Ravinder Kaur and Nayanika Mathur - The People of India

Lekh

In the 32nd episode, I speak to Ravinder Kaur and Nayanika Mathur, editors of a new volume The People of India: New Indian Politics in the 21st century published by Penguin. The collection includes concise chapters from leading scholars of South Asia who write about a person or concept that exemplifies the politics of contemporary India. The conversation begins by asking how the volume began before moving to understand what is ‘new’ and ‘politics’ in their understanding of Indian politics and why a fresh perspective was needed to make sense of recent shifts in Indian politics. Then we explore three features that constitute this new terrain of Indian politics - primacy of the politics of the protest; push toward hyper centralisation; and the ideological restructuring that centres shifts within a capital-religious framework. Both editors then speak about their own chapters in the volume that looks at the new virtual citizen or Bhakt (Kaur) and the India state or Sarkar (Mathur) and their relevance in the politics of the moment. The conversation ends by considering how the pandemic has affected the trends that Kaur and Mathur chronicle; the chapters that resonated with them; and how to use this opening to take this work forward.