The Madness in the Method: thinking through democracy during fieldwork in India

This paper is a methodological meditation on two (interconnected) things: one, the idea of democratic fragility and what we could gain from an on-ground account of democracy as a lived experience; and two, the idea of political scientists talking ethnographically about their own research methods, and how that can contribute to reimagining democracy research. When I began my doctoral research in 2020 with an aim to study Indian political parties and their parliamentary and judicial behaviour, India was already on a path of purported democratic and institutional backslide (Varshney 2022). Since then, I have conducted two rounds of field visits to India, with the primary goal of archival research and conducting narrative interviews with Members of Parliament and political leaders across four selected major political parties. Within this context, using my field experience as a lens, this paper will reflect at tandem on questions of democracy and questions of methodology. The two-year period between the field visits has been peppered with notable political events, rallies, significant state elections, and benchmark judicial judgements in India, each finding its reflection in the data. I borrow from the emerging innovations in qualitative research methods where the data collected in fieldwork and especially in elite narrative interviews are complemented by fieldnotes by the researcher on emotional experiences and intuitive reflections upon entering certain political spaces or particular interviews (V. Berthet et al. 2023). Following sociologist John Law's "messy methods" (Law 2004), I use a novel interdisciplinary 'performance and politics' framework, where methods are messy and performative, and mapping the spaces of fieldwork through metaphors of performance and performativity open up nuances in the data. The paper shows the ways in which this methodological exercise reveals crucial data on the researcher's intersectional positionality of gender, caste, ethnicity, and class, and its interplay with the final research conducted. Through this, I ask: what patterns then come to light, when mapping my fieldwork using this framework in a vibrant but contested, arguably weakening democracy like India? What is the role of the researcher, as a voter and citizen of said democracy, while navigating this landscape? 'Fear' or trepidation as an emotion is often associated inversely with democracy in the scholarship (Glowacka 2009 , Yuong Fong 2022). How does an emotions-based approach to fieldwork as a researcher of politics help navigate data and data collection, and allow for an imagination of hope and resilience within a democratic framework? This reflexive paper thinks through these questions and imagines what this perhaps allows us to extrapolate about democracy at large, particularly in the Global South.