Democracy against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India (South Asia Across the Disciplines) by Jeffrey Witsoe

Author:Jeffrey Witsoe
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

A Multiple Village

Caste Divisions, Democratic Practice, and Territorialities

In the last chapter, I explored the political world of Koilwar; in this chapter we examine how lower-caste politics transformed Rajnagar, a village within Koilwar block where I lived between 2002 and 2003 (returning for shorter periods in 2004, 2007, and 2010). Rajnagar is a large village with a population of 5,086 (according to the 2001 Indian census) located a few kilometers from the block headquarters.

The village perceptive is important because some 90 percent of voters in Bihar live in villages, and villagers actually vote more than their urban counterparts—a trend that exists across India. More important, village realities mediate peoples’ experience of democracy. As we shall see, local considerations—especially the ways in which party politics intersects with local power—largely drive support for political parties. And this relationship became even more pronounced as political parties became explicitly associated with specific caste alliances during the 1990s. In this sense, it could be said that all politics is local. Rajnagar, therefore, can be seen as a prism through which to interpret larger-level political change. It certainly became such for me. But this is also true for everyone else—most Indian people also view larger-level politics through the prism of their respective villages. Even those in urban areas often have one foot in their ancestral village (which remains the nexus for their social networks), and this inevitably influences their politics.

Of course, every village is distinct, and my interpretation of politics in Bihar would have been somewhat different had I lived in another village. But since I was examining the intersection of larger political forces and village realities, I believe that the changes that I observed would have been evident almost anywhere, although to various degrees, playing out in different ways according to the specific histories, demographics, and political dynamics found in any village. The dynamics of political change in Rajnagar needs to be examined in relation to the material presented in preceding chapters, in relation to” interlocking multiple social-political sites and locations” (Ferguson and Gupta 1997, 37). This was, therefore, inherently multisited ethnography (Marcus 1998)—my experiences in the village provided insights for research in other political contexts (in Patna, Ara, and Koilwar) and vice versa. Although I spent a fair amount of time in surrounding villages and also visited villages in other regions of Bihar, it was only by spending an extended period of time in one place that I began to get a handle on how larger-level politics intersect with the complex dynamics of the village and how this shaped people’s political subjectivities. And if, as I suggest, Indian democracy, and especially the politics of caste, is rooted in village realities, and if these realities mediate people’s experience of democracy (and, thereby, their voting behavior as well), then there is no substitute for such a “bottom-up” analysis.

Recent ethnographic studies of north Indian villages have generally told the story of the continued domination of village life by mostly upper-caste groups. The means by which this dominance

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