THE INSTITUTE SEMINAR SERIES February 2018 Topic Speaker
From Bondage to Citizenship: Dalit and African American Mobilization in two Southern Deltas Narendra Subramanian Professor of Political Science, McGill University, Canada, & Visiting Professor, Hertie School of Governance, Germany
Chair
Arvind Sivaramakrishnan Professor, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras
Date & Time
February 5, 2018
Venue
Adiseshiah Auditorium, MIDS
Monday
3:30 p.m.
All are cordially invited.
Abstract
Shashanka Bhide Director
The talk will explore mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those caste lines in India and along racial lines in the United States. These inequalities have proven durable although the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies, Dalits and African Americans, have had political rights for over half a century. The mobilization of these groups from the 1940s to the 1970s for full citizenship (the franchise, civil rights such as freedom from agrarian bondage, and social rights such as entitlements to higher incomes and education) is compared. The effects of mobilization on political representation and policy benefits are also considered. The experiences in two regions of historically high ethnic and class inequality (the Cauveri delta in India and the Mississippi delta in the US) are compared and placed in the context of the respective national trends. Taking certain similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socio-economic relations, regime type, and enfranchisement timing as points of departure, I demonstrate that important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, social classification, and group identification influenced the two groups’ mobilization, interethnic alliances, relationship to political parties, representation, and social rights. These factors helped Dalits build more favourable interethnic alliances, and made polity insiders and dominant elites more resistant to inclusion in the US and especially in the Deep South, including Mississippi. As a result, subordinate group representation increased and democracy was enhanced sooner in India and specifically in the Cauveri delta. Narendra Subramanian studies the politics of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, and race in a comparative perspective, focusing primarily on India. Subramanian’s first book (Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India, Oxford University Press, 1999) examined why the mobilization of intermediate and lower status groups through discourses of language and caste by the Dravidian parties reinforced democracy and tolerance in Tamil Nadu. His second book (Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India, Stanford University Press, 2014) traced the course of the personal laws that govern family life among India’s major religious groups, in comparison with experiences in other countries with laws specific to religious group, sect, or ethnic group. He is currently engaged in a project comparing the effects of political rights on the socioeconomic status of two historically bonded groups, titled From Bondage to Citizenship: The Enfranchisement and Advancement of Dalits and African Americans. Subramanian got his B.A. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
