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Paper short abstract

This paper helps us understand how intersectional subaltern identities provide the traction for the emergence of new valmiki youth. I argue that a new model of ‘coeval populism’ has surfaced in contemporary India, which blends both the old and new vocabularies of subaltern assertion.

Paper long abstract

Concerning subaltern political mobilisation, scholars like Partha Chatterjee (2004, 2011) have pointed to a rupture in modes of claim-making with the State, viz., the binary between civil and political society. Though in recent years, numerous scholars (Martin 2013, Nilsen 2018 and Bhattacharya 2021), have drawn our attention to the intertwining of both cultural insecurities and economic precarities. In this paper, I draw upon ethnographic vignettes to trace how the emergence of neighbourhood associations and youth associations in recent years in marginalised, dalit neighbourhoods (i.e., Valmikis in Delhi) have both unsettled and re-invented old modes of subaltern mobilisation i.e., community leadership through pradhans. I analyse two critical events (i.e., Valmiki Jayanti and Sanitation Workers’ Strike) and map the twists and turns that emerge in intra-community relations among Vamikis in Delhi. By analysing the differential efforts taken by two different kinds of subaltern community leaders among the Valmikis i.e., pradhans and Resident Welfare Association (RWA) chiefs, this paper demonstrates why and how local significations and adaptations matter to understand the emergent polyvalent discourse of populism in contemporary India.

In so doing, at a theoretical level, I contribute to the intersectional understanding of subaltern identity formation and the traction that the emergence of new valmiki youth has provided to the discourse of subaltern caste assertion (Kumar and Martin 2025). I argue that a new model of ‘coeval populism’ has surfaced in contemporary India, which blends both the old-school, classical trope of ‘welfarist populism’ and the new-school, contemporary model of ‘aspirational populism’.