Hierarchy as Hope

Hierarchy is India’s biggest scandal. It is embarrassing that the world’s largest democracy, with a constitution that guarantees liberty, justice and equality to individual citizens should also be the most elaborately hierarchical society on Earth. While critics deride hierarchy as an archaic and motionless order of subjugation, India's denizens see it as a source of hope: a vehicle for aspiration, upward mobility and positive change. What if we too could see in hierarchy a source of social flourishing? And what would it take for us – egalitarians – to see it that way? This essay, an introduction to my forthcoming book, Stray men: Hierarchy as hope in a society of thieves, reflects on the progressive, mobilising role of hierarchy, both in India and closer home.