Hierarchy as a Democratic Value in India: An Informal Essay¹.

What are India's democratic values? Metropolitan common sense tells us that democracy is an essentially egalitarian political form and that to be good democrats, people, wherever they are and whoever they may be, must espouse equality as a political value. In this essay I challenge this conviction by suggesting that hierarchy is a pivotal value in India's democratic life. Drawing on 15 years of ethnographic work conducted across northern India and touching on the history of democratic thinking in Europe, from Aristotle to Rousseau and Bernard Manin, the essay offers comparative reflections on the nature of "democratic values" in a bid for a more ethnographically grounded theory of democratic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]