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The Concept of the Political in India
in Contributions to the History of Concepts
Author:
Lisa Mitchell
Lisa Mitchell
Professor, University of Pennsylvania, USA lmitch@sas.upenn.edu
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Abstract
Efforts to trace the concept of the political in India and South Asia have looked for equivalent terms in the languages of the subcontinent and have traced textual influences of ideas both globally and within South Asian literary traditions. While not diminishing the importance of textual approaches, this article traces the historical emergence of associations between the concept of the political and the joint actions and collective practices of amplification frequently used to communicate with rulers. It argues that under British rule many of the accepted methods and moral economies condoned for communicating with rulers were explicitly criminalized and came to be recognized as political only in response to this criminalization. By attending to a history of practices and their associations with wider “semantic nets,” the article also offers methodological reflections on the relationships between histories of doing, histories of concepts, and the lexicons through which these can be traced.
Contributor Notes
Lisa Mitchell is Professor of anthropology and history in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. E-mail: lmitch@sas.upenn.edu