Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Ruchi Chaturvedi, "Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
Description: In Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, Chaturvedi investigates the unique character of the conflict between the party left and the Hindu right. This conflict, she shows, defies explanations centering religious, caste, or ideological differences. It offers instead new ways of understanding how quotidian political comp...