The vernacularisation of democracy: popular politics and political participation in North India

Anthropologists have largely left unexplored the analysis of how ideas and practices of democracy have been internalized in the popular consciousness of different societies and neglected the development of an anthropology of democratization processes. Using the political ethnography of a powerful northern India caste (the Yadavs), the article unravels what I call the process of vernacularization of democratic politics, meaning the ways in which values and practices of democracy become embedded in particular cultural and social practices, and in the process become entrenched in the consciousness of ordinary people. The analysis of how the local idioms of caste, kinship, kingship, religion, and politics (‘the vernacular’) inform popular perceptions of the political world and of how the democratic process shapes in turn ‘the vernacular’ provides a line of inquiry to understand the rise of popular politics in different parts of the world.