Show Notes
On the making of independent India – and its lessons. Assistant professor of politics at The New School, Sandipto Dasgupta, talks to contributing editor Alex Gourevitch about this new book, Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony.
Why was the postcolonial movement insufficiently anti-colonial?
What is the difference between the legal and political meaning of popular sovereignty – and why does it matter?
What was the hidden, repressive element to the Indian Constitution?
Did post-colonial leaders create something novel, even heroic? Or did they fail even on their own terms?
Where do the democratic and counter-revolutionary aspects of the Indian revolution express themselves?
How do symbolic substitutes for genuine popular participation play themselves out in Modi's India?
Links:
Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony, Sandipto Dasgupta, Cambridge UP
/198/ Universal India ft. Achin Vanaik
/417/ Has India passed peak Modi? ft. Achin Vanaik
More from Bungacast
On infrastructure – who owns and who controls it. Scholar Joscha Abels talks to Lee and Alex about global infrastructure, from satellites to cloud computing to undersea cables. --> For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast
On migration, monarchy, and legitimacy. Merouan Mekouar, professor of development studies at York University in Toronto, gives Alex and Lee an in-depth view of a country at the centre of multiple tendencies. –> Subscribe for more like this, at patreon.com/bungacast
On dead ends and new beginnings. Socialist writers, teachers and podcasters, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn, talk to Alex and George about their pamphlet, The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism, which came out this year.
On sovereignty and Brazil's election. Juliano Fiori, Alameda Institute director, talks to Alex about Lula versus (Flávio) Bolsonaro through the lens of internal and external threats to sovereignty.
A docu-series from Bungacast. This sequence of interviews, conversations and meetings were recorded mostly in New York – the capital of the 20th century – in order to ask what the future of place is in the 21st century. In part four, we finish off by digging into New York itself to look at the great contradictions of modernism. We conclude by asking what the capital of the 21st century is, and who, if anyone, is planning it. This fourth episode features: