Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India, by Mukulika Banerjee. (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Bart Klem, Gothenburg University

How can a democratic citizenry emerge in a society that is destitute, fiercely unequal, and riven by caste-oppression? This question animated the founders of India as an independent democratic republic, most prominently its famous constitutional architect B.R. Ambedkar. Mukulika Banerjee’s Cultivating Democracy answers this question from the vantage point of Madanpur and Chisthi, two small villages in the rural periphery of West Bengal. She explores India’s democratic ideas and ideals trough the social imaginaries of people who stand far removed from the seats of power. They live hard and unjust lives and have little to expect from electoral politics, but they cherish civic principles and act on them on the rare occasions life affords them.

The book is beautifully structured around four events: a scandal, a harvest, a sacrifice and an election. While each of these chapters speaks to discrete dimensions of West Bengal village life (and thus to distinct academic debates), Banerjee weaves them together to produce a rich conceptual and empirical canvas. The reader thus encounters grand schemes of India’s contemporary history without ever leaving the village.

The Scandal chapter captures the attention right way. The book’s plot gets in motion on multiple fronts when “Comrade”, its main protagonist, makes a faux pas. As the local strong man of the Left Front, and the only person with a motorcycle, his authority is near absolute. But when he adjudicates an extra-marital love affair, in which he is himself implicated, he incurs the moral dismay of his flock. The scandal becomes a thankful subject of gossip, which then creates a conduit to express other forms of discontent. Docile subjects of a block vote suddenly show themselves capable of building alliances and mounting resistance.

These alliances rear their head again the Harvest chapter. The Left Front’s legacy of agrarian reforms provides a backstory to this chapter. These have emancipated lower caste sharecroppers at the costs of the land-owning Syed caste. This has earned the communists credit but has also opened new social space. Harvest rituals, Banerjee posits, represent an agrarian moment of ‘communitas’. This is particularly pronounced when harvest coincides with the Ramzan and the milad prayers become a moment of horizontal cohesion, beyond the grip of caste hierarchies and patronage pyramids.

The Sacrifice chapter expands on this. Values of redistribution and self-denial are performed though the Islamic Eid festival, and its prayers stand out as moments of parity. Such exemplars of egalitarianism are keenly observed by low caste Hindus. This then finds a correlate in the queuing up for the polling station on election day, when all voters present themselves – just for this once – as equal citizens of the republic.

The Election chapter highlights the turn of events around the 2013 panchayat (village council) elections, two years after the Left Front has finally been dethroned in West Bengal, ending three and a half decades of uninterrupted rule. Rather than merely electing a new council or affecting policy change, this is a dramatic moment of settling scores and having to show one’s true colours. All of the book’s cascading chains of events collide in the climax and aftermath of these elections. Comrade is defeated and new leaders stand up. But in a final stroke, the dislodged strong man implicates his challengers in the resulting violent scuffles.

The plot of party politics and patronage thus ends in a double knock out. The plot of village-life transformation leaves more space for democratic virtue, Banerjee shows. Commoners acquire and internalize values of popular sovereignty and political equality, and values of post-reform egalitarian cultivation articulate with values of republican democracy.

Through her discussion of the four events – based on fieldwork from 1998 to 2013 – Banerjee offers a rendition of great transformation in rural West Bengal. The minutiae of village rituals, agrarian routines, disruptions and gossip project a truly grand story of three interlocking trajectories of societal change: A transformation of Islam, with the rise of Deobandi movements; a transformation of paddy society with the fits and bursts of agrarian reform and redistribution; and, a transformation of electoral politics, with the demise of the Left Front in West Bengal. These interconnected transformations offer us a story of hope in relation to Ambedkar’s quest for a civic democratic culture. “The transformation of India’s anti-democratic soil,” Banerjee concludes, “is achieved through such events in social life that assert the pivotal role of civilians in the active cultivation of the altered sociality of ‘anti-structure’” (181-182).

This latter term is a reference to Victor Turner and reiterates the author’s engagement with the Manchester school. Her perspective is inspired by how Max Gluckman and F.G. Bailey (alongside Turner) used events as entry points to thread together seemingly disparate spheres of religion and politics. Thankfully, she does not let these seminal works restrict her analysis. She uses them as a conceptual backdrop instead, to then turn to more contemporary authors in the thick of her analysis, mainly political anthropologists of South Asia – Veena Das, Craig Calhoun, Anand Pandian, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Jonathan Spencer.

The book ends with upbeat conclusions on the democratic fibre of rural citizens in India’s periphery. Some of these insights have been overtaken by events – more events. Unlike the four events around which the book is structured, these recent ones take place beyond the confines of the village. In the preface, the author bewails the degradation of India’s democracy, which spiralled as she was writing up: Covid and the heavy-handed state response to it, the Citizenship Act that works to exclude Muslims, and the Hindu temple of Ram built on the ruins of the Babri mosque. In hindsight, she writes wryly, it was “a privilege to have studied democracy while it still existed in India, in defensible form at least” (xii).

Cultivating Democracy offers a fantastic read – as a whole or as individual chapters. Banerjee’s evocative examples will inspire an undergraduate class to ask fundamental questions about modern democracy. For readers interested in South Asian anthropology and for critical scholars of democratic politics, this book is a treasure.