption around the politics of bootlegging. In the context of systemic corruption at the local level in routine times there was little difference between violators of the law and its purported guardians, such as state law-enforcement mechanisms and politicians. From the 1980s, practices of public power in Ahmedabad, infused by routine forms of corruption, became entwined with deepening ethno-Hindu politics and a strong anti-Muslim bent, thus readily enabling the communal harnessing of state power in 2002.
How India Became Democratic explores the greatest experiment in democratic human history. It tell... more How India Became Democratic explores the greatest experiment in democratic human history. It tells the untold story of the preparation of the electoral roll on the basis of universal adult franchise in the world's largest democracy. Ornit Shani offers a new view of the institutionalisation of democracy in India, and of the way democracy captured the political imagination of its diverse peoples. Turning all adult Indians into voters against the backdrop of the partition of India and Pakistan, and in anticipation of the drawing up of a constitution, was a staggering task. Indians became voters before they were citizens - by the time the constitution came into force in 1950, the abstract notion of universal franchise and electoral democracy were already grounded. Drawing on rich archival materials, Shani shows how the Indian people were a driving force in the making of democratic citizenship as they struggled for their voting rights.
Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/how-india-became-democratic-citizenship-and-making-universal-franchise#OKcAIWpsuqo8pksC.99
Belligerent Hindu nationalism, accompanied by recurring communal violence between Hindus and Musl... more Belligerent Hindu nationalism, accompanied by recurring communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, has become a compelling force in Indian politics over the last two decades. Ornit Shani's book examines the rise of Hindu nationalism, asking why distinct groups of Hindus, deeply divided by caste, mobilised on the basis of unitary Hindu nationalism, and why the Hindu nationalist rhetoric about the threat of the impoverished Muslim minority was so persuasive to the Hindu majority. Using evidence from communal violence in Gujarat, Shani argues that the growth of communalism was not simply a result of Hindu-Muslim antagonisms, but was driven by intensifying tensions among Hindus, nurtured by changes in the relations between castes and associated state policies. These, in turn, were frequently displaced onto Muslims, thus enabling caste conflicts to develop and deepen communal rivalries. The book offers a challenge to previous scholarship on the rise of communalism, which will be welcomed by students and professionals.
Clark-Decès/A Companion to the Anthropology of India, 2011
... AGNS (Akhil Gujarat Nav Rachana Samiti with Akhil Gujarat Vali Maha Mandal) 1985 A Challenge ... more ... AGNS (Akhil Gujarat Nav Rachana Samiti with Akhil Gujarat Vali Maha Mandal) 1985 A Challenge to Reservation. Ahmedabad, Apr. 20. ... Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chatterji, Angana P. 2009 Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India's Present; Narratives from Orissa. ...
The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constituti... more The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constitution-making and democracy. Conventionally it has been analysed as a founding moment. Its success against multiple odds has been explained as resulting from a vision and consensus among the elite over what would become a pedagogical text for an ‘ignorant’ and undemocratic public. This focus among academics on political elites, and an underlying assumption that constitutional details were beyond the public’s imagination, limited the scope of investigations largely to the Constituent Assembly debates. By directing the inquiry away from these debates towards hitherto unstudied documents, this article offers a paradigm shift in the method of research and understanding of India’s constitution-making. It explores the constitution as it emerged from beyond the Constituent Assembly through engagement with its making among diverse publics. In doing so, it shows that the Indian constitution was not ...
The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constituti... more The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constitution-making and democracy. Conventionally it has been analysed as a founding moment. Its success against multiple odds has been explained as resulting from a vision and consensus among the elite over what would become a pedagogical text for an ‘ignorant’ and undemocratic public. This focus among academics on political elites, and an underlying assumption that constitutional details were beyond the public’s imagination, limited the scope of investigations largely to the Constituent Assembly debates. By directing the inquiry away from these debates towards hitherto unstudied documents, this article offers a paradigm shift in the method of research and understanding of India’s constitution-making. It explores the constitution as it emerged from beyond the Constituent Assembly through engagement with its making among diverse publics. In doing so, it shows that the Indian constitution was not simply founded and granted from above, but came about through many smaller acts of assembly away from the Constitution Hall. It was the public who set normative expectations and tried to educate the members of the Constituent Assembly, and this was critical for the constitution’s future reception and endurance.
This article explores the engagements of people and various civic organizations, even from the ma... more This article explores the engagements of people and various civic organizations, even from the margins of society, with the making of India's constitution during the early stages of its drafting. Using hitherto unstudied archival materials, it examines constitutional visions, demands, conceptions of inclusion, and constitutional proposals, as these were expressed at the time by people outside of the Constituent Assembly. The conventional understanding has been that the constitution was a product of elite consensual decision-making, and that India's nationalist leaders endowed it from above. This article shifts the historical inquiry away from the Constituent Assembly onto the ways the constitution-making process was experienced, related to, and understood from below by ‘We the People’ – those on behalf of whom the constitution would ultimately be enacted. Hence, it constructs a new perspective on the making of India's constitution. In doing so, the article throws light o...
Shani's article examines a key aspect of the rupture from colonial rule in the making of independ... more Shani's article examines a key aspect of the rupture from colonial rule in the making of independent India, which was critical to its process of democratization. This undertaking was the preparation of the first elections on the basis of universal suffrage. Implementing and planning for the enrollment of almost 174 million people was a staggering bureaucratic undertaking. This article investigates the process of devising the instructions for the preparation of the preliminary draft electoral roll on the basis of adult franchise, in anticipation of the constitution. It suggests that in effect, this process became an all-India administrative exercise in guided democratic political imagination, which diffused the notion of universal franchise within the administrative machinery around the country. This exercise resulted in instituting and operationalizing the procedural aspect of the idea of equality. It also set in motion the creation of a new national polity for India. By contrasting this process with colonial discourses on franchise and preparation of electoral rolls, focusing particularly on the enrollment of women and the attitudes toward other groups at the margins of the franchise, the article explores key changes in the bureaucratic political imagination in the transition from colonial rule to independence.
This paper explores the development of multiple conceptions of citizenship in India in an attempt... more This paper explores the development of multiple conceptions of citizenship in India in an attempt to understand how, despite profound social divisions, India's nationhood holds together. The paper advances the proposition that the Indian polity incorporated a deeply divided and conflict-ridden population by offering multiple notions of citizenship upon which a sense of membership in the nation, and a share in the enterprise of the state, could be sought. By negotiating and balancing distinct overlapping conceptions for competing membership claims in the nation, diverse social groups could find a viable place in the nation, without entirely resigning their various group identities. The analysis focuses as a lens on the Muslim citizens who are amongst the most excluded members in the whole body of Indian citizenry. It provides perspectives into how even some of the most marginalised members in Indian society found sufficient prospects for a meaningful participation within the nation. Multiple conceptions of citizenship enabled the state to manage its diverse social groups and contain many of their underlying conflicts.
This article examines Gandhi’s legacy in the shaping of citizenship in India and its implications... more This article examines Gandhi’s legacy in the shaping of citizenship in India and its implications for the resilience of Indian nationhood. I contend that a conception of citizenship that can be extrapolated from Gandhi, and that persisted as a practice, as well as a political language, instilled in the dynamics of Indian citizenship attributes that played an important role in securing the resilience of Indian unity and its democratic viability. The Gandhian conception of citizenship was developed after independence in conjunction with three other primary concomitant notions of citizenship. The ongoing multifaceted interplay between the four competing conceptions of citizenship, and the tensions and shifting balance of power between them became part of the mechanism that enabled the sustainability of some conflicts within the Indian polity to the detriment of other more threatening divisions. In the effect of this process Indian citizenship has been able to inhibit the tensions that had the potential to break the country apart.
This study explores the nature and practice of state power in ordinary times, as it developed in ... more This study explores the nature and practice of state power in ordinary times, as it developed in Gujarat from the 1980s, in an attempt to understand how the communal harnessing of the state that manifested in large parts of Gujarat in 2002 was possible. In particular, it examines everyday expressions of public corruption around the politics of bootlegging. In the context of systemic corruption at the local level in routine times there was little difference between violators of the law and its purported guardians, such as state law-enforcement mechanisms and politicians. From the 1980s, practices of public power in Ahmedabad, infused by routine forms of corruption, became entwined with deepening ethno-Hindu politics and a strong anti-Muslim bent, thus readily enabling the communal harnessing of state power in 2002.
The Asian Sphere offers a unique opportunity for outstanding candidates at the PhD level to enrol... more The Asian Sphere offers a unique opportunity for outstanding candidates at the PhD level to enroll in a multidisciplinary and inter-university graduate program that deals with the Asian continent. The Asian Sphere is a joint Israeli program between the Hebrew University and the University of Haifa, funded by the Humanities Fund of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel (VATAT) and Yad Hanadiv. It is a structured graduate program of excellence that deals with the entire Asian continent as a continuous civilizational zone and addresses cross-regional contacts and processes among Asian societies, cultures and states and to a lesser extent between Asia and other continents throughout history until present time. Apart from a dynamic and exceptional environment of learning and research, the program offers a large number of scholarships for outstanding graduate students. The scholarships for PhD students are in the amount of 60,000 NIS per year + full tuition for three years. The Asian Sphere accepts students from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, such as Asian Studies, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Art History,
Over the past two decades, a rich scholarship has emerged around the “everyday state” as an analy... more Over the past two decades, a rich scholarship has emerged around the “everyday state” as an analytical category of social and political life. Grounded in the disciplines of anthropology, political science, sociology, legal studies, and development studies, this body of work turned focus on bureaucracy, documents, corruption, communal violence, police operations, and legal practices to show how the ordinary and the extraordinary events shaped the structures and language of state authority. What underpinned this approach was the idea that state power is not pre-constituted, it is established through routine and banality as well as spectacular performance of its authority in the public sphere. This insight is critical, more so in the current moment when the established structures of governance – national and global – are said to be rendered fragile, even weakened by the rise of “the people” as a political force. The category of “the people” has always been a force in modern democratic politics, but what is telling in the contemporary discourse is how older categories are re-deployed in the early 21st century in unanticipated ways. Taking the current anxieties about the return of “the people” and the impending breakdown of democratic structures as our focal point, we set out to rethink concepts of the state, the political, governance, and the economy in relation to 21st century political subjectivities. The workshop is an invitation to trace the past and the present, and indeed speculate on the future, of politics and political subjectivities. We ask whether the focus on the everyday state has inadvertently ended up overlooking the larger dynamics of politics? What kind of landscape is being produced upon the intersections between Politics (with a big P) and the idea of the people? How might disciplines such as anthropology and political theory or law and history intersect to produce new understandings of the state? How might the very category of “the people” be expanded by not just going back in history or by looking at subaltern populations but, also, in the context of the Anthropocene might we open it out to incorporate the nonhuman? How might concepts of authoritarianism or populism be productively applied and modified to understand the state?
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Book by Ornit Shani
Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/how-india-became-democratic-citizenship-and-making-universal-franchise#OKcAIWpsuqo8pksC.99
Papers by Ornit Shani
and the tensions and shifting balance of power between them became part of the mechanism that enabled the sustainability of some conflicts within the Indian polity to the detriment of other more threatening divisions. In the effect of this process Indian citizenship has been able to inhibit the tensions that had the potential to break the country apart.
there was little difference between violators of the law and its purported guardians, such as state law-enforcement mechanisms and politicians. From the 1980s, practices of public power in Ahmedabad, infused by routine forms of corruption, became entwined with deepening ethno-Hindu politics and a strong anti-Muslim bent, thus readily enabling the communal harnessing of state power in 2002.
Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/how-india-became-democratic-citizenship-and-making-universal-franchise#OKcAIWpsuqo8pksC.99
and the tensions and shifting balance of power between them became part of the mechanism that enabled the sustainability of some conflicts within the Indian polity to the detriment of other more threatening divisions. In the effect of this process Indian citizenship has been able to inhibit the tensions that had the potential to break the country apart.
there was little difference between violators of the law and its purported guardians, such as state law-enforcement mechanisms and politicians. From the 1980s, practices of public power in Ahmedabad, infused by routine forms of corruption, became entwined with deepening ethno-Hindu politics and a strong anti-Muslim bent, thus readily enabling the communal harnessing of state power in 2002.