Lipin Ram successfully defended his PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology on 9 March 2020. Entitled “Democratic Possibilities: the communist movement and democratic politics in north Kerala, India” the dissertation was supervised by Professor Shalini Randeria. Professor Mukulika Banerjee, who visited the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy where she also gave a lecture, was a member of the jury.
 

This dissertation is located in the emerging field of social-anthropology of democracy, a research paradigm that turns often taken-for-granted elements of the democratic process – voting, party politics etc. – into objects of anthropological research. It looks at the communist movement in the south Indian state of Kerala, specifically north Kerala, in order to understand the former’s engagement with democratic politics. It attempts to apprehend the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPIM) in its electoral, mobilisational, agitational and subjectivizing dimensions, so as to pose the following central questions:

i) how do we make sense of the co-emergence of violence, affect, vocabularies and practices of kinship and community, aestheticization of violence, as well as thoroughly emancipatory praxis, within the domain of democratic politics in places like north Kerala, and indeed, in post-colonial nation-states like India?

ii) what does a theory of democracy that takes the above characteristics seriously, and not as illegitimate or lesser versions of a putative ideal of democracy, look like?

The dissertation advances the central argument that to understand the diverse and often highly contradictory impulses, discourses and social forms that emerge from the commonality of the democratic sphere, we must come to terms with democracy as a domain of practice with ‘radical possibilities.’ Grappling with this modality of democratic politics offers a way out of the impasse characterizing current debates around ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ democracies, while also providing a productive theoretical schema to apprehend the diverging socio-cultural expressions of democracy set in motion across the world. It makes the case for venturing beyond the framework of evaluation when it comes to studying democracy: sustained empirical research into the interactions between what may be called the sociality of democracy on the one hand, and the symbolic dimensions of democratic politics on the other, is what studying democracy ought to be about.

Methodologically, this dissertation is a call to pay more attention to the ethnographic and historical meanings that people in different parts of the world have come to associate with democracy and its attendant processes. Moreover, it demands the willingness and imagination to theorize from these premises rather than measure them up against a normative model located in the West that is dubious in its historicity in the first place.   

This approach breaks with existing research frameworks on democracy as follows. Firstly, it goes beyond questions of institutional mechanisms of democracy and its moral foundations, addressed largely from the disciplinary frameworks of political science and normative political theory. Secondly, it departs from research that is concerned with societies undergoing democratisation or ‘transitional societies,’ addressed largely within political science and anthropology, turning critical lens onto “places not undergoing overt institutional change” (Paley 2002,470–71). The analysis of everyday practices of party politics in north Kerala undertaken in this book, therefore, contributes to a theory of democracy and not democratization. Thirdly, instead of the frequently deployed framework of communal/ethnic/sectarian tensions rendering governance problematic in democratic societies, it introduces a different set of analytical lenses in the form of the communist movement and the strategic, discursive and symbolic measures it operationalizes to successfully engage with democratic politics.


Lipin Ram has been a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna. His broad research interests include democratic politics, violence, affect, and social theory. Prior to the PhD, he received his Master’s in Political Science from the Central European University (CEU), as well as from the University of Hyderabad (UoH), Hyderabad. 

Recent publication: " Smell Matters: A Critical Reading of 'Parasite' ", EPW Engage.