Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India by Gyanendra Pandey, Duke University Press, 2024, 240 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1478031383

This review examines Gyanendra Pandey’s Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India, a study of masculinity, domesticity, gendered space, caste, class, and the historical formation of the modern Indian subject. Pandey challenges the conventional distinction between men as belonging to the public sphere and women as confined to the domestic sphere, arguing instead that these spaces are deeply interconnected through lived experience. Drawing on autobiographies, memoirs, ethnographic accounts, and fiction, the book investigates how men have imagined freedom, duty, discipline, dignity, and liberation within the domestic world of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Particular attention is given to the ways patriarchal structures shape domestic life and reproduce unequal relations across gender, caste, and class. The analysis also highlights the performative character of autobiography and memory, using contrasting accounts of men and women to illuminate the tensions surrounding masculine identity and domestic responsibility. Pandey’s phenomenological approach further explores embodied privilege and the home as an archive of prejudice. The review acknowledges the book’s significant contribution to understanding the relationship between private life, social structures, and historical change, while also identifying a methodological limitation arising from its reliance on literate and self narrating subjects. Despite this limitation, the work offers a valuable critical perspective on masculinity and domesticity and demonstrates how counter archives can challenge established narratives of patriarchal power and liberation.

State law, dispute processing, and legal pluralism: unspoken dialogues from rural India by Kalindi Kokal, London: Routledge, 2020, 218 pp., ISBN 9781138625211

This review examines Kalindi Kokal’s State Law, Dispute Processing, and Legal Pluralism: Unspoken Dialogues from Rural India, which explores the interaction between state law and community based legal orders in rural India. Drawing on ethnographic research in Gonjhe and Dharamgarh Valley, the book demonstrates how individuals navigate multiple forums for dispute resolution and negotiate between formal state institutions and non state mechanisms shaped by caste, kinship, religion, and community values. The analysis highlights the concepts of legal agency, legitimacy, power, and sanction, showing that state and community based normative orders do not operate in isolation but continuously influence one another. Ideas such as honour, religious duty, social interconnectedness, and local authority play an important role in maintaining community order, while state law provides an additional source of legitimacy and protection of rights. The study further demonstrates how community forums may resist, incorporate, and adapt elements of statist legality. Overall, the book provides an important empirical contribution to the understanding of legal pluralism and illustrates the complex negotiations through which individuals and communities balance formal legal structures with locally embedded systems of justice and social order.

Making Sense of Ruptures: Facets of Normalized Violence in India

The attempt of this essay will be to understand ways in which violence is normalized in India. The assumption this essay makes is that violence is perceived to be a point of rupture in the everyday functioning of a society. Despite the abnormalcy, violence emerges as a ritualized and repetitive phenomenon of political lives. There is very little explanation available for why individual perpetrators engage in violence, with the burden often falling upon the faceless mob. In trying to understand different approaches to studying violence, the essay attempts to extend the framework to current times of the internet and social media, where rumor generation and narrative concoction find an all-embracing presence. The essay reflects upon Shubh Mathur’s ethnographic accounts of Hindu nationalism in Rajasthan in the early 1990s through the frameworks of the Institutional Riots System and the role of crowd psychology in mob violence. It draws on the work of Arani Basu to understand the relation between media and violence as it stands today. The essay intends to put across a case for a framework of assessment, beyond the ecological and sequential models, consisting of media technologies, everyday social life, and the political structure to explain the basis of violence that maps out the agency of violence to an individual and not just a mob.

The Atrophy of Democratic Praxis: Mobocracy, Majoritarianism, and the Erosion of Popular Sovereignty in Contemporary India

This research paper executes 3 intersecting analytical frames to decode the structural degradation of democratic governance in India. Firstly, through the ascendancy of mobocracy as a mode of extra-juridical social regulation. Secondly, through the consolidation of majoritarian hegemony that eventually marginalizes minority political subjectivities. Thirdly, in the transformation of electoral democracy into a performative apparatus that progressively distances governance from popular participation. This commentary argues that Indian democracy confronts a crisis not merely of institutional efficacy but also of normative legitimacy. Drawing on Gramscian frameworks of hegemony, Tocquevillian critiques of tyranny of the majority, and Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality it further attempts to illustrate this crisis. The spectacle that the choreographed populism produces, the instrumentalization of electoral consent through clientelist patronage, and the delegitimization of dissent as anti-national heresy together constitute a regime of an orchestrated democracy wherein the procedural form of elections coexists uneasily with the substantive indenting of democratic content. The paper further contends that contemporary India illustrates what Guillermo O’Donnell theorized as ‘delegative democracy’, a condition in which electoral mandates are construed as unconditional licenses for executive privilege rather than bounded grants of custodian responsibility.