Translation of Globally-Circulating Political Ideas: The Multiple Genealogies of Democracy in Telugu South India

Mentor Areas

Prof. Mitchell is the author of Hailing the State: Collective Assembly and the Politics of Representation in the History of Indian Democracy (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press, 2009 and Permanent Black, 2010), which was recipient of the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities. Her current research interests include the multiple genealogies of democracy in India; public space and political protest in the history and everyday practice of Indian democracy; the street and the railway station as public space; the city and the built environment in South Asia; urban credit networks; and commodities in transnational history. Her research centers on the Telugu-speaking regions of southern India, including Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Her earlier research traced the rise and fall of language as a new foundational category for the reorganization of literary production, history-writing, pedagogical practices, and assertions of socio-political identity in southern India.

Description:

What does democracy mean in southern India?  How do residents seek to ensure that they are represented politically?  And what histories have shaped these strategies of representation?  This historical project is prompted by ethnographic research in the Telugu-speaking region of southern India that stretch Euro-American understandings of what democracy means. Take, for example, the words of a human rights activist in Hyderabad, who proclaimed, “I always say that [the Telangana movement] is one of the greatest democratic movements in the world so far that I have ever witnessed. Not even in the China revolution did this take place.”  Startling to those for whom China and its revolution represent the antithesis of democracy rather than its pinnacle, his comments reinforce the idea that Indian democracy is understood not simply in “local” terms, but in transnational terms that differ quite dramatically from understandings in parts of the world that have historically laid claim to the founders, promoters, and protectors of democracy. 

This project examines the introduction into southern India of new globally-circulating political discourses and practices during the 19th and 20th centuries, and their roles in re-shaping understandings of political representation. The project focuses on the translation of concepts and practices into the Telugu-speaking regions of southern India (the contemporary states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh), and their intersection with and reshaping of pre-existing political discourses and forms of representational action.  The project will (1) construct histories of specific printing presses and publishing houses through which new political ideas were introduced into the Telugu language from European and other Asian languages; (2) use a focus on translation to develop a Telugu-language inventory of political concepts and trace the histories of the Telugu words used to capture, convey, and transform these ideas; and (3) contextualize the publication and translation of particular texts in relation to the channels through which new ideas have flowed, focusing on key individuals, organizations, and movements through which translated ideas have been circulated and made to find audiences. The resulting concept inventory will form the basis of a new book on the multiple genealogies of democracy, electoral politics, and collective representation in Telugu-speaking South India.

Preferred Qualifications

Telugu language skills are preferred.