Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book discusses the process of vernacularisation 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. It talks about the ways in which ‘democracy’ has acquired social roots in India and has produced new social relations and values which in turn have energised popular politics. The book shows how Yadav folk reinterpretations of democracy are the product of the encounter between, on the one hand, local descent views of caste, horizontal caste-cluster types of social organisation, marriage patterns, factionalism, ideas of masculinity, local notions of personhood, folk understandings of ‘the past’ and ‘the political’, and on the other, the Indian institutions of democracy and practices associated with it.