Antinomies of pluralism: Modulating conceptions of politics and agency in India

Abstract

Conceptions of pluralism and identity exert a powerful influence both on the process of politics and on the study of politics. They inform a wide range of ideals and methods and, more importantly, shape influential definitions of politics and political subjectivity and agency across national spaces. The article is an attempt to formulate an approach to pluralism that allows us to enrich accounts of political subjectivity and agency at the same time that it forces us to rethink our relation to political theory and political sociology. The context in question is India—indeed certain broad transitions in the social and historical landscape of modern Indian political thought and practice—which serves to complicate extant versions of the contending models of politics. The argument is certainly not for a new, extra-historical (or post-cultural) foundation for agency and for political claims, but rather to set up a heuristic for contending with the antinomies of pluralism as they articulate in the space of politics and agency in India. The ground traversed is an attempt to meet the constraints as much of historical sociology as of normative theory (or theorising).