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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the new books network. This is the nordic asia podcast.
- [00:14]
B
Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Kenneth Born Nilsson. I'm a social anthropologist in Oslo and also the director of the center for South Asian Democracy in the same city. How do the inhabitants of the Indian city of Mumbai navigate political science and representations? And what lessons does the popular politics of Mumbai hold for democratic politics at the current moment? More broadly, these questions are at the heart of a remarkable new book titled Drama of Democracy Political Representation in Mumbai, written by Lisa Bjorkman and published by the University of Minnesota Press. It's a book that shows with great sophistication and empathy how remarkably astute Mumbai Karists from all walks of life are at assessing political performance and real life. Politicians endlessly discussing and debating possible meanings of words and images, cash and crowds, flyers and flowers. The author, Lisa Bjorkman, is an anthropologist at the University of Louisville and also a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute. Lisa, welcome to the podcast.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. This is a great pleasure.
- [01:31]
B
On the back cover of the paper version of your book, I mean, it's also available open access online, but on the back of the paper version, the anthropologist Jonathan Spencer calls your book, and I quote now, a triumph of theoretically sophisticated political ethnography. And I just want to say to start us off that I really couldn't agree more. It's a great and very stimulating read through and through.
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A
Thank you. Thank you so much.
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B
It's set in the Indian state of Maharashtra, in Mumbai, more specifically, where the regional party, the Shiv Sena, has for many years, decades even been a dominant political force. And you start your book with sort of a genuine shift in drama, namely the split of the party into two factions that happened just a few years ago. In a way, this kind of factionalism is not unusual in Indian politics. It happens across parties. So why did you find this particular split it so illuminating?
- [02:27]
A
Thank you. Thank you again so much for having me and for inviting me to begin with this particular maybe, point of entry, which actually is the point of entry to the book as a whole, as you mentioned. So the way that I enter this book, Drama of Democracy, is through something which was quite puzzling, which was a. A sort of tit for tat series of rallies that happened during the festival of Dussehra, during which two factions of the Shiv Sena party or two different political leaders were competing to be recognized by the election commission as, quote, the real Shiv Sena. So what had happened was there was a defection of a number of separate sitting corporators and legislators from the party who were claiming that they were defecting. But you know, whereas it's quite common for maybe for parties to split or for people to leave a party, this was really puzzling because they weren't trying to leave the party behind, they were trying to take the party with them. So the moment that I'm focusing on at the beginning of the book isn't the split per se, which as you rightly note, is nothing unusual, party split, the kind of bread and butter of politics in some ways, but this moment of sort of trying to perform through the assembling of these large crowds during Dussehra, that one or the other faction was, quote, the real Shiv Sena. So again, it wasn't the split per se that was illuminating, but it was these tit for tat performances. And I was really struck by how the media was talking about these shows. And in fact there were, there were trailers to these rallies in advance of them. Like there's like a movie trailer. There was these kind of, you know, short snippets. This is what you're going to see if you come to this or that one, and this, so on and so forth. And the media described, one media outlet described them as, quote, the grand cena shows. And it was this term shows that really caught my imagination. And then at the rallies themselves, what was really striking was the way that the, the media was discussing and describing these enactments of mass political assembly, their scale, their energy and so on. And also how interviews with particular participants at the rallies were kind of doing their part to try and shape the narrative, which would then be amplified by the media. So, for instance, you know, I talk about one group of women who are sort of flashing their train tickets for the, the media camera saying, look, you know, we were the real Shiv Sena supporters. We paid our own fares and came. We haven't been transported here. The allegation being that, you know, the other rally must be somehow more inauthentic or something like this, that's a bit more sort of less self mobilized. We are the real Shiv Seneks. And what was really interesting to me as well was that even though both of like the media was describing in both contexts the size of the crowds, both of the venues, the different venues had different capacities. So the point here wasn't for overall numbers, but the media described how each of the kind of party workers associated with the different factions have been tasked with trying to mobilize and assemble certain numbers of participants so that the optics of each show would appear to overflow the grounds. Right. So they wanted something which was kind of media ready. It was the performance of an image. And this was something that I found really striking because, you know, conventionally we think of parties competing to represent people, right? And here we have people gathering in a competition to represent a party. So the question here was, you know, what does this work of representation entail? And then how were people going out evaluating it? Because that was kind of the game. There was all of these images that were being circulated. People were presumably going to evaluate. The election commission was going to evaluate. They were sort of trying to make this the site of enacting or demonstrating that, you know, this or that faction was the real cena. So, yeah, so this is where I kind of begin and come to this notion of performance as the analytic through which I'm looking at democratic representation. So the book is about representation, and I'm studying it ethnographically using methodological insights from performance studies, which, you know, I talk about at some length in the introduction. Why I'm kind of building from extant scholarship using political performativity as an analytic, and then sort of expanding that into an analytics of performance, which actually invites methodological attention to questions of audience uptake. So, you know, the question of not just, you know, which one is enacting itself in what way, but actually, what do people do with some image? Do they take photos of it? Do they share it over social media? Are they making fun of it? Are they. You know, and. And this was really important to me because while there's a lot of very important and interesting scholarship on political performatives, the kind of performative, you know, scholars of performativity have used this concept to describe situations where sort of words or actions actually bring into being the thing that they're trying to describe. Right. Like, so the classic example of saying I do in the context of a marriage ceremony. So scholars have talked about performative enactment of political authority. But what was important to me in thinking with performance is that in the context of democracy, where people are actually doing things with their interpretations and their experiences of performative enactments, we need to know how people make sense of them. Otherwise, methodologically, political performatives can only find authoritarianism, because this assumes that a performative enactment of power is power, without considering the possibility that a performative enactment of power could be mocked or ignored or not even noticed. And so this was really a methodological shift to use performance to study democracy by attending methodologically to audience evaluation and uptake. So this was really the move that comes from this initial party split that you're talking about in these shows.
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B
I'd like to get back to this question of crowds and audience in just a minute, but maybe could you take us back a little first? Because you opened with this shifts in us split, which is of course quite recent happening, but the book itself begins much earlier. And I know that you've been working on this book for well over a decade, if not closer to two decades. What's sort of the inspiration to research at this book? And maybe more importantly, at what point point did you figure out for yourself that you actually were researching a book?
- [10:08]
A
Thank you so much for that question. It's a pleasure to be able to speak about it because it was actually a quite important realization, the one you're pointing to, that this was a book. As you mentioned, I began working on this research. There's three parts of the book. And the first part of the book focuses ethnographically on the kind of run up to a municipal election in 2012. So 2011, 2012, that winter, that's when I began. And I began that research as kind of, you know, when you finish a book. Like I had finished the research for my doctoral dissertation, which became my first book. And there was a couple of questions that were kind of kicking around that I hadn't quite. That weren't really part of that first book, but that had emerged through that research. And in that context, the questions had to do with, you know, what do all of these different, very interesting characters that I had been focusing on during my earlier work about water, this sort of everyday work of water infrastructure. What are all these people doing during an election? Because what I found, you know, during my doctoral work is that sort of what I had initially been thinking of as formal versus informal politics, as somehow inhabiting elections and their outside or the state and its outside, kind of theoretically this kind of collapses empirically. There is no outside of so called formal politics and it's always election season. So then I went back to kind of look at this election and that was extremely interesting to sort of follow these people during an election season. And like this, Kenneth, it just kept opening up more and more interesting questions. It was extremely generative. And so the first chapter of the book where I talk about, I follow flows of money, money exchange and circulation and gifting and the kind of semiotics of money, the kind of communicative work that Cash performs during a municipal election where cash is used to do things that are quite conventional, like pay for election expenses, but also some things which strike me as, you know, less conventional or less theorized, like, for instance, paying for flag bearers to participate in rallies. So I had initially been thinking of this as a kind of interesting and quirky feature of a particularly maybe theatrically disposed city. I began to think about this as perhaps something that had, or Mumbai as having something much broader and more profound to say about Democratic politics and communication after Donald Trump was elected the first time. And I remember there was a lot of discussion about the size of crowds, particularly during that election. And what struck me during that season was the profound difference in the way that people talk about the kind of size and extent and strength of crowds in the Mumbai context. And what I was reading in the American media, where, you know, in the American context, when there would be a pronouncement about the scale or size or numbers of some crowd, that was easily shown to be inaccurate by imagery. For instance, you know, there's 10 billion people at my rally, when you could see that the number was actually not quite that large. And then what would happen is the political opposition in America would resort to fact checking, as if the register within which that statement about the bigness of a crowd was made was, in fact a truth claim, which could then be kind of debunked by fact checking in Mumbai. I got to thinking that this is, in fact, not the way that people engage in these kinds of discussions. So when some kind of statement may be made, an assessment of some kind of rally or show, the opposition would very rarely engage in fact checking. And this was not because things were taken to be truth claims, but in fact, there was a more general sense that these kinds of discussions might inhabit a different register of communication, which was the theatrical. So instead of fact checking, they would try and upstage, right? Or try and, like, put on a bigger show. If somebody would put on a show of something, and then, you know, people would say, oh, that's not. That's making us look bad, or something like this, there would be an attempt to. To put on a bigger and more compelling and more kind of effectively maybe moving display. And what I found as well is that people were evaluating the different shows in that register, so people weren't talking about truth and lies in the same way. And part of what I talk about in the book is the way that people are sort of sorting maybe different kinds of displays which ones are to be, you know, what are appropriate and Inappropriate deployments of the affective affordances of the theatrical. When sort of allegations of somebody doing performance, when that was or wasn't appropriate, that could be a moral evaluation. But when something was explicitly framed as theatrical, like a political rally, then it was evaluated as such. Right. Like the same way, you know, there's like, good and bad movies, there's good and bad rallies, and people would talk about them within that genre. And that was extremely interesting to me. And. And again, as you mentioned in your opening comments, your opening description of the book, what I find in Mumbai is that people are extraordinarily fluent in this mode of communication and evaluation. So there's a lot of kind of talk about people maybe being duped by lies or this and that. What I found is, in fact, people are extraordinarily proficient in navigating a kind of very, very lively world of signs and representations and words and images in Mumbai. So that was really what I was hoping people might be able to take away from a theorization from Mumbai.
- [16:22]
B
I wonder if you could somehow say a little bit more about sort of the role of the crowd in your book and its argument. I mean, I've worked in Bengal for quite a while, and I recognize the sort of the political rally and the spectacle. And they were just so many things in reading your descriptions where I thought, yeah, I mean, I. I know this. I've seen something. Something similar. No, including this sort of very critical and adept assessment of what's going on, what's being conveyed, how is this evaluated? I mean, could you say something more about. I mean, it's all interlinked. No, the. The crowd, the bodies, the assessment, the evaluation, the moral discourses and so on.
- [17:03]
A
Okay, this is a great question, Kenneth, because one of the things I was struck by in Mumbai from the beginning of this research is the way that people talk about crowds as a variety of what they call publics, using the English origin word public. So this was really interesting and puzzling to me because, you know, coming from social theory, crowds are sometimes, or quite often maybe counterposed with ideas of the public. So, you know, for instance, the kind of classic notion of the public sphere that Habermas famously talks about, where we've got sort of the public use of reason, where the public is a space for discourse and communicative action, for rationality, or we have other work, more recent work by scholars of mass mediation, where we've got, you know, ideas about how the public is used to describe situations where publics are, as sort of entities are brought into being through the circulation of discourse. So what was really interesting about how publics are often theorized as being mediated by discourse, the crowd in social theory is often talked about as something which is non discursive. It's something which is sort of unmediated or spontaneous or sort of animated by affect and feeling instead of discourse and ideas. So sometimes in social theory, the crowd is a kind of residual, and it can be either celebrated or vilified, depending on who's doing what with crowd theory. But I was really struck in Mumbai about how the word public was used to describe crowds. Crowds of people who gather not just for, say, like a film or a theater. So this would be the kind of classic notion of sort of a public gathering by virtue of shared attention to some kind of object, like Michael Warner talks about, or, you know, Benedict Anderson's idea of the kind of social subject of the nation which is brought into being through the circulation of media discourse. But we've got here in Mumbai people who gather for things like political events, protest marches or roadblocks or election rallies. These are talked about as publics. So for instance, you know, I remember talking to one political party worker and I talk about this. I think this is at the end of chapter one. And I was saying, well, you know, like, what are people gathering here to see, you know, looking at a rally? And he says, oh, people need to see the crowd because they need to see how much public you have. So here we've got the crowd being described as so much public. So again, this kind of slippage between these words and then alongside this kind of maybe similarity between the crowd and the public, or the crowd as public, I had a really interesting conversation which actually is a kind of opening vignette to chapter two, where I'm talking with a group of men who are standing on the side of the road watching an election rally. And I ask them too, like, what are you guys standing here to watch? And they say, well, we have to look at the size of the public, right? They're looking again at the size of the public, but they say the size of the public will be the size of the image. So in that sense, I was interested in the crowd as something which is not only a kind of assembled public that is, you know, gathering by virtue of its attention to some candidate or support for some candidate who's leading a rally. But also there's an image of that public which has other audiences. So what this drew my attention to was that how the crowd is a public and also has its own publics, because when the crowd is imaged or there's images of the crowd that circulates, those circulate in ways that produce other kinds of publics. So there's sort of overlapping and multiple modes of publicity. And all of these modes of publicity have different kinds of material mediations and different kinds of audiences. So these are audiences, not only people that are assembled because of their shared attention or interest in some candidate, but people like the Xerox shop man that I'm talking about. He was outside a Xerox shop who's assessing the size and the strength of the candidate and their public. And he says, you know, the size of the public will be the size of the image. That's what they're looking at. He says, you need to advertise because no ad, no sale, right? So the kind of rally is an advertise. So this was really key. Again, thinking back to the original, the first vignette I talked about, that people are coming out to enjoy and evaluate some kind of performance, but it's not because they're reading some sort of literal meaning from the physical size of the crowd, but they're drawing on all kinds of sensory and embodied experiences and understandings of that kind of rallied in order to understand the public and its imaging. So, you know, for instance, I remember one person, I was asking which one was biggest, which one was best? And one person was saying, oh, you know, this. That crowd might have been bigger, but it had no strength. And so the strength of the image or the strength of the. Of the rally wasn't just in its size, but it was in the kind of feeling or the atmosphere that a certain crowd, as public as image then would enact. So I'm interested, you know, in sort of all of the different materials that go into the assembling of a crowd and then the images of that crowd, which then circulate and have their own kind of myriad of publics and audiences. And this was also, last thing I'll say this was so interesting to me as well, because these rallies and these shows were. They were sort of fraught with contingencies. So people would show up to sort of watch how they would turn out. Like, could they pull it off? It was like a real time enactment of the power and authority that voters were very keen to understand. So this wasn't just. Sometimes people think about kind of performance, performance or theater and politics as being somehow separate from, like, real ideas or the. The real questions that matter. Oh, this is just a, you know, a kind of bunch of theater. But in Fact, what people are watching when they're evaluating and sort of participating in these displays are crucially important things. For instance, who is going to turn up for one rally versus another rally has to do with all of the relational work that a campaign and a candidate has put into assembling the rally. So this is the weeks and months and years of relational trust building labor that has gone into being able to enact a particular show. So what I'm looking at, so chapter two is about a particular rally, sort of what is on display. And then chapter three goes back and looks at the weeks and months and years of work that go into the crafting of the relations that are then put on display that people are turning up to watch. So it would be a mistake to just show up at the rally and say, oh, people are just watching to see how many flag bearers somebody paid or how many flowers get thrown from a rooftop. The real thing that people are turning up to watch is, okay, who are the different actors who are participating in some rally or not? You know, who are. Because people are able to recognize one another, they can read who is part of one or another rally. And these are very, very important issues. Somebody would say, oh, you know, they've, they've clearly built, this campaign team, has built trusting relations with this group of manufacturers, and that must be for good reason. So if the manufacturers are with him, that means they have good reason to believe that he'll be able to help them renew their commercial or industrial license, which is a sort of pressing issue and given the kind of complexity of such things in Mumbai. So again, it's really important to understand that when people are evaluating shows, they're looking for things that are of crucial import to voters, substantive issues.
- [25:35]
B
So, but in the latter part of the book, I mean, the two last chapters in particular, you turn to focus a lot more on the Citizenship Amendment act and those broad based popular protests that erupted in 2019 and also in 2020 across much of, including in Mumbai. And a lot has been written about the Citizenship Amendment act and also about the protests, the critique, and so on. And when I got to that point in the book, I must admit that I was actually wondering, is there anything more to be said about the CIA protest that hasn't been said already or been argued already? But I actually think that the way in which you focus on the circulation of images of all kinds within this mobilization and the kinds of crowds or publics that they produce and the kind of political subjectivity that they bring out, I think you actually managed to shed some novel light also on this particular moment in Indian political history. Could you talk us through this part of the analysis that focuses on the Citizenship Amendment act and the popular mobilization?
- [26:43]
A
Sure, yeah. And thank you for sort of inviting me to explicitly talk about the different parts of the book and how they relate to one another. So the first two parts of the book, as we've already talked about, focus explicitly on the way in which the sort of longitudinal relationship formation work between elections, then is sort of mobilized and put on display during election season. So the first two chapters of the book are really about, or, sorry, two sort of parts of the book are about really, the answering the question, what kind of politics? What is the political discursive terrain of democratic communication that elections inhabit? Right. So, like, what is the politics of an election? But it's against the backdrop of this much sort of broader and more textured understanding of communication, relationality, semiotics, materials, you know, streets and screens and all this kind of stuff. So in much the same way, when the CAA protests happened in the winter of 2019, 2020, it's against that same backdrop. It's the same city. It was just a different moment of. And the sort of stakes of different kinds of mobilization. So it's not a different set of arguments, but rather a different moment and a different set of dynamics that are kind of mobilized. But yet this was a very puzzling moment to me, having worked on the kind of electoral politics that I've been talking about. And this was because when these protests erupted in the streets of Mumbai, there was something very sort of odd that happened, which is that the kind of bread and butter of politics and the crowds and publics in Mumbai is politicians claiming credit for this or that sort of rally or gathering. So whenever, like, you know, when this is what was going on during. During these election rallies, I'm talking about or, you know, political orations and so on and so forth, different political actors are saying, well, you know, I'm responsible for this. Like, this is my public, right? You need to know how much public they have. So when there's a crowd, it's always somebody's public. But what happened during the CAA protest was that there was an explicit act of disavowal by politicians from all of the parties. Nobody was claiming credit for these crowds. And in fact, they were seeking to distance themselves from these crowds, not as a critique of them, but to say, look, this is something which is not electoral politics. And so this was actually extremely interesting to me because at the same time, that the sort of apparatus of party politics was seeking to say, look what's going on over here. Even the parties that were kind of professing to be on the side of the activists and protesters, they were saying, we are not the organizers. We are not the kind of the ones that are orchestrating this. And yet the protesting crowds were not professing to be kind of spontaneous or unorganized or unmediated. Right? So this wasn't sort of legible to our crowd theory analytics either. And this was very explicit. The activist organizers were advertising, we have police permissions. This is where we're gonna. There was like, instructions that were circulated over WhatsApp groups about proper comportment and where certain things should or shouldn't take place. So there was no effort to kind of curate an image of these protests as spontaneous and unmediated. And yet this, like the kind of bread and butter credit claiming of this is My Public, was not the kind of register within which these are being enacted and. Or evaluated. And in fact, on the contrary, one of the ways, because there actually was a. There was a sort of small group of pro CAA protests or sort of series of pro CA protests that went on at the same time. And one way in which the anti CAA and the pro CAA protest activists would try and discredit one another was by saying, oh, your rally looks like a political rally. This is only drama. This is just political drama, right? So nobody would disparage a political rally as being a drama, because everybody knows that political rallies inhabit the. That particular kind of register. But one of the ways that people would try and disparage the ruling party that had enacted the CAA would try and discredit the anti CAA protest gatherings by saying, oh, these are all just politically organized, that sort of thing. So this was actually really interesting to me that these were sort of different genres of mobilization and evaluation of crowds. And yet neither one was professing to be spontaneous. They actually were very explicit in their material mediations. So what I focus on, particularly in chapter four, is, is how the protest gatherings over that winter were the site of intensely competitive efforts by activist organizers to control the narrative. That's the phrase they would use, controlling the narrative regarding what the protests would mean and how they would. How they would signify the kinds of semiotics and communication that these kind of crowd images would yield. And they would try and do this by controlling the images of the crowds. So again, these were not sort of spontaneous. They didn't profess to be spontaneous. They were Deliberate efforts to curate particular images, crowd images, but there were different crowd images than the ones we're talking about, you know, earlier. So the way in which activists would do this was a. Through efforts to try and curate the look of the crowds themselves. There was a lot of concern among Muslim Mumbaikars and political leadership that if the crowds of protesters looked like they were made up only of people who were visibly Muslim, right, You know, women in hijabs or men wearing Muslim looking caps, then this might work to further alienate and isolate Mumbai Muslims. So there was a lot of worry about, like, how can we make the crowd look more kind of inclusive and cosmopolitan. And this was a real issue because the CAA protest drew a disproportionate number of Muslim bikers because they so obviously targeted the caa, so explicitly targeted Muslims. So Muslims were very concerned. They tended to show up in greater numbers. And this was the cause of much anxiety. And by the same token, there was a keen awareness by both activists and also participants, the myriad of participants who would show up at these protest gatherings. People were very aware that the images of the crowd and of sort of images of placards that people would carry, that the interpretations of these images was totally up for grabs. Right. What the uptake was going to be. Again, back to our performance analytics. What the uptake was going to be could be easily manipulated. And there had to be some effort to kind of curate and sort of spoon feed how people might interpret these images or at least make sure that certain images were less vulnerable to hijack. So this, the way that people would do this was, for instance, by handwriting their placards so that there could be no allegation that these were like mass printed. Right? The kind of making sure that there was no party insignia at the rallies in order to fend off allegations that this was party organized, that sort of thing. Like, no, I remember I speak to one woman that I talk about at some length in chapter four, who describes to me how she came with a placard that she had handwritten. She's a lawyer by training because she had something very particular to say. And so the crowd is. The site is the kind of way in which she can speak her voice, communicate her individual voice, her personal perspective is what she puts it. So this isn't like a singular crowd speaking as a singular voice, but rather the crowd becomes actually the infrastructure by means of which people seek to project their individual voices or individual perspectives. So she comes with a poster with the idea that people will capture images of her poster on their mobile phone and will circulate them through the media sphere. So the chapters are looking at how all of the different kinds of media and materiality of these media, things like sound and images or paper placards and mobile phone cameras and the proximity of bodies and traditional and social media, how all of these things are being brought together in order to circulate different kinds of images that have different kinds of publics, and the way that people are sort of trying to curate the way in which these images and their kind of discursive uptake will be received. Yeah, so this is kind of what's going on in that chapter. I'll leave it at that. I could go on and on.
- [36:29]
B
I mean, the whole context for the CAA as an act and also the protests is of course the rise of Hindutva in contemporary India. And that's also something that you touch upon, especially in the beginning of the book and then again in the conclusion. And I mean, there's of course it's very difficult to write a book about anything political in India without having Hindutva as part of the discussion, because we are at a moment in history where India has been described as moving through a phase of democratic backsliding because of shrinking press freedoms, the silencing of political dissent, activists being jailed and so on. This has occurred with the rise of the bjp, which is also a party that earlier this year, one spectacular victory in the municipal elections across Maharashtra, including in Mumbai, where you have worked for so many years. But still in your book, it ends on a very sort of optimistic note regarding Indian democracy. And that's a bit unusual in the literature today to see someone ending sort of on a note of optimism. What are the grounds on which you mobilize this not so bleak outlook for Indian democracy?
- [37:44]
A
I'll begin by saying that there has long been a kind of puzzling disconnect that many scholars, not just me, have noted, which is that there's a disconnect between the kind of meta discourses by means of which politics is narrated in Mumbai, or, sorry, in India more generally. I'll speak of my own work in Mumbai. But you know, this is something which other scholars have noted in other parts of India as well, where the kind of political narrative tends to be dominated by identity politics, majoritarianism, this sort of thing. And yet fine grained ethnographic research has shown that Indian voters are overwhelmingly pragmatic in their electoral choices and in their kind of the way in which they mobilize their energies politically. So the question of flipping Parties switching parties. Well documented phenomenon of Muslim politicians supporting the bjp, even when that seems kind of counterintuitive for that sort of thing to happen. So there is this kind of puzzling pragmatism where people are sort of very non ideological in the way that they, they vote, the way in which they kind of offer their loyalties to, not loyalties, but their kind of political trust in mediators, representatives, brokers who are of different kinds of social or caste or community backgrounds. Like this is something which is documented across India. And yet, and yet we have this very, very powerful, sweeping narrative of Hindutva and sort of majoritarianism. So what do we do with this, this kind of strange disconnect? And where I end up is in the conclusion of the book. I guess I can talk about that because I found it just so like breathtakingly. It was like an aha moment when I saw this. There was a survey, a CPR survey that happened just a couple years ago after the inauguration of the, the new Mandir in Ayodhya and on the site of the former, the Babri Masjid that had been demolished a couple of decades ago. And this was a very, very politically kind of, what's the word? I'm thinking of explosive sort of issue. And at the inauguration of the new Ra Mandir, you know, there was a lot of talk about what this signified. And from the perspective of the ruling party, it was said that, well, the inauguration of this new Ram Mandir is a sign of the end of a thousand years of domination of Hindus by foreign powers, particularly the Muslim rulers and whatever it is. But this is the kind of reassertion of, of, of Hindu political authority. The rectification of historical wrongs done to Hindus, I believe, was some, the, some variety of that phrase. So there was a CPR survey that happened after this and it asked Indian voters. It was an urban voter survey across India. Two questions. And the first question was, was the inauguration of the Ram Mandir the sign of the rectification of historical wrongs done to Hindus or was it a political stunt? And it was like Pretty even, like 50%, including like a full third of registered BJP partisans said that this is not the rectification of historical wrongs done to Hindus. This was a political stunt done in the run up to elections. So this was stunning to me. A full, like one out of three BJP partisans did not agree with this statement and a full, you know, 50% of the surveyed voters. And then the second question was, okay, but did you like the show? Like, did you appreciate the spectacle and an overwhelming majority was like, yeah, it was awesome. It was great. So then the question is, okay, so if people are not necessarily believing in the literal interpretation of this statement as a, again, we're back to this sort of truth lies in theater, right? This is not a story of truth and lies. But okay, clearly this is. This, this statement is inhabiting a theatrical or some sort of performance register. So people aren't interpreting it literally as a statement of the, you know, historical wrongs done to Hindus. And yet they appreciate it. They're not like, nuh, you know, this is wrong, this is a lie. They're like, okay, yeah, so it's not truth, but it's still compelling. So then it raised interesting research questions. Okay, so what sense did they make of it? And I have no idea because I wasn't there and I didn't do that research. But what I think my research in Mumbai does is open up a different set of research questions that we might ask. And of course we know that there is a core constituency, sort of die hard true believers in Hindutva in the very strong variety, people who sort of follow the, the kind of long standing belief of, that the RSS would, would have us sort of enact or that sort of supports the Hindutva ideology. And yet we also know that the number of people who vote for the BJP is wildly greater than the number of people who subs who probably subscribe to those kinds of like the sort of true believers. So then the question is, okay, if people are not taking this literally, then why and how are people flipping to join the party? They're being pragmatic, who knows, there's all kinds of, and I talk a little bit in the conclusion about some flipping that goes on in Mumbai where people are being quite pragmatic. And this isn't to say that this is how democracy should work. So I guess in answer to your question, why am I optimistic? I wouldn't say I'm optimistic, but I'm not as pessimistic in the sense that I think we have reason not to take the kind of overt professing of support for this line at face value. I think there's more going on. I think that the fact that there is so much crackdown on press freedoms, on academic freedoms, on so many things is clearly a sign that there is a lot of discontent, that there is disagreement. On the one hand, you don't need repression unless there's resistance. So that's thing. And so then we just need to understand, okay, what is the way forward. But I think the optimism comes from what I think is good reason to believe that there is more disagreement with that official line than it might seem. And so. And I also think it opens up a different set of research questions. So I wasn't in Mumbai during the more recent municipal election, so I most certainly can't. People have been asking me, what do you make of this? What do you make of this? And I would say that I have research questions that I would like to ask, but since I wasn't there, I have no way of making sense of what was going on when so and so corporate or decided to flip or decided to support this party or that party in this faction or that faction. There are some things that I find quite fascinating and that I think call for more research attention. So I guess that's, you know, I guess I'll just end Kenneth by saying that really the ambition of this book is to maybe lay out a different both research agenda and also a kind of set of concepts by means of which we might think the global political contemporary. So, you know, some people have talked about some of the dynamics that I describe, things like crowd mobilizations and so on and so forth, charismatic politics, personal kind of charisma of leaders in terms of a kind of liberalism gone wrong, like democratic democracy gone awry, maybe populism, this kind of thing. And what I've tried to do in the book is instead of taking these concepts that come from the sort of Western canon of democratic theory and think about what's wrong with Mumbai, I've tried to really attend to the way in which Mumbaikirs themselves are doing the moral evaluative work of talking about and assessing politics and assessing the kinds of signs that we've been talking about today. So each of the five ethnographic chapters is organized or anchored by a concept keyword, an emically derived problematizing concept keyword. So this is a word that people talk about when they're kind of evaluating what's going on here. So, you know, is or isn't something theater is. So the sort of liberal theory would have a lot to say about whether something is theater in terms of, oh, it's not a truth claim. But as we've been talking about in Mumbai, people are doing a different. They're sort of using different kinds of evaluative frameworks or cash. The first chapter is about circulations of money. So, you know, liberal democratic theory would theorize circulations of cash as a sign of the corruption of the kind of authorization, accountability, relation of representatives to their constituents. So if some, if voters are recipients of cash, this must mean that they are not actually holding the representatives accountable according to the temporalities of authorization, accountability of elections, because the sort of transactional relationship has already been closed with the exchange of money. So it's this kind of, you know, breaking down of representation. Now, Mumbaikars have plenty to say about moral, evaluated, moralizing evaluations of cash. But it's not that people will talk about the way in which money is set into circulation, who is giving the money, the proper temporality of gifting, who is giving money to whom, in what way and in what context. So I've tried to really attend to these other ways in which people are talking about communication that are not taking for granted the set of concepts and categories that come from the age of democratic revolutions in 18th century France, but in fact may have a different genealogy. So it's a sort of leaning on historians and scholars who have pointed out that the genealogy of democracy or representation, at least in India, does not begin with concepts and categories that come from sort of canonical Western political theory. And my hope is that in fact these concepts and categories might be, might travel, might be used to maybe think about contemporary dynamics in the United States or wherever we are here in Sweden, even in a different way, or to ask new questions.
- [48:57]
B
Lisa, it's been great having you on the podcast. Thanks so much for coming.
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A
Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a great pleasure.
- [49:05]
B
We've been discussing Drama of Democracy Political Representation in Mumbai, written by Lisa Bjorkman and published by the University of Minnesota Press. It's just a click away. It's available open access, meaning that anyone can access it from anywhere for free and it is a great read. My name is Kenneth Brunelson and thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.
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A
You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast.