Guest Lecture.

Workshop on Democracy, Multiculturalism and India:

‘Vernacularization of Democracy: The Indian Experience’
By Dr. Jyotirmaya Tripathy, IIT, Madras, Chennai
27. May 9:00 – 13:00; Building 1328, room 220

India is the largest democracy in the world with a population of over one billion and with a
kind of religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity that few can match. However, the theoretical foundations of democracy like homogeneity, modernity, civil society, education etc. have proved to be meaningless in the Indian democracy. I argue that when democracy takes
root in a culturally different geography (like India), democratic ideas get vernacularized
when it comes in contact with the practices and ideas of ‘different’ people and gets embed-
ded in particular social and cultural practices. Through this process of vernacularization, democracy not only gets desanitized but also produces new social relations and values
which produce a novel notion of the political. This can be best seen in the rise of caste
based political parties in the last two decades.

Biographical sketch
Jyotirmaya Tripathy is in the faculty of humanities and social sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai, India. His areas of interest are cultural studies, postcolonial theory, gender studies and alternative approaches to development. His book After Globalization was published in 2007 by Allied Publishers, New Delhi and his second book The Resisting Indian was published in 2009 by Sarup and Sons, New Delhi.