Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses the unprecedented democratic transformation that is currently taking place in India. It employs the new analytical framework of the ‘vernacular public arena’, in which negotiations, dialogues, debates, and contestations occur among diverse ‘vernacular publics’. The diverse character of Indian society has begun to more completely manifest its political potentiality. The rise of the vernacular public arena since the 1990s has coincided with the transformation and expansion of democracy in terms of actors, agendas, and spheres. The historical background for the emergence of the vernacular public arena is the structural change in Indian society that began in the 1990s, which can be termed the ‘post-postcolonial transformation’.