ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with multiple modes of representation of Indian Parliament over the last several decades since independence. At a more conceptual level, it engages with various forms and meanings of the idea of the ‘political’ and its democratic enunciation and expansion manifested in the functioning of Parliament as a house of representatives. The newer and at times contentious modes of representation have come to acquire a certain kind of dialogical and communicative habitus in the life of the Indian Republic. The political ethnography of representation shows how the world of political is defined and elaborated through the institutionalized, bureaucratized and formally rationalized spheres of parliamentarian deliberation and contestation. This kind of representational political order can be made sense of if we can identify the processes of transmission between the discursive, deliberative and legislative modes of representation. The democratic limit of the political reveals an unequal world built on the intersecting hierarchies of caste, class, gender, region, religion and language, and their effects on the modes of representation in a Parliamentary democracy.
