Book Recommendations

Why India votes - Mukulika banerjee

Attempting a national picture of the Indian electorate, this book is based on a comprehensive and comparative ethnographic exploration conducted across India to probe and explain the motivations of ordinary voters. Examining in detail what people think about politicians, the electoral process, democracy and their own role within it, it marks an innovation in anthropological research.
Why India Votes? (Routledge 2014), the outcome of a major ESRC Grant, broke several new grounds both conceptually and methodologically: it examined the reasons why despite varying odds, India’s voter graph continues to rise, making India the largest electoral democracy in the world. Voters across 13 states were asked the same set of questions, and their responses compared and woven into a socio-politico-anthropological narrative on the sacredness of participative political behaviour in a country marred by extreme income inequality, skewed access to resources, and dystopic infrastructural developments, intensified by an asymmetrical rural-urban divide.

As part of this interest, Mukulika also prepared a BBC Radio 4 documentary on ‘Sacred Elections’ for the Indian national elections in 2009; and a current grant from the Indo-European Networking Programme in the Social Sciences entitled EECURI (Explanations of Electoral Change in Urban and Rural India) has allowed her to expand this analysis to cover state and Panchayat elections. Her applied knowledge of anthropological methods to political behavior led her to be the founding Series Editor of the hugely successful ‘Exploring the Political in South Asia’ (Routledge) which is a platform for scholars to publish political-ethnographic studies on India.

Annihilation of caste - BR Ambedkar

Annihilation of caste is an undelivered speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar which he later self-published in 1936. The subject of the speech was based on the harmful effects of casteism in the Hindu society.
However, upon reviewing the written speech, the conference organizers deemed it too controversial, and subsequently revoked Ambedkar's invitation to the conference. Ambedkar proceeded to self-publish the speech, which gained widespread popularity and prompted translations into multiple Indian languages
The book focuses on the urgent need for social reform to take precedence over political and religious reform in Indian society. Ambedkar meticulously exposes the tyranny imposed by upper-caste Hindus on the untouchable community, providing instances of discrimination and advocating for the reconstruction of Hindu society. He challenges the fallacy of socialist ideals in the context of India, asserting that a socialist revolution is unattainable as long as the caste system persists.

Poetics - Aristotle

The earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In this text Aristotle refers to poetry and more literally "the poetic art," deriving from the term for "poet; author; maker,". Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic. The genres all share the function of mimesis, or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes:

1.Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter, and melody.
2.Difference of goodness in the characters.
3.Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out.

The surviving book of Poetics is primarily concerned with drama; the analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although the text is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about [t]his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."Of scholarly debates on the Poetics, four have been most prominent. These include the meanings of catharsis and hamartia, the Classical unities, and the question why Aristotle appears to contradict himself between chapters 13 and 14.