The antecedents and consequences of political entry strongly impact the outcomes of democracies, determining the quality of leadership, configuring partisan and electoral competition while influencing popular attitudes and beliefs. My interdisciplinary work in political sociology examines the renewals of representation in South Asia from the standpoint of political aspirants and novices. Through combining computational and ethnographic approaches of everyday political labour such as speech-making, campaigning, digital outreach and brokerage, I explore youth and student activism, political ambition, populist discourses, and practices of the self in contemporary India. Theoretical findings based on quantitative text analysis and participant observation reconsider the power to “stand for” the people as inherently possessed and concentrated rather than diffused and dispersed.
My ongoing collaborative research agenda on democratic responsiveness and “political becoming” seeks to produce sociological accounts of youth entering electoral and ideological arenas. Moving forward, I build on my publication record on the biographical consequences of Left political participation in spaces of daily political socialisation such as select publicly funded Indian campuses. At the backdrop of neo-liberal narratives of aspirational uplift and assertion of ascriptive socio-cultural markers, my scholarship argues that it is the advertisement of trajectories of social downlift from upper- and middle-class identities by young Left activists and politicians that produces legitimacy to represent India’s underbelly. The foregrounding of these findings is closely associated with the creation of public repositories on India’s intellectual history, writing research software that allows interpretive text analysis for big data, and the curation of exhibitions on repressed political cultures – such as university-based student activism.
Considering the populist turn of democracies worldwide and in the Global South, I unpack the institutional and policy consequences of pursuing political careers built on the personalistic claim: “I am the people.” Through reworking the understanding of populism as mimetic and folk performances of non-elitism, I will research new entrants in politics and current leaders’ distinctive engagement with democracy as direct representation. I aim at examining how imitations of the putative people are mobilised by political actors to reclaim the legitimacy to embody public interest in lieu of parties and electoral brokers. In particular, I examine how phenomena such as institutional disfiguration, ethnic nationalism and the shrinking of the public sphere are deepened by a handful of Indian political leaders and aspirants through the flaunting of direct, warm, kin-based, relatable, non-technocratic, authentic and culturally accessible relationships with constituents. To that end, text analysis and machine learning methods are applied to a new historical archive I constituted over the past four years. It contains political speeches and interventions covering the pre- and post-independence period in India.
My first book manuscript, In the Shadow of Saffron India: The Azadi Generation and the Politics of Becoming examines the public relevance of educated youth’s experiments with politics in Indian campuses. It provides the first monograph-length account of the everyday politics of those “anti-India” students who challenge the de facto illiberal and ethnic turn of Indian democracy. The account answers the question of how reinterpretations of politics circulate from one generation to the next, carrying the possibility of change, while durably affecting the life trajectories of their participants. The book further argues that in conducive educational territories, self-making and performances of self-change legitimise political representation. Findings of this research appeared in a range of journals articles and special issues, notably in Modern Asian Studies, SAMAJ, India Review, Economic and Political Weekly, Mouvements and Studies in Indian Politics.
A tentative second book project will continue to examine the constitutive relationship between represented and representatives in South Asia. The book will delve on the way populist leaders – prominent or in the making – successfully “embody the people” through appropriating and obliterating political intermediaries – such as political parties and caste representatives. The book will reject the idea that populism is mere anti-elitism. Instead it advances the concept of populist mimesis as a powerful political mechanism which turns a composite political majority into a uniform whole, furthering in fine political majoritarianism. Approaching politics from the point of view of its discourses and their social impact, the research endeavour embraces novel approaches to text analysis and mining, using as a departure point the DIPS – the Database of Indian Political Speeches, an archive of more than 130 million words retracing public interventions of Prime Ministers, various administrations, political icons (including M.K. Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar), legislators and religious gurus since the end of the 19th century. Through comparing semantic and stylistic attributes of spiritual figures and mass political leaders such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi the book unearths four mechanisms of mimetic representation in the Indian context: disintermediation, simplicity, intimacy and counselling. Two journal manuscripts are currently under consideration by the American Political Science Review and Studies in Indian Politics.
Based on computational and discourse analysis approaches, the study is complemented by an ethnography of yuva turks (Young Turks), the new entrants in regional and national politics in four Indian states and union territories renowned for their personalised brand of politics: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Tamil Nadu. The ongoing research agenda ambitions to elucidate the often-hostile relationship between populist leadership and their political parties. It revisits critically the assumption that party affiliation and popular display of political responsiveness are the only factors for electoral success in South Asian democracies. From there, the prospective book hypothesises that populist claims can be better understood as bargaining instruments for upcoming and established politicians, in particular for those who do not have otherwise sufficiently solid economic, symbolic or dynastic capital to impose their will and views on a partisan structure. While implemented episodically and sometimes unsuccessfully, populist tactics could be empirically recast as strategies to “cut the line” of access to political power. I suggest they facilitate the bypassing of the traditional chamchagiri (sycophancy) political system and mitigate the growing electoral dominance of wealthy businessmen financed by thekedars (contractors) and dalals (brokers).
In addition to my publication activities, I am committed to engage a wider public through curatorial and programming activities. This is reflected in my recent partnerships with Indian (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Institute of Economic Growth), German (ICAS:MP) and French (CNRS80) research institutions. Thanks to their financial support, I curated the Memories of Change (MoC) exhibition, the first of its kind retrospective exhibit on the legacy of student politics in India. The exhibition showcases visual artworks, oral history sources and archival troves part of the Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism (PaRChA), a digital archive of 75 000+ pamphleteer material I collected during and after my doctoral fieldwork. In addition to this, I am currently completing the development of the new media art installation Chat-Hi:. The latter is a prototype of a conversational archive, relying on a language model algorithm (GPT-2/3) trained on the Indian statesmen contained in the aforementioned DIPS archive. The human-machine question-answers digital interface of Chat-Hi: is described in a forthcoming article for the journal Leonardo, MIT Press, in which the afterlives of prime ministerial figures are considered. It shows how the political imagination of India as a harmonious whole has progressively replaced the one of religious and cultural diversity. The methodological questioning sparked by this approach has motivated me to initiate the development of new research tools such as the R package seaglass, a wrapper of five functions for interpretive text analysis optimised for big data. Its aim is to facilitate qualitative interpretations of quantitative results of text analysis (such as keyness, topic modelling, clustering, correspondence and cosine analysis) through highlighting linguistic patterns in the original corpus.
| >> Research interests • Youth activism as political self-fashioning: Entries • Political archives and the pamphleteers: Entries • Populist style as political representation: Entries • Political intermediaries, elites and subalterns: Entries • Ethnography of political ambition in India: Entries • Text analysis, speeches and lifeworlds: Entries |