Mukulika Banerjee

An anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), her main area of interest is democratic culture in South Asia, especially in India and Pakistan. She is founding Series Editor of “Exploring the Political in South Asia” (Routledge), a platform for publishing political-ethnographic studies on India. She is author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford University Press, 2021), a fifteen-year study in a rice growing area of Western Bengal, which demonstrates how community life in such societies is based on values that are essential for democracy, among them cooperation and distribution. Along similar lines, in Why India Votes? (Routledge, 2014) she examines why, despite the sociopolitical complexities of the country, India has become the world’s biggest electoral democracy. In the field of construction of cultural identities, Mukulika Banerjee has explored resistance—taking the form of traditional dress—to social change and western dress norms in The Sari (with Daniel Miller, Berg, 2003). She is also editor of Muslim Portraits. Everyday Lives in India (Indiana University Press, 2008), a volume of essays that explores the everyday lives of Muslims in modern India in a hostile sociopolitical climate. She also works with media outlets, for example BBC Radio4.