This is an essay on perception. It’s a study of how the new movements look at democracy to construct and reconstruct the world. I want to begin with two notes from my diary—both reflections on majoritarianism.
The first entry is that majoritarianism, in a way, has become a map of mediocrity. It has created a series of monocropped ideas, preventing both the diversity and divergence that democracy desperately needs.
The second entry says majoritarianism has created a conventional narrative. It has adopted the standard dualism of opposition and hegemony, and to a certain extent, carries out the narrative itself. Subtleties, eccentricities and dissenting imaginations are lost in this construct.
This essay is an attempt to probe these two.
Let’s try to understand the nature of the student protests by looking at the way they were constructed and perceived, starting with talking to a few people who attended the protests. I want to begin with a sharp-minded student of mine. She said, “I went there without knowing too much. I went there to know more, and I realised I was in good company. Almost all the people there went with an idea of trying to find out more.”
What’s really important was the moment’s tentativeness. The tentativeness was, for her, as important for sociology as uncertainty was for physics. Both gave a certain classical edge and a modernist impulse that allowed the subjects to acquire a sense of difference and a sense of fluidity at once.
She pointed out, “I realised everyone there was equally open-minded. There was a sense of hospitality, a sense of diversity. What integrated them was the sense of a common problem. The problem became the commons for the protest movement. It was not any solution, not any ideology.” She pointed out that there were no cadres, and that the few who came from the RSS and Bajrang Dal were not effective.
It allowed for a different kind of storytelling. She added, “One of the most beautiful things about the tentativeness was that it allowed for the play of language. Democracy became a polysemic term.” Democracy’s multifarious meanings became a part of the very guarantee of the vitalising nature of the political process. By allowing divergence, democracy became a kind of pedagogy.
Another protester pointed out that it was not just language that conveyed—it was the silence of body language, too. This was very crucial, he repeated, because many times a shrug or a wave was as poetic or emphatic as any wordy vocabulary.
Together, they pointed out that body language, orality and polysemy added to a new kind of democracy, which was itself like a liberated language. A democracy that celebrated multiple meanings of words. A democracy that invented itself almost every day.
One has to understand the nature of hospitality one of the protesters underlined. These were not ideological carers. They did not laugh at you with contempt. They tried to understand and engage with you. They tried to answer and ask more questions. This creates a new sociology. My student almost suggested that a sociology of tentativeness was one of the great gifts of the recent protest movement.
She made another crucial point. For a long time, democracy has been seen in formal terms. It is either an election ritual or certain theories of representation. One of the things we are required to understand is the tacit constitution—the unstated, the understated and the silent. Rather than taking them for granted, one has to understand the heuristics that sustain democracy. This movement can be seen as an attempt to examine the tacit nature of democracy.
I thought her ideas were stunning. What she tried to propose was a new theory of democracy based not on formal concepts, but on the practicality of a simpler understanding, a more ordinary way of looking at reality.
She counted two things as absolutely important for this democracy. One was hospitality, the other was non-violence. Between hospitality and non-violence, one created an experimental situation where conversation was possible and the adda was born.
In a deep and fundamental way, these movements revived the idea of adda—the sense of gossip, the sense of caring enough for a topic to pursue it to the end. Deep down, there was also a sense that democracy needed to be seen as a polyphonic symphony of ideas.
Democracy as a set of perceptions does not work purely on representation. It, in fact, works on three other ideas. The movements were not looking for representation or only justice. What they were looking for is a certain kind of authenticity, idealism and integrity.
These terms emphasise the institutional nature of democracy. It’s not just about being—like having the right exam paper. It’s an attempt to understand the right kind of examination. These things need to be understood in a fuller sense.
Three observations are crucial. One, democracy became a kind of ordinariness. The students hardly used any formal concepts. They hardly threw the book at each other. The workbooks they created stem from everyday life. As such, democracy becomes a collection of folklore studies.
This point was illustrated by one of the stories from C Joseph Vijay’s party. While fighting ideologically, it made a statement by taking the calisthenics of the BJP and the DMK, and turning it into choreography. What was the march became a dance. What was an ideology became a conversation. What was a statement of the past became an experiment for the future.
That sense of hypothesis marked these movements. The sense of the tentative gave them a different tinge. That is, I think, a movement’s power. It is not the search for justice—but looking at truth in a way that is both playful and true.
For truth and trust to go together, one needs a different framework of thinking. What the student movement experimented with was not so much specific political ideas, but a framework that allowed for looking at the future in a distinctive way.
One needs the new narrative to capture these experimental, tentative, playful moments. They carry on storytelling traditions in a fascinating new way. It’s an attempt to reinvent democracy. And by reinventing democracy, they reinvent themselves.
Most of these groups tried to understand a democracy caught between alienation and animation. They drew power from tentativeness and openness in facing new questions, and in the ability to answer them in a distinctive way.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)