Citizens as cultivars: democratic values in paddy fields and universities
01:07:46 Share

Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening, everyone. Can you hear me OK? No. Oh, you can now. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to this evening's lecture. My name is Catherine Allerton and I'm head of the Department of Anthropology here at the LSE.

Tonight is a very special occasion. It's an inaugural lecture marking our colleague Mukulika Banerjee's promotion to Professor of Anthropology at the school. These inaugural lectures are a time to celebrate the successes of our community.

Professor Banerjee is an anthropologist of South Asia and her published work concerns a broad range of issues in the region, from a non-violent social movement in Pakistan to an account of the Sari as a garment that has survived widespread social change to work on the everyday lives of Muslims in India.

However, since her appointment as a reader in our department in 2009, Professor Banerjee has become best known as an anthropologist of democracy, pioneering an original intellectual approach to the everyday life of democracy in India and to the study of elections and political engagement more broadly. This research programme has led to two major books, Why India Votes, and her 2021 monograph, Cultivating Democracy.

Professor Banerjee is also the founding series editor of Rutledge's Exploring the Political in South Asia. And she's also just started a podcast called The India Briefing that aims to be the single credible source for understanding India. I also have some hot off the press news. And I'm delighted to announce that Professor Banerjee has just heard she's been awarded a highly competitive British Academy Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for new research on taxation. APPLAUSE

So we have much to celebrate and without further delay let me hand over to Professor Banerjee for her lecture, the title of which is Citizens as Cultivars: Democratic Values in Paddy Fields and Universities. Good evening friends here and online. For nearly 30 years I have taught in London universities, first at UCL and then at LSE, which adds up to a lot of young people I've tried to help think about the world.

For over 25 years, my own preoccupation has been how democracy is experienced in India and what social anthropology as a discipline can say about democratic politics more generally. For 10 years, I've gardened a little to relax and learnt that cultivars are plants selected for certain desired traits which can retain those traits when propagated through cuttings and seeds.

Today, I will suggest that good active citizens with democratic values are precisely such cultivars. They don't exist naturally, but must be nurtured into existence. And I'll consider the lives of our universities and of Bengal villages together as important sites of cultivation, such cultivation, but sites which are threatened. In the villages of Madanpur and Chishti,

five hours from Kolkata. I did my fieldwork while farmers did theirs, growing rice paddy. In April, the farmer would prepare the soil of their small landholding, then plant the seeds and carefully transplant their seedlings. Through summer, he'd watch its progress like a hawk, wary of pests and inclement weather, and grateful for monsoon rain. In autumn, he'd become increasingly exhilarated if the crops seemed healthy.

until in a good year he'd sit quietly, proud on the eve of a bountiful harvest in December, for he had successfully converted brown earth to luscious green. Such cultivation is painstaking, arduous work. It also requires self-fashioning, for you need to develop discipline, patience, vigilance, and always hope. There is no room for complacency or cynicism.

and it teaches you the importance of cooperation as you still depend on others for advice and for tasks like gathering in the harvest. Anyone who's looked after an allotment or a garden or even a pot plant will recognize many of these virtues and learnings. Meanwhile, in the university, we start the year with a bare field full only of potential. We then invest hours inside and outside the classroom.

This requires discipline, hard work and trust among students and responsibility, inspiration and care among teachers. Graduation ceremonies finally arrive, like harvests, the culmination of this patient process of nurture marked by the relief and exuberance of a job well done. With research too, a good question, a good idea or question is just a seed.

To make it flower, grants must be applied for and secured, languages learnt, the field identified through reading, evidence gathered, and close cooperation with editors, reviewers, and publishers. So to hold sheaves of paddy is like holding a degree certificate or a book with one's name on it. Only the farmer, the student, and the scholar fully understand all that has gone into that moment.

Thus, Paddy Fields and universities alike are sites of profound cultivation. So far, so parable. Let me try and deepen this comparison and explore the relationship of Paddy Fields and universities now with democratic politics. A politics based ideally on the will and consent of the governed, accountable institutions, adherence to the rule of law, and respect for the rights of all in a society of mutual recognition.

My research on democracy was sparked by an interesting survey in 1998, which found that unlike in the West, voter turnout in India has steadily increased and even more surprisingly was highest amongst the most socially disadvantaged. I wanted to know why. What motivated this commitment among the poorest, given their lives improved little from one election to the next? What did they think or feel they were doing?

Anthropologists at that point hadn't been much interested in elections, partly because they were seen as dull matters left best to political scientists. But India's voting gripped me, and I studied it through prolonged ethnographic research with some of the most socially disadvantaged citizens, low caste, rural and Muslim. Several publications resulted.

In these I showed that one main reason why they voted in high numbers was because the voting experience was meaningful and enjoyable. The polling station in India was a unique arena because there was genuine social mixing of caste and class and where all citizens were treated with dignity and respect. For this, one day only, democracy's promise of political equality felt real.

This was hugely meaningful in a society otherwise driven by deep social inequalities and disrespect. As a result, poor voters wanted to be part of this process, to experience that feeling of being a "sultan", exerting popular sovereignty, and of being recognized for a day as an individual, an equal citizen, and come to recognize that voting was a foundational constitutional right which they felt a sacrosanct duty to fulfill.

This showed it was vital to consider the subjectivity of voters themselves, a perspective anthropology privileges but which was mostly missing from the study of elections by other disciplines. In fact, my elections are sacred thesis emerged precisely from the ethnographic method of participant observation in the village, which in contrast to methods like interviewing requires careful attention to what people actually do, not just what they say.

It was only because I noticed that women wore their best saris to the polling station, the one that they saved for festivals and weddings, that I began to grasp the significance elections held for them. Only then could I start asking more insightful questions. I was able to test my thesis across India with the help of a team of brilliant researchers. The findings were remarkably consistent.

Voters across India did dress up to vote and spoke eloquently in their languages about the virtues of voting, of it being a duty and a right, and of their feeling of an inviolate commitment to it. But what happens to democracy once the elections are over? After all, voters are embedded in systems of kinship, religion, work and economy, all of which shape their lives and political sensibility.

And this is where classic anthropology's holistic approach of studying all aspects of a society is vital in connecting what happens at elections with what happens in between. Let me give you an example. One year, two teenagers fell in love. The girl got pregnant and they were forced to marry. The decision about the marriage was not taken by the two families, but by the local comrade of the Communist Party.

The comrades ran large over the villages. His party had won every election for three decades and seemed impossible to dislodge. He was venal and vindictive, ruthlessly stamping out any political opposition through intimidation or even violence. Shantrash, terror, was the word often used to describe the mood and most people were outraged by his excesses.

But there was no one to challenge him as other formerly prominent political figures had all been cut down to size, including his fellow communists. One had even become an itinerant peddler to escape the village entirely. On this occasion, however, the comrade had not just meddled, he had caused a scandal. The marriage he had forced was considered haram, taboo, by the villagers because the teenagers were related through their mothers and belonged to different generations.

there was widespread horror but fear of the consequences of saying anything through the long years the comrade had eroded the scope for collective action as by his machinations friends had fallen out brothers become estranged and women gossiped bitterly about each other but the crossing of a religious red line

couldn't be easily ignored and the rumblings began to get louder. Waiting in the wings was a young man named Majhi, educated but unemployed, who desired to enter politics despite the comrades' efforts to stop him. Over subsequent visits, I observed a process of painstaking alliance building among the villagers as they used various social resources to create a group behind Majhi.

Let me give you three examples. Hanif and Inayat were formerly friends, but had been estranged for some years. Now Inayat's son was getting married and the comrade, smelling the political wind, offered to send 100 of his supporters to the wedding to make Inayat look good in front of the new in-laws. But knowing the comrade's devious ways and to ensure that Inayat did not face humiliation, Hanif marshalled another 100 people on standby as a plan B.

When the Comrades' crowd indeed failed to turn up, Hanif's plan saved the day and his bond with Anayat was thereby repaired. Both now moved to actively support Marji's campaign against the Comrade. Two sisters, Nuri and Meena, lived in the only female-headed household in the village. For years they'd been at the receiving end of the Comrades' unwanted sexual attentions, and now Nuri's daughter was growing up.

As opposition to the Comrade began to take shape, they suddenly found their neighbours, even those they were not very friendly with, increasingly dropping in at odd hours, especially after nightfall, to ensure that they were rarely alone and thus less vulnerable to the Comrade. And a year after the marriage taboo scandal, the Communist state government introduced self-help groups for women. Each group would receive 5,000 rupees to help start an enterprise, the profits to be shared.

The only condition was that the women in a group could not be of the same caste. The most successful group took over the local school's midday meal, cooking with materials the government provided but the comrade dispersed. This group took control away from him and improved the school's meals, and by working together they built trust and discussed the comrade's conduct, which they had been previously very fearful of discussing with anyone outside the home.

These women soon became another important element in the growing alliance opposing the Comrade. So over several years, the villagers identified a common purpose, marshalled social conventions of friendship, kinship and neighborliness, alongside new initiatives like the self-help group to create ties across the caste, gender and economic differences which the Comrade had long exploited to keep them divided.

Maintaining a newly united front, the forced marriage between the youngsters was eventually annulled and the comrade much diminished. But things did not end there. When some years later the new insurgent political party, Trinamool Congress, looked to increase its base across West Bengal, it was this alliance in the two villages that formed the local unit of the new party, led by Majhi.

At the subsequent election, Trinamul won in the constituency, supported by the village activists, and across West Bengal, the communists were defeated and lost power for the first time in 34 years.

As all this hints, long-term anthropological fieldwork can connect the electoral cycle to the non-electoral and show how the capacity to engage with formal institutions of democracy is forged and revitalized amid the social institutions of local religion, kinship, and economic life.

And ironically, the communist government's land reforms, which gave lower caste people more secure rights in the land and better wages, also helped grow the villagers' self-respect, self-assurance and self-organizing ability, which in turn grew their democratic sensibilities and activities, including in the end against the communists.

This kind of increasing capacity to be politically active and engaged between elections is what I call civic growth. It is the capacity to be active citizens, questioning the status quo, holding officials and government to account, and finding ways to organize against complacent or undesirable incumbents.

This, of course, is essentially the classic view of Republican values that goes back to Rome and Jyotirao Phule in India and John Dewey in the US, both of whom were, of course, Ambedkar's heroes. As President Obama put it to the cheering crowds on the day that Trump was defeated in 2020, if you can remember it, quote, your efforts have made a difference. Enjoy this moment.

Unquote.

I suggest that just as we measure the performance of the economy through its growth rate, we should measure a country's political health not merely by a checklist of democratic institutions, but by the capacity of its people to do the exhausting work of active citizenship between elections without being arrested or silenced. Unfortunately, in most societies today, certainly in the West, civic growth and active citizenship is weak.

There is passivity, cynicism and little participation contributing to our era of low voter turnout and democratic decline. As I discovered firsthand canvassing in London during last year's general election. This mirrors and follows the wider decline of opportunities in the UK for togetherness and collective action. The decline of mines and large factories, of trade union membership, of traditional political party membership, of church attendance, even golf clubs are shrinking.

This is the world of "Bowling Alone." The striking title of Robert Putnam's celebrated work on social capital. He showed that even though the number of Americans who went bowling was unchanged, more and more of them bowled alone now, rather than in leagues. Such leagues had traditionally united people from different social groups and created an opportunity for social interaction and civic discussions.

Putnam calls these bridging groups based on heterogeneity and variety, which helped create a sense of community and contributed to civic growth. In contrast, bonding groups were homogenous and composed of people from the same demographic. Whether they were church-based black women's reading groups or the Ku Klux Klan, they did not create community.

More broadly, Putnam shows that the quality of relationships between different types of people both reflect and reinforce higher levels of trust and social cohesion and are thereby good for democracy. In a recent paper entitled The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Andy Haldane, the former chief economist of the Bank of England, and David Halpern, responsible for the Nudge Unit in David Cameron's government, argued that such relationships in social capital are vital for the economy too.

The evidence is pretty damn strong at the macro level, they told journalist Heather Stewart. And they say the Chancellor's plan for economic growth will not be successful unless it pays attention to social capital. Quote, a community that is socially divisive and mistrustful has no hope, whatever you throw at it by the way of money, jobs, businesses and infrastructure.

So if the social capital associated with active membership is this important for our economy and for our democracy, how can we grow it? In urban settings, what space is the equivalent of my Bengal villages to create trust and bridging groups? One answer I'd give would be universities. For decades, they have served as communities of belonging for young people amid the atomization and enemy of society.

They provide students with a unique arena in which in their formative years they can learn, explore and challenge. It's about the only time in their lives that they're invited to express their opinions, can do so freely, can critique management and those in power, disagree vehemently with everything, experiment with lifestyles and yet still be cared for and valued.

Students alongside studying make friends with people who they'd never otherwise encounter, learn to play a team sport with people they may not like, create music in an orchestra by cooperating with musicians they may not rate, perform dance shows and plays with students studying other disciplines, learn to protest effectively, but also which battles to take on. And most importantly, learn to do this within norms of civility. In short, they develop their virtues and values.

Classroom teaching is important, but a campus education is created as much through impromptu conversations in corridors and gyms, reading groups, student societies, panel discussions, blogs, public events, and so on, enabling students and staff to co-create knowledge. As LSE's new president, Larry Kramer, said in his inaugural lecture last term,

Universities are institutionally unique inasmuch as their central task and animating reason is to develop and support a community of critical thinkers who can and will collectively analyze and seek to understand complex issues from multiple viewpoints.

In similar vein, in his book What Universities or Democracy, Ronald Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins, identifies the cultivation of pluralistic, diverse communities and citizenship education as two of the key roles of a university along with the stewardship of facts and social mobility.

And a recent study in the UK showed that universities have a liberalizing effect on the political values of respondents, especially if they're trained in the humanities and social sciences, less so for STEM. Put in terms of my lecture today, I can see our job as academics as creating young citizen cultivars who will preserve and carry the values they form in the university into the wider world outside.

much like the way farmers in England traditionally believed their corn dollies, made from the last sheaf of corn and buried in the land after a harvest, will preserve the spirit of the grain in the soil for future years. However, this crucial propagating role of the university is under threat. Reduced government funding has led to speculative expansions and investment misadventures, now bringing financial shortfalls, cuts and redundancies.

Tuition fees turn students into customers rather than co-producers of knowledge. The focus now is on training them for jobs, not educating them in the round. An audit culture has brought endless assessments of teaching and research and departmental rankings, organized along disciplinary silos.

Despite working evenings and weekends, there is constant time scarcity in the face of endless tasks, with the consequent knowing anxiety to protect one's time, so as to produce ever more research outputs that can be listed, measured, and ranked.

As a result, the ethos incentivized now is to avoid volunteering, avoid unscheduled conversations, and instead hide away as much as possible to be more individually brilliant to earn those elusive indicators of esteem. This is not helpful for creating a community. For much of what our universities work well, for much of what made our universities work well was invisible and reliant on what anthropologists call generalized exchange.

One reviewed a manuscript for a publisher and spent days writing a report offering suggestions to improve it because one knew someone had done it for you in the past and someone would do so again in the future. And one served as external examiner for another university's PhD candidate because there was a shared commitment to maintaining standards in a discipline. It was a gesture of mutuality and cooperation without which no PhDs would be awarded. If there is payment at all, it's token, it's 250 pounds for about five or six days work.

And we teach to inspire and educate, not for good departmental rankings. But if you are pressured by the system into thinking instead of direct exchange, of what do I get from this task or transaction with you? Is it worth my while? Then these indirect, unaudited and unrecognized tasks soon won't be done at all. Still less the impromptu chats with students and colleagues in corridor and pub.

citizenship can become now just a box in our annual assessment not an embracing ethos the university will then be a shadow of itself full of academics bowling alone mirroring the alienation in society rather than challenging it it will no longer be a warm greenhouse for our young in which they learn a wider and more generous set of values than those in the harsh competitive world outside in some

The contemporary university can become like these fields. The paddy you see here is the high-yielding variety, introduced in the mid-1980s as part of India's Green Revolution, and different from the traditional Swarna type. When I started my fieldwork in the late 1990s, people told me excitedly how they could grow two crops a year with it, and of their increased incomes and the little luxuries they now enjoyed. But nowadays, one hears a different story.

This new variety demanded much more irrigation than the traditional one, so the water table fell. That drove up costs because more diesel is needed to pump groundwater from DRIPA. The high-yielding variety also requires pesticides, but these are costly and drive mosquitoes into the village and so people are falling sick with malaria. In the past, the farmers would leave a fallow period between one Swarna crop and the next to remove acidity from the soil.

But this stopped with the high-yielding variety, which sapped nutrients instead. Many fields now lie barren, unable to cope with the second crop. A brown revolution has followed the green. As my friend Mukhtar said, sadly, it's not joyful to cultivate anymore.

Earlier, each field was worked on, some did better than others, but we were all in it together. We gave each other advice, looked out for each other's crops, corrected mistakes young farmers were making, and watched over each other's harvests for thieves and arson. Now I'm still doing the same back-breaking labour, but it feels lonely. Farming is less fun, even if I get a good yield. I won't labour the likeness to the mood in universities now.

But even in the good times, the farmers had kept cultivating the old Swarna type on the side. It was cheaper to cultivate, resilient and fed naturally by monsoon rains, although it took longer to mature and gave smaller yields. It helped restore fields and it was the rice the farmers and their families preferred to eat for meals and in the daily snacks of Bengal like muri and khoi.

Its longer stalks were better fodder for livestock, oxen were used for ploughing, as you saw, and cows for milk, and was better for thatching roofs, where the high-yielding variety tended to mould in the rains. Most significantly, high-yielding rice was never used for the palau of wedding feasts, special festive foods like pithe for Eid, or ritual offerings to the gods.

The implicit reasoning was that it was more reliant on money and capital inputs than on labor, devotion and the skills of the farmer and therefore too synthetic, too dry, khora to be a sincere ritual offering. So Swarna Paddy remained valued and cultivated because it sustained a whole way of living. Cooler thatched homes, a close-knit human-animal economy, ritual and social offerings.

Again, you can see the parallels. The obsession of a neoliberal university with high outputs is short-term and does not necessarily bring quality in research and teaching. But invisibly, but irrevocably, it depletes the energy and spirit of faculty and students and reduces camaraderie.

Worse, the cost of fragmentation and individualism in universities is also that we'll be all more vulnerable when we are attacked politically for what we do and represent. Such attacks have happened in India for a while and are starting in the US too now. By losing our old habits of solidarity, we will weaken our capacity to organize and fight together and will find it hard to save the very freedoms we so treasure.

Some of us, however, have tried to keep tending our batches of old Swarna on the side. My own department audits well enough, being top ranked in the UK, but it also convenes a musical band of staff and students, and faculty and fellows still lunch together after the well-attended Friday seminar. And some make it to the pub with students at the end of the week. But numbers are dwindling, because such double-cropping is sapping and unsustainable.

Personally, I've tried to continue the generous values I learnt early in my career from teachers in Delhi and in Oxford, many sadly no longer with us, and senior colleagues at UCL, LSE and beyond, many of whom are here tonight, I'm very pleased to say. Thank you for coming.

Theirs were the values of not watching the clock, of never turning students or international visitors away, of engaging with multiple disciplines, of recognizing that anthropological fieldwork is not short-term data mining, but a long-term moral commitment to the place and its people, Sudan, Ethiopia, Italy, Nigeria, Lebanon, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, or wherever.

I've also chosen to collaborate with civil servants, diplomats, filmmakers, barristers, dancers, politicians, musicians, curators, storytellers, generals, journalists, writers, political activists, or anyone who was curious or asked for anthropological insight.

And my book series on exploring the political in South Asia and working with many first-time authors gave me as much satisfaction as my own publications. In the same spirit, in 2015, I took on the job of setting up LSE's South Asia Centre. It almost doubled my workload with no financial or other benefit.

but we created a fantastic forum for interdisciplinary conversations across LSE departments, fostered networks among students, postdocs and faculty working on South Asia and showcased their work and talents. I can't honestly recommend my way to ambitious postdocs wishing to build a successful academic career.

But it has made my life hugely interesting, expanding my horizons far beyond the universities that made me, and in turn renewing and shaping my own teaching and research. And throughout, I learned patience from my favorite pint of Guinness. For hope and inspiration in the future, I look to another space, not far from my field site. An hour away stands Shantiniketan,

The university town Rabindranath Tagore founded in the early 20th century. Recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is iconic in the Indian and Bengali imagination and attracts many visitors. Tagore was a philosopher and public intellectual, India's best known man of letters and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 with a vast output of poetry, essays, stories, plays, novels.

He was an important figure in India's fight for independence. I used to visit Shantiniketan to take a break from fieldwork and to see friends at the university. And I noticed that the academic year was marked by rituals inspired by the farming calendar. For instance, Holokarshan was celebrated in the rainy season and served as a symbolic tribute to the activity of ploughing the land. The ceremony aimed to endow the work of ploughing with dignity, indeed sacredness, and remove its stigma.

Tagore, high caste, wealthy and educated, performed the rite himself, whereas traditionally high status caste groups, both Hindu and Muslim, had marked their social distinction by refusing to even touch the plough, never mind using it on the land. The ritual of Brikhurappan, of tree planting, was started in 1928 with the sapling of the Bhopu tree. Today the campus is filled with them.

Borsh Mungul was marked by the cultural presentation of Tagore's monsoon-based compositions through song, dance and recitation. The annual Posh Mela or fair in winter marked post-harvest abundance and so on. Such rituals were part of a broader agrarian ethos that Tagore established in the university.

Tagore's interest in the rural had begun aged 28 when he was sent by his father to look after the family estates. Previously, his sensibility had been entirely shaped by urban Calcutta, capital of the Raj, where his family was prominent. He bought more land to add to the estates in Birpum to set first up the school in 1901 and later the university.

The plan was to create a different model of education in which all pedagogy would include an intimate relationship with nature and rural life. From the start, Tagore treated the surrounding villages not just as sources of labor and material resources, but also as sources of art, ideas, imagination.

Ashish Nandy characterizes Tagore's view as bifocal, in that he drew inspiration from the rural, but also was keen to make its lived reality better. To this end, in 1922, he set up Sri Niketan, next to Shantiniketan, as a base from which to design and run a rural regeneration program. To help him in this, Tagore recruited a young Englishman, Leonard Elmhurst,

a doctoral student of agricultural sciences at Cornell University in New York at that time. For four years, Elmhurst and his wife Dorothy, an American heiress, helped build and finance Sriniketan's work. Tagore also sponsored three young men, including his own son, to study agricultural sciences in the US to aid the work in Sriniketan. But this rural regeneration was different from today's rural development.

for the emphasis was as much on encouraging the natural impulses of community life and enhancing them through innovations like cooperatives as it was to introduce better techniques of farming or sanitation. In passing, my saree today was bought in Shantiniketan as an example of how the humble quilting katha stitch made by rural Bengali women were helped to find avenues to feature in designer wear.

This Sri Niketan experiment is important for my argument today because of its organic relationship to the university, which aimed to cultivate Tagore's sensibility towards the rural world in its students. As Nandi observes, Tagore's idea was not just to develop the village, but to develop one's own mind in order to engage with the rural world.

The result was a new kind of imagination on campus marked by emotional exuberance and awareness of the land it stood on, where agrarian and lunar rhythms marked time alongside the Gregorian, helping to create a different quality of art, music and education. The rituals, which extraordinarily for modern India, continue punctually to this day and serve as a regular reminder of the agrarian world where the timing of tasks could not be compromised.

Sriniketan and Shantiniketan were key to Tagore's patriotism. His vision of being Indian and of creating life worlds truly independent of colonial education and structures, without which, as Nandi says, one could not be truly Indian. His was a version of patriotism that was not mere nationalism. Shantiniketan attracted artists and activists from the world over.

cosmopolitan and progressive it nurtured many of the subcontinent's freedom fighters and future leaders imbuing them with the song strong sense of patriotism but also a rich aesthetic sensibility a fitting expression of tagore's vision was realized in india's constitution in 1950 whose 75th anniversary has been marked and is being marked by the lse south asia center in a series of events

The first edition was illustrated by artists from Shantiniketan. Nandulal Bose, his daughters Gauri Bhancha and Jamuna Sen, daughter-in-law Nivedita Bose and granddaughter Bani Patel and Sumitra Narayan, Omula Sharkar and other artists. Together they created a constitutional document as radical in its design as in its thought.

but the constitution itself daring as it was in its imagination of india as a democratic republic with universal suffrage was marked by a modernist bias against the rural perhaps that is why in contemporary india some of the ambitious new privately funded universities that have been established on agricultural land as shantiniketan was have failed to examine their relationship to that land or to the rural cultures encircling it

I would urge them to embrace Tagore's openness to rural life and to be educated and developed by it. In her book, Political Emotions, Martha Nussbaum, the philosopher, argues that political emotions are essential to render stable, she calls it, a commitment to liberal ideas such as rights, progressive constitutions and social democracy. However, unlike far-right ideologies or indeed the far-left ideologies,

which successfully mobilized anger, hate and resentment, liberalism has been less attentive to using emotion to fuel its key concepts and commitments. She presents Tagore as a rare example of a thinker who successfully cultivated progressive values through emotions alongside Comte, James Mill and Mahatma Gandhi. Each Nussbaum shows was committed to cultivating humanity and supporting the goals of a just society.

But they also believed that an intellectual commitment to universal humanism, empathy for those who were different, and a redistributive economy in which everyone could live with dignity, required not just philosophical argument, but also a cultivation of the self and the creation of an imagination and emotions that would support such principled ideas.

We might think in this context of the positive emotions many felt during the 2012 Olympics here in London, including its opening celebration of the NHS or the weekly doorstep applause for frontline workers during COVID or even the Platinum Jubilee Street parties, events which reconnected people and revived their collective feeling, however briefly, about these institutions and the values of neighborliness and the common good

We have seen how Tagore tried to foster relevant emotions and imaginations in Shantiniketan, and I have suggested that his adoption of the agrarian ethic was key to that effort. In this, he was not alone. Let me cite two other thinkers, among many in a Western tradition of looking to farmers for political values, that goes back at least to Virgil and his Georgics. The 19th century American farmer and essayist Henry David Thoreau explicitly linked cultivation and politics.

In his book Walden, he described farming with one's hands as "a politically relevant process by means of which an individual or a group attempts to call forth and develop dispositions that align with and embody ethical political ideals."

Thoreau drew on his own experience of growing beans and living off their sale to reflect on how this activity led to fashioning oneself towards a certain knowledge and values. Brian Walker observes that in Thoreau's take on cultivation, quote, there are patterns of thought that can be seen to bridge the agricultural and moral realms.

In Britain, meanwhile, the poet Coleridge, Susan Manley notes, contrasted civilization, which can be achieved through mechanization, force or violence, with cultivation, which held a higher moral value as it required patient and persistent self-cultivation.

These thinkers, by advocating for the practice of cultivation as a basis of moral and civic virtue, implicitly deny the stereotypes of a simple brutish peasantry that live in villages or dens of vice, as Ambedkar called them, needing improvement by others and see them instead as sources of inspiration. I should stress that by focusing on the virtues of cultivation, one is not romanticizing village life or the bitter struggles of land.

70% of India lives in villages and deep social inequality based on caste, the violence of those who control resources over those who labour, agrarian distress and the grinding poverty of rural India are realities that I've witnessed up close for two decades and would be foolish to deny.

But by conceiving of rural areas only in negative terms, without examining them as a source of potentially fruitful ideas for towns and the wider polity, we too do great violence. During 2020-2021, through the height of the pandemic,

Indian farmers protested three major farm bills that had been passed by the Modi government with little prior public discussion or parliamentary scrutiny. The government said that these would make it easier for farmers to trade on commercial terms, improve their incomes and boost large-scale production and national food security.

But farmers and their unions called them anti-farmer laws that showed no understanding of how Indian farming worked and left them vulnerable to exploitation by big buyers and crony capitalists. The farmers demanded a repeal and a minimum support price mechanism to ensure corporates could not control the prices. After initial local protests, tens of thousands of farmers and their families, mainly from Punjab and Haryana, marched to Delhi.

So fixed was their resolve that even when the government dug up the highways to stop their tractors, used tear gas, water cannons, blockades and police violence against them, that only made them more determined. Over 379 days, they sustained the largest, longest occupation in modern India's history.

set up vast camps over several miles on the four corners of the capital, refusing to budge until the laws were repealed as bot factories discredited them online as separatists and anti-nationals. Thousands of tents were constructed using tarpaulin, canvas and thousands of trolleys, otherwise used to transport produce from farm to markets.

The protest sites had an air of vibrant efficiency. Teams cleaned, collected rubbish, arranged food, checked security, provided fresh supplies, water, electricity and blankets. Some farmers came and went, working on a rota on their fields at home and bringing back supplies when they returned. Some camped permanently, refusing to leave until they had won.

Community kitchens, langars, served everyone. Sick children are socialized into the mass preparation of food at gurdwaras and this training was evident as the hundreds of men and women rose early to participate in chopping, kneading, washing, rolling, stirring, serving food to thousands.

Wonderfully inventive book lungers, gyms, hairdressers, even shoeshine stalls sprung up, run by volunteers looking to find new ways to pamper and care and do kīrat and seva, and not just for the farmers, but for the itinerant tradesmen and residents of nearby slums. Christmas, New Year, Lohri, Makar Sankranti were celebrated by everyone together.

In a poem published in the camp's trolley times, the poet observed that, quote, "The earth knows a farmer's patience. For farmers wait to eat bread made from wheat they have sowed." There was no single leader the farmers followed and only a committee to represent them. It was a project of world making that shared a common purpose with the civility that generated solidarity.

It was thus a very specific kind of movement, culture. Its mood, one of quiet determination, not anger. As one elderly man said, we have not come to fight. One fights with enemies, not with one's own government. First and foremost, we want to display that farmers have dignity and they have rights. And we have come to claim those rights. Eventually, the government had to concede and repeal the laws.

Whatever one's views, and few deny that Indian agriculture needs some kind of reform, two things from this epic story seem most important. First, the battle was won through mobilization, solidarity, and persistence. In this, the farmers brought the values and virtues learned from farming,

hard work, endurance, vigilance and hope to their politics. They drew on their own cultural resources of their cultivating experience, rural life and religious community to maintain unity. They showed that they could be agents of change and maintain collective action rather than being together but apart, as Karl Marx alleged. Second, they made for far better representatives of democracy than the government and parliament.

Mr Modi's government has seriously distorted India's record of holding free and fair elections, jailed journalists and boasts of destroying civil society organisations. Opinions are deliberately polarised by the bot-driven echo chambers and crony media and dissent is punished, including through tax rates. In this increasingly intimidating climate, the farmers' movement showed that the only defence

is more, not less, political participation from ordinary citizens to maintain and build solidarities to fight fear and to keep asking uncomfortable questions of elected governments and hold them to account. When Leonard Elmhurst and his wife returned to Britain, they sought to replicate the holistic rural influenced education of Shantiniketan.

Tagore had been to Devon and advised they bought land there for the project. The famously progressive Dartington Hall was founded in 1925 and Tagore became a frequent visitor. One of the early pupils was Michael Young, who'd had a difficult childhood and been through many schools. He was sent to Dartington by his grandfather on the condition that he learned fruit farming. When his grandfather's money ran out, the Elmhursts gave him a free place, as they did many others.

Young did indeed learn farming and also how to make his own clothes and later recalled a blissfully happy education. He went on to study economics here at LSE, became a barrister and then completed a PhD in sociology also at LSE.

on the extended family in East London. He later helped draft the Labour Party Manifesto of 1945 that established the welfare state, founded the Consumer Association and Witch magazine, and played important roles in many progressive institutions, including provide the core vision for the Open University. So we all owe a lot to young Tagore-inspired fruit farming skills at Duttington.

Many years later, Elmhurst reflected in his book, The Poet and Plowman, on what he'd learned from Tagore and Sriniketan. To respect the individual, to treat each day as a new opportunity for some creative experiment, to look upon the whole of life and all of its processes as the natural playground for human art and scientific measurement, these habits of mind I learned to appreciate.

That, I suggest, remains a perfect vision of what ideally a university should be today. We may struggle in LSE to establish organic links with the rural, but we can be inspired to create communities based on emotion and empathy with what surrounds us.

For example, in 2017, LSE students, including many from my own department, I'm proud to say, added their voice to the strike by LSE cleaners demanding better pay and less precarious contracts. The cleaners had a powerful humanizing slogan: "We are not the dirt, we clean." Their combined efforts resulted in their demands being met and the cleaners being brought in-house to LSE on better and more secure terms.

And as a Londoner, the London Underground inspires me every day as a space for civic cultivation. As the late Adrian Mitchell put it in a poem, while a car says me, a bus says us. This relationship between individuals and common goals, common goods, is one I have begun to explore in my new project on taxation in India.

Democracy and taxation are inextricably linked. Citizens should pay tax and governments should be accountable for how they spend it, creating a broad social contract. And research shows that progressive taxation with high accountability and transparency generates better civic and democratic cultures.

But in India, the tax regime is aggressive, relying heavily on indirect consumption taxes, which place a relatively greater burden on poorer citizens, few of whom earn enough to pay direct income taxes. So building on research in the emerging anthropology of tax,

tax morale, tax subjectivity and non-tax practices of giving, I've started research to investigate popular perceptions of such taxes, how they coexist with high voter turnouts and the implication of those views for civic culture and the social contract, a topic that will be especially important at a time when India's democratic culture and institutions are under severe threat.

In this lecture, I've tacked between India and the UK, two countries bound by their history and cross-fertilization of ideas and lives, including my own. I'm very grateful that LSE brings India and UK together every day.

It was founded to make the world a better place through social science research and was supported from its inception by generous grants from many philanthropists including the Tata family of Bombay whose grant created a job for Clement Attlee in the Department of Social Policy 20 years before he became the British Prime Minister.

LSE's first student union president was Indian. And the early Indian feminist and progressive Hansa Mehta, whose portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, also studied here. As did, of course, B. R. M. Vedkar, tireless campaigner for social justice and chair of the drafting committee of India's constitution. Former LSE director William Beveridge, author of the report that laid the foundation for the British welfare state, was born in India to British parents who worked in the Indian civil service.

And in this very theatre, in November 1931, Mahatma Gandhi addressed his biggest ever British audience when he came to attend the second roundtable conference in London to negotiate terms for India's independence from the British Empire. These interwoven relations continue in LSE into the present, productively and inspiringly.

In closing, I note that inaugurations are rituals of beginning and all beginnings come from careful nurture. The ribbon at a building is cut only once the foundations are strong. A festival is heralded only once the logistics are in place. A plant flowers only when its root system is secure. Many of you helped nurture me on my long journey to this event.

my professors, mentors, colleagues, students, co-authors, co-hosts, publishers, fellow travelers, political allies, friends, and members of my beloved family. You all, in your own ways, nourished and helped me grow. So my profound thanks to you all. You have been what gardeners call rooting powder. Tegor wisely said,

The roots below the earth claim no reward for making the branches fruitful. Nonetheless, I end by recognising your claim on this moment. Thank you. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super-rich?

Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event. So

So since the seats in the old theatre are more comfortable than they were when Gandhi gave his talk, I'm going to ask you to linger a little longer and I'm going to introduce Professor David Wengro. Professor Wengro is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. He's the author of numerous books and articles but is perhaps best known in our department for the book he co-wrote with the late David Graeber entitled The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity.

So I invite Professor Wengro to respond to Professor Banerjee's lecture. Thank you. These days you often hear that the world is in a topsy-turvy state. And for me this evening, that is certainly the case because my first encounter with Professor Banerjee was as her student. In 1994, I was in the second year

of my undergraduate degree in archaeology and anthropology at the University of Oxford. I was a lucky student. I was able to benefit from the wisdom of anthropologists like Wendy James and archaeologists like Andrew Sherrod. But for the entirety of my first year, all my tutorials in social anthropology were given by a wonderful man called Nick Allen.

And Nick prescribed readings based almost entirely on the structural analysis of Indo-European kinship terms and the works of Georges Dumézil, all of which remains a source of great fascination, but in hindsight was maybe not the most straightforward introduction to the field.

I learned later on that by the second year I'd earned a reputation as an unteachable student and Mukulika, at the time herself a PhD student, had to be begged by Marcus Banks to take me on as a T.T. And I know that Mukul will be missing Marcus and Wendy and Nick this evening. It was entirely thanks to her

and to my own great relief that I could finally begin to feel that I was understanding what this anthropology business was really all about and why it matters. She was and is an astonishingly gifted teacher. And the fact that I'm here this evening as a UCL professor at my teacher's inaugural lecture is testimony to that.

Years later, I reconnected with Mukulika as a colleague at UCL, by which time she'd already established herself as the leading light of our anthropology department. It's really no wonder

Professor Banerjee's first monograph, The Pathan Unarmed, is the kind of research that's only produced once in a generation, if that. A work of ethnography and oral history which recovers the memories of Pashtun men who pursued a strategy of non-violence against British rule in the Northwest frontier within the idiom of Islam.

It was published at the turn of the millennium, one year before the 9-11 attacks. Mukulika is the kind of person who discards more good ideas every month than most of us have in a lifetime. I happen to possess a few of them, in the form of unpublished notes and essays that she's been kind enough to share with me over the years, including one called At the Edge of the Indus.

As the US government's long manhunt for Osama bin Laden, at the time the world's most wanted criminal, came to its violent end, Mukundi connoted with typical perspicacity, and I'm going to quote, and I hope you don't mind, that in the end, it was his own kin that let him down, not his hosts, the Pashtuns, nor the Afghans, among whom he had sought sanctuary.

For ten years, she observed, the most sophisticated technology was blunted by the values of Nanawathai, as no one among whom he had sought shelter betrayed him. When he did cross the Indus to Abbottabad and strayed into a different world, he was able to survive another five years by borrowing some of its reputation.

In the end, Operation Geronimo was successful, perhaps, because it took place on the wrong edge of the Indus.

This insight is, to my mind, very typical of Mokulika's contributions. It's rooted in a deep interest in the social principles and ethical concerns of marginalized groups who may suddenly find themselves thrust into the glare of international politics and able to change the course of history. The move from micro to macro is not just a theoretical one.

it echoes the relationship between structure and contingency in the real world of global politics. I think it also owes a profound debt to the Manchester School of Anthropological Thought, associated with figures like Max Gluckman and our late mutual friend Abner Cohen, with its emphasis on the case method and situational analysis of major events and their public staging.

Since then Mukulika has applied the same rigorous approach to new field-based research, notably in these rural villages of West Bengal, where her ethnographic work formed the basis for an entirely original approach to the workings of Indian democracy, bringing to light the deep rhythms, the deep social rhythms that animate national elections on a local scale.

Insights that escape the purview of political scientists, sociologists, media pundits, and quite often the politicians themselves. Today we've heard about more recent work in a similar vein, pushing back against outdated intellectual stereotypes of rural society in South Asia.

The focus of that work, as we heard, is on values of citizenship, values that Professor Banerjee has herself demonstrated here at LSE, not least through her role as the inaugural director of the LSE South Asia Centre. Observing Mukulika in that role, and not for the first time, I was struck by something, which I think anyone who's been fortunate enough to know her can confirm.

She is, quite simply, an incredibly brilliant and charismatic person, who I honestly believe could have chosen any number of parts in her professional life, anything from politics to movie stardom, and succeeded spectacularly. But, typically, as I've also come to understand,

She consciously chooses the most difficult and challenging path in the belief that whatever lies at its end is ultimately of greater value, not simply to herself, but to the people around her. And I think there's a spiritual side to this too, and a family side with Julian and Arya always at the center.

I am incredibly fortunate to have met and known Professor Banerjee along that path, which I know still contains many twists and unexpected turns. I personally look forward to them and want to take the opportunity to thank Mukulika for all that she's done so far for all of us and for tonight's marvellous lecture. Thank you. So we have time for a couple of questions.

Does anyone in the audience have a question that they would like to ask Mookilika? You don't have to. But we give you the choice. Are there any questions online? No. They're not very good. They're not very good. We have a censor board here. We do things in style and anthropology. Anyone in the audience have a question? Oh, there. Oh, sorry.

My question was largely around, particularly building on your observation of the farm mills and the farm protests, how do you think it has impacted the migration process? To the UK. I think that depends more on the UK government than Punjab farmers, don't you? Whether they're going to be let in. But just because you've raised that question, I just want to say on that, there's a coda to that story, which is...

the government is trying to bring back those same laws that were repealed. And it kind of proves the point about active citizenship. There's no resting on laurels. You've won that fight, but because it's been brought back in a very different way, in a much more backdoor fashion, so you've got to be vigilant, you've got to work hard, and you've got to keep fighting. And they are. We have an online question.

Thank you. Here's one from Sushmita Majumdar from Silicon Valley, California. She says, how would private citizens work to become cultivars? Are there university resources that can help? Where does one start? I think coming to university and having a university experience is a good start. I mean, as far as I would tell. But I think also, you know, it raises the question, talking, I'm frequently asked this,

you talk about Bengal villages, do you have to live in a village in order to become an active citizen? And obviously the answer is no, because urban spaces create their own civicness. I mean, I very briefly mentioned the London Underground, but I think...

You know, it is that idea of bridging groups, of learning what a university education teaches you. I've been trying to persuade you to think about is that you learn to work with people you don't know. It's not your private dinner party. You might go litter picking in your local park or organizing a food bank. There are various kinds of things that one does, but also to learn to organize and work with people

in forms that create collective bargaining. And what it means to belong to a union

why unions are important in order to express a collective will, it's something that I think many academics in the room will know this from personal experience, that belonging to a union is very difficult because you disagree finally with the final vote. Are we going on strike or are we not going on strike? I voted not to go on strike, so why are we going on strike? I'm not going to, I'm going to leave the union. Now, that's not how unions work, and I think it's just learning to

be part of groups that you might not like everything in it and might not like everyone in it, but learning to pull together in common purpose.

which you can learn in a variety of different ways, right? As long as it's not just a question of having dinner parties with your friends. It has to be that quality of bridging groups. And I think Silicon Valley, London, anywhere, there are always avenues to do it. But I think university opens you up to the possibility of how to do it. You learn how to do it.

So we are a little bit over time, so I think we might end there because everyone deserves a drink, especially Mookalika. I don't think we have any pints of Guinness upstairs. But we do have other refreshments up on the fifth floor. If you can take the stairs, please do leave the lifts for people who can't take the stairs. Many thanks to David and congratulations, Mookalika. Thank you, Gav. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE Events soon.