The Postcolonial City and its Displaced Poor: Rethinking ‘Political Society’ in <scp>D</scp>elhi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract P artha C hatterjee has produced a compelling analysis of political modernity in I ndia. This article evaluates the significance of his conceptualization of ‘political society’ for understanding political practices in D elhi by looking at three issues: the relevance of proof of identification documents and various enumeration‐related practices for proving citizenship; a court case concerning the resettlement of a particular population in D elhi; and the role of popular intermediaries from the community in channeling the political energies of poor people. I argue that C hatterjee's theoretical contribution allows for a contextual analysis of the specificity of political experience in I ndia if we treat his schematic formulation heuristically, by focusing on its analytical strengths rather than ideal prescriptive standpoints. His ideas about the enforcement of bourgeois norms, subaltern collective practices, and hegemonic liberal state institutions allow us to go beyond a culturalist analysis of political society. In particular, they help us understand how the experience of democracy reflects the locational disadvantages of various groups. Further, while state institutions, including the judiciary system, protect the interests of dominant groups, they also respond to various forms of exclusion. My empirical findings corroborate C hatterjee's arguments concerning political society while also raising critical points for rethinking his theoretical framework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".