Nicolas Martin

Nicolas Martin was awarded the Mercator Professorship in Indian/South Asian Studies at the University of Zurich in 2016 and previously held positions at the London School of Economics and University College London. His research focuses on inequality and citizenship in rural South Asia and examines the changing contours of caste, class, and power. His work draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in both Pakistani and Indian Punjab. His publications include Democracy Against Equality: Caste, Institutions and Power in Postcolonial Punjab (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), Mafia Raj (co-author, Stanford University Press, 2018), and Politics, Landlords and Islam in Pakistan (Routledge, 2015).

My field setting

I have conducted fieldwork in both Pakistani and Indian Punjab. In Pakistan, my research drew on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in a single village in a region frequently described as feudal and bandit-infested. In the Indian Punjab, I carried out fifteen months of fieldwork across roughly a dozen villages and the agricultural market town to which they converged, during a period when the state was often characterised as being under the rule of criminals. For me, the village is not the object of study in itself, but a vantage point from which to observe wider social, political, and economic processes at play.

My key research questions

My work on extortion is guided by a broader interest in how inequalities of power, status, and wealth are perceived and justified. I ask whether hierarchical caste values have historically been regarded as legitimate and how far democratic constitutional norms have challenged or delegitimised them. These questions are pursued in rural settings marked by unequal landownership patterns that often render the landless economically and socially dependent. Within this framework, I examine whether rural patron–client relations are ever understood as mutual obligation, protection, or support, and when they are instead perceived as exploitative practices amounting to extortion.

My research findings

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in rural Punjab, I found that everyday political practice challenges the view that hierarchical or 'feudal' values are widely embraced in South Asia. Expressions of loyalty toward patrons often reflected strategic behaviour under conditions of economic dependence rather than genuine endorsement of inequality. Public anger over corruption, demands for access to documents and services, and local protest movements consistently revealed aspirations toward equal citizenship rather than indifference to it. At the same time, democratic institutions were frequently captured by entrenched agrarian and commercial elites who controlled credit, market committees, bureaucratic offices, and electoral candidacies. This concentration of power limited meaningful alternatives for voters and blurred the boundary between public office and private gain. My research therefore suggests that democratic shortcomings stem less from cultural resistance to equality than from structural inequalities and elite dominance that allow democracy to be used in ways that reproduce, rather than reduce, social and economic disparities.

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