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Lisa Björkman, "Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Raghavi Vishwanath. And today we have with us Lisa Bjorkman, an associate professor at the University of Louisville to discuss her new book, the Drama of Democracy. Political Representation in Mumbai. The Drama of Democracy, if I may say so myself, is an incredibly engaging political ethnography of the city of Bombay, drawing on a decade of research. And it makes a really compelling case to be attentive to political form in addition to content, the semiotic, the performative linguistic image and speech tools through which the spectacle of democracy is created and how this makes new forms of representation possible. The book is so rich and so, so well written, so engaging and I'm really excited to have the chance to speak to Lisa about it. So thank you so much, Lisa, for agreeing to speak to us at the network.
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Thank you so much for inviting me. It's really a pleasure to be here.
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B
To start from the start. Right, so you open the book by acknowledging how the politics of form has been co opted by the right and the politics of content. The most cerebral politics, as you say, has been left for the left. And your opening claim places at the center, the figure of the crowd. You speak about how crowds in a rather new phenomenon have started to consolidate rather than disrupt democracy and how lots of political actors have also started to rely on these crowds to create real. Rely on the theatre of the crowds to create real legitimacy. I wondered if you could speak to us about the figure of the crowd. Who is this crowd? How do they come together? And would you say that this insistence on the theatricality of the crowd, do we see that now in all democracies, all polities, or only certain kinds of polities?
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Yeah. Thank you so much again for inviting me and also for inviting me to start, as you mentioned, at the beginning, because what your question really invites me to reflect on is the origins of the book and how and why it came into being. How I realized that in fact what I was researching was a book, that it deserved a kind of a book length treatment because originally that wasn't the case. I had gone to Mumbai. I mean, I'd done my doctoral field work in Mumbai and I had been researching and writing. And then at a certain point I realized that what I was investigating wasn't just some small quirk about Mumbai, but in fact had something perhaps much larger or that Mumbai had something much larger to say about the kind of global political moment. So as you mentioned in sort of much social Theory and political theory in particular, embodiment and affect and crowds and theatricalities tend to be kind of counterposed with kind of proper democratic politics or political communication, which are sort of meant to be sort of a kind of rational politics, discursive reason. And we have sort of reason is the proper language of democratic politics, whereas embodiment or emotion or affect or performance are somehow thought of to be some inherently authoritarian. So, and this is why, for instance. And so I would say that the moment when I realized that Mumbai might have something important to say was when Donald Trump was elected the first time in 2016. And I noticed this funny quirk in American politics where when Donald Trump would say something which, from my kind of Mumbai perspective, so seemed patently theatrical and performative, like he would say something about the size of his crowds, which had no relationship with anything which could be construed as, you know, reality. There was 10 billion people at my rally or something like this. And then the left would respond by fact checking, as if this were the register within which that statement about the enormity of the crowd had been uttered. And what I found so interesting was that in Mumbai, political actors across the spectrum, from sort of leftist parties to right wing authoritarian Hindu nationalists, everyone is communicating in a kind of theatrical, performance, affective way, for instance, mobilizing and energizing crowds and speaking in this kind of performance register. So this kind of tendency that we see especially, you know, in American politics and in the sort of Euro American political theoretic world, to think that affective and emotional speech is somehow inherently authoritarian, that political form and political content somehow are they map onto one another, and that rationality is the proper kind of form of political communication that is proper to democratic politics. This, in fact, breaks down in Mumbai when everybody is speaking in this very sort of rich performance and theatrical register. And again, as you point out, a lot of contemporary scholarship talks about crowd politics as being a counterpoint to the formal institutions of democracy. And so crowds get kind of read as a sign that something is amiss, right? Something is wrong with our formal institutions of representation. This is like broken liberalism. If the. If folks are having to pour into the street to make their voices heard, to represent themselves right, to. To embody the people, because that is because the institutions of representative democracy have somehow failed them. So, like, crowds are read as a sign of broken democracy, broken liberalism. And this is just simply not the way that people in Mumbai would talk about crowds at all. So the book begins with a discussion of mass political assembly and of crowds, a sort of tit for tat crowd event. And that that introductory chapter demonstrates how these crowds are discussed. The sort of moral, evaluative talk about these crowds engaged in both by those who are present, who are part of the crowd, and also by the media. And everyone is talking about the crowd, the crowd gatherings as a variety of show, and that's the word that one major English media news organization uses. They describe these as the Grand Seina shows. These are sort of two Shiv Sena gatherings. So this raises to my mind new questions. So if everyone is in agreement that the crowd gathering is a variety of shows, then rather than say, oh, why is liberalism broken? We have to ask, well, what is being shown and to whom? Because these crowd gatherings are not being talked about as a kind of somehow being outside or a critique of the institutions of representative democracy, but they're internal. In fact, the ones that I talk about in the intro to the book, they're explicitly being staged in order to try and perform for the Indian Election Commission or which of the two factions was the, quote, real Shiv Sena. So people are amassing in order to represent a party with the idea of being accorded official recognition with the eye toward the upcoming polls. So all of this crowd gathering is part and parcel of the representative electoral kind of system, rather than a kind of sign of that of its breakdown. So again, just to say quickly, people have a lot to say about crowds, their content and composition and so on. But what was so interesting and important to me and the puzzle was that, like, how. How do we. How do we take very seriously as sort of political theoretic concepts the moral talk that people use to evaluate crowds? So this is why I begin not by reading the crowd as automatically a sign of broken liberalism, but rather saying, okay, what are people talking about? Do we actually use those terms and perhaps offer those up to the world at this particular conjuncture, excuse me, as maybe ways of theorizing what's going on in other parts of the globe. So to your question of, you know, is this just a Mumbai thing? Is this just a, you know, how does this travel? My hope is that by offering concepts that are born of listening to the way that people evaluate and talk about politics, we might have a conceptual vocabulary that doesn't start with some of the canonical formulations that are not helpful in explaining the political present.
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B
Thank you. Thank you so much. That was really, really helpful. And something that struck me as you were speaking is the concept of representation, which is really the concept that ties the entire book together. And as someone who is not from political theory, I was very curious to understand, and you explained this so articulately in the book, which is the paradox between representation being sort of predicated on presence, but actually the practical modalities of representation are often disembodied and absent, which is why the crowd became such an aberration. I wondered if you could sort of take us through the history of why it was that representation as a concept became fixated to the disembodied form. Why was it so okay for people to think that they are being represented, but never want to see in visceral, material, tangible, corporeal forms that representation?
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Yeah, this is a really important kind of backstory to, you know, where. How we got here as scholars in thinking that representation is premised on absence. So, you know, political theory of representation often begins with the work of Hannah Pitkin. The concept of representation. It's a kind of classic where, you know, and the assumption that that political representation often makes. What Hannah Pitkin does is she takes a kind of Wittgensteinian, ordinary language approach and says, okay, you know, what are people talking about when they're talking about representation? And what they're talking about is the fact that there's something absent which is represented. And she's asking, okay, so, you know, what is that absent? Something that gets represented. And so we have symbolic representation. We have, you know, all these different kinds of representation. But. But the kind of. The thing that goes unquestioned is this premise of absence. So some political anthropologists and historians have gone back and investigated you know, whence this kind of preoccupation with absence. And I'm not a historian, but I find this history extremely important because it helps us explain, you know, where are our kind of wonky diagnostics come from? And unsurprisingly, it has its origins in the Western European experience, where we see how the counterposing of representation with embodiment is largely a historical artifact of the transition from royal sovereignty to popular sovereignty during Western Europe's 18th century. Age of democratic revolutions. Right. So, you know, when the European monarch is disembodied in 1700s, we have the kind of idea that democracy is by definition disembodied. Right? We have the people that are sovereign, but like, all the people can't be kind of embodied there at the same time. So we have the legitimacy of political authority based on consent and authorization by the people. But those who actually exercise public authority are never supposed to actually embody it like, it's not their physical Bodies that are the sovereign, they just represent the sovereignty of the people in absentia. So this is the kind of cutting off of the head of the king, Claude Lefort. Right. This idea and opening up of the empty space through the dethroning of the monarch. So this is a set of kind of normative political theoretic concepts which arguably never really described 18th century France to begin with, but nonetheless have come to inform the way in which we analyze and talk about and diagnose politics, representative democracy all over the world. And so this is why when we have the fleshy embodied crowd, people start to get anxious and think there's something wrong with the institutions. Now this is where history becomes really important and attending to history. And somebody whose work I've been really interested in and following and influenced by is Lisa Mitchell, who is a historian of Indian democracy and political representation. And she demonstrates very powerfully in her new book, Hailing the State, that sort of putting people on the ground, as it were, is an idiom of communication and representation in the subcontinent and has been long before the European age of democratic revolutions. So we need not think about. It's much more helpful for us to understand that there can be a genealogy of political representation and communication that doesn't start with 18th century France and that in fact, that helps us. It kind of gives us an alternate genealogy of democracy that allows us to kind of. Not that we need to take, you know, older concepts, but it kind of gives us permission to actually think about this not being a case of broken liberalism, but in fact to take as an ethnographer, an anthropologist, to take quite seriously what's going on as a modality of representation in its own right, and in fact one that might travel because arguably, you know, even Western representative democracies, again, didn't do so well in approximating the concepts that sought to explain or theorize, theorize it. So anyway, that's. There's a lot of really interesting work there that I kind of reference in the book, but that's not my own research, of course.
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B
Thank you. Thank you so much. This is so detailed and also so clear. You brought up many ideas. I want to pick on one of them, which is the idea of alternate genealogies. So thinking about how these ideas travel, sometimes moving the originary point of what we know, what you've sort of pedestalized as the right way of thinking about things. And I think you see this running throughout the book. An early chapter of the book speaks about money, which is again, a very material good that travels in democracies in the process of making democracies. And in your trailing of this character called Seema, who is a candidate at the municipal corporation election, you speak about how cash. You basically push the reader to think about cash in new ways. Election season, cash flows in new ways, not simply as a commodity to secure votes. Because as you say, it's not like if you give someone cash, they're going to vote for you. So what else is cash doing there? Question you ask, and the question you attempt to answer. And you speak about how the giving of cash, the giving of gifts through the form of cash, create new social relations which are mediated on loyalty and disloyalty, which I thought was a really, really interesting idea, really interesting way of looking at it. I wanted to ask you if you could speak to us about how you came upon this observation about cash. And a question that I was left with was, as you say, if cash really doesn't have the intended effect, a lot of times, why so much emphasis then on the material form of cash? Still, like, could we, could political actors just not give up on the act or the tradition of cash giving and take to other gift giving means? What is it about the giving of cash in particular as a commodity that continues to have such appeal?
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This is such a rich question and it's hard to know where to begin. But I guess where I want to start is with the final part of your question, like the why cache? Because it allows me to go back into what was so interesting to me about it. So the second part of the book, the second and third chapters of the book, the research was carried out in early 2017, which was on the heels of India's demonetization moment. So it was a period of severe cash constriction. So as you mentioned, chapter one focuses on an electoral campaign that was five years earlier in 2012. And I'll talk in a moment about that work in particular, and the arguments that I make are that in that chapter are that cash inhabits multiple communicative registers simultaneously. The most interesting, well meant, they're all interesting and important, but most notable or perhaps maybe unlikely or surprising to the reader would be that it inhabits a kind of communication and a kind of a performance register. So how, what is this? Not only does it work in a kind of mosi and gift giving, relational formation way, but the actual giving of cash and what that accomplishes in terms of mobilizing publics and for rallies and crowds and so on, that this is actually a variety of performance. Now, this was borne out during the Demonetization election season in 2017, because this was a moment of cash constriction where there actually was much less cash in circulation. And nonetheless, the kinds of spectacles that were sought to be produced, which in 2012 were talked about as sort of cash like spectacles, those same sorts of spectacles were sought to be produced in the absence of cash. So how does one produce a spectacle of cash without the cash? And so this shifts our attention and allows us to see that, oh, the point isn't the cash. The point is the spectacle, that what the cash represents, what is that image? And so that's a really helpful way of understanding sort of what is actually on display. What it be is what is being shown. Right back to the question of the show. So this is something which also I write about in my first book, which was about water, the sort of everyday politics of water access and distribution in Mumbai. And it's kind of where I ended that book. So what I discovered and what I show in the book is that the kind of effectiveness and competence in everyday infrastructural work. So things like getting a application for a new water connection process, or knowing how to navigate the municipal bureaucracy, for example, being able to assemble the resources in order to sort of do these sorts of things, this is what constitutes local authority, this kind of expertise. So this expertise is at the same time the infrastructure by means of which, like the stuff of everyday life is made to happen, like how water is made to flow. And it also is the way that political authority is constituted, right? The authority that allows that work to be done. So I take this up in the chapter of Drama of Democracy that you mentioned, the first chapter, which is looking at flows of cash during election season. And I write about how small scale building contractors in popular neighborhoods in Mumbai, which tend to be treated for policy purposes as so called slums, which renders that kind of regulatory framework somewhat contradictory and complicated to navigate. So building contractors in this context are people whose work requires expertise in navigating the kind of opacities and contradictions of the city's regulatory regimes governing the built space and infrastructures of neighborhoods that are treated for policy purposes as slums. Things like, you know, procuring. So for if you're a contractor, you need to be able to make sand and water and cement arrive. And though that's complicated, you need to be able to have access to money, right? It's, you need to be a lot of the contractors, they actually lay out the money themselves first to do the work. So you need to be able to mobilize these kinds of resources. So in this context, being able to build at all is a sign that you've got really good networks and connections to things that people are extremely keen to be able to mobilize. Right? We need water in our schools, we need water in our homes, we need, you know, construction. We need to be able to access the municipal authority, we need to be able to negotiate or navigate bureaucracy. And as well, given that being able to build a house without it getting demolished after some or another complaint of irregularity or legal violation, which is always a possibility given the regulatory framework in these areas, if somebody can build houses and they don't get squashed, this means that this person is really, really effective and they've got good networks with the police, with all kinds of people. So this is the kind of person that folks are really keen to seek advice from during election season. So what I learned was that small scale building contractors were some of the most sought after advice givers during election season. Who is our person? Right? Especially if the incumbent candidate has been unseated by a cost reservation or a gender reservation or something, then people are scrambling during election season because maybe their networks of their sort of trusted networks have gone for a toss because, you know, because of these sort of scramblings. So, you know, this is there. There are certain people who are advice sought after for advice, and at the same time, this is the same. So just to say that like putting up a house, even if it's not an intentional spectacle, is read as a sign, right? So what happens during the election campaign is that people who are candidates who are seeking to kind of demonstrate their efficacy in these same kinds of very important domains of expertise and competence, they will use this register of performance to show that they can do stuff, right? So they will put on a show to show that they can bring stuff together. So, for instance, there will be choreographed displays and there's a set of kind of political protests that I write about elsewhere. Actually, in a 2015 article in Critique of Anthropology in which I kind of was thinking through some of the ideas that ended up getting unpacked in the book. And in that article, I look at these two tit for tat protest demonstrations that I remember at the time. This was in 2008, I was sort of gobsmacked because the people who had organized or mobilized, especially one of the protests, were explicit in marking the protest gathering as a genre of performance. And this was marked in ways. For instance, it. I mean, I could go on and on about It. But the final part of the protest, the organizer actually orchestrates his own arrest by the police. And just to make sure that everyone knew that it had been pre orchestrated, there was a brass band that played exit music as he was sort of driven away from the site. Anyway, in that piece I unpack the ethnography and how carefully it signals its own theatricality. But the point here was for the organizer to see, look, I can even enlist the police in my drama. And so it becomes a kind of real time, the performance. It's not a kind of fake thing, it's an actual. It's very real. It's read as a real enactment of authority because it demonstrates in real time the ability of the convener to put to work, to kind of animate the apparatus of the state, right? He makes a very senior municipal water engineer appear in the eastern suburbs, all the way from downtown on time, right? To make an engineer appear. This is a really, really compelling way to show that you have the ears of the engineers. So if your water tap goes dry, I'll be able to help you, right? So this kind of thing. So in this way I realized that, okay, you know, showing things in real time isn't some sort of like, theatricality, isn't a kind of entertainment. It actually communicates extremely important information in a way that, that renders people compelling. So back to your question about money. You know, all of these kinds of dynamics, the kind of everyday economies and lives of everyday life in the city are obviously shot through with money, right? To do things like build a house, get a water connection, these, these sorts of things, one has to be able to access and wield and move money. Social relations and all kinds of economic relations are mediated by money. And so in this way, the kind of forging of relations through money is utterly unsurprising, right? So, you know, gifts of money work like any other kind of gift in producing enduring relations of mutual sort of, you know, trust and accountability and so on. And at the same time, money becomes a sign of money, right? So money becomes a spectacle of itself and of all of the work that money can accomplish. So in this way, it inhabits both of these registers. And what was so interesting is the reason why I focused on money in that chapter was that the way in which some political commentators who were kind of disconnected from these sort of everyday realities, particularly in popular neighborhoods, would talk about the circulation of money, again as a kind of broken liberalism critique. Oh, the kind of flooding of representative democracy with money actually evacuates the meaning of the vote because it cuts the kind of authorization, accountability, kind of institutional regime that is representation, right? Because if there's money, then there's a transaction which begins and ends at the moment of purchase, right? If money is read only as purchase, then one can come to the conclusion that this is not democracy at all. This is a very sort of cynical theater. These are just like, you know, hired hands that are putting on some. Some nonsense show. Whereas, in fact, people are watching and talking about the circulation of money very, very carefully. People talk endlessly about money, people who are involved in its circulation, but their critiques aren't of the evacuation of representation by the severing of the relationship. On the contrary, they're talking about who is the money given to? How is it given? Was it given to the right person? Was it given in the right temporal horizon? The timing of the money was often talked about. So again, I talk about cash as being the kind of moral, evaluative talk about cash as being a way we can understand when relations, when and how relations are being assessed for their durability, reliability, efficacy and so on and so forth.
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B
Thank you. Thank you so much, Lisa. That was so interesting. And while you're speaking, you also answered another question I had, which was about where the line lies that separates political theatre veering into deception from political theatre being proof of real legitimacy. And I think Mani really straddles, shows you how that line straddles in that exactly as you say this, there's such a spectacle, but whoever does the spectacle better is also in doing that, showing that their power is real, that they can actually make these relations happen. So exactly like you say, however large a rally is, it is sign of someone being able to perform the theatre. Well, they're not making any. There's no pretense of it being theatre anymore. People are very openly admitting that this is all engineered, but the quality of how it is engineered becomes a factor of how real the power is. And that, I think, is a really, really interesting argument that you make in the book and in fact, related to that. The book is full of interludes as well, which I thought were really, really lovely. And they. They set the scene so well. In one of the interludes, you speak about the violent riots in Bombay in 9293 and the political effects this had, as you say it, in response to those riots, economic, religious, social leaders from various stratas of the Muslim community in Bombay, which is otherwise really quite heterogeneous, they started to use the rights as sort of springboard to create new relations with institutions of the state, with the police, with the public. And when I was reading that interlude, it suddenly made me think about violence also as a theatrical tool. Of course, you have, in a democracy, you have rallies, you have cash flow, you have garlanding, you have movies. There's such a show. But something else we know about democracies is that they are also violent. I wondered if it, this, this frame, this paradigm of theatricality might allow us to explain violence as well. So as, as I've been telling you before, I'm doing field work now as well. And in my recent conversations here in Gujarat, I have been speaking to lots of people, activists especially, about how the communal logic that has become the prerogative, that's become the mainstay of the current government has risen to this point. How. How has it become this monster? And many of them very blankly told me that, you know, sure, there's a communal logic, but, you know, that's, that's what, that's what's being shown. That's the violence they want you to see. But behind the scenes, the government still has great relations with Muslim businesses. The government still has great relations with the WAQF board. Money is traveling where it needs to travel. And that suddenly made me think about how perhaps the violence could also be seen as theatricality. And I, as Natak, as you say in the book, I wondered if you could share your thoughts on that. Could we, could we potentially also see the violence of democracy that we know to be so endemic, especially in Indian democracy, as a way of staging.
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A
Raghavi? I think this is such a powerful point that you raise. And thank you for inviting me to speak about it. And this is sort of where I conclude the book as well. And the short answer to your question is absolutely yes. And it has been even in Mumbai, in the city where during the riots that you spoke about in 1992, 93, there were riots that were extremely theatrical in the sense that not that they were fake, but that they were a performance and an enactment of political authority and of the ability to commit acts of violence with impunity. So what was on stage, if we go back to, you know, what this kind of, what is being shown, formulation and to whom, that being able to sort of orchestrate a riot in sort of daylight and commit acts of violence and then sort of escape being held accountable, which, you know, to this day, some, there's still a lack of accountability that's going on. This is a really great way to perform one's authority, to show that you have the kind of apparatus of the state at your command. Now what was so fascinating to me or what has been fascinating to me as somebody who, who's been working in Mumbai since 2008 is there has not been another major riot in Mumbai. So political violence, this is the argument I make is no longer or is not right now a legitimate or compelling sort of narrative content for a show. Like it's not, that's not what people are wanting to see in Mumbai perhaps. I mean, one can think about why, you know, it's really bad for the economy. You shut down the city with a riot. Everybody loses not only their lives, but nobody stands to gain. So you know, if we think about in, you know, in 2006 after the train bombings, I was in Bombay at that time as well. And this was, seemed to be a deliberate. Yeah, that. Sorry, not the train bombings. Yeah, it was, it was the, the train bombings seemed to be a deliberate effort to provoke some kind of communal or maybe violent angry response. And this just, it simply held no water. People got back on the train the next day. I got back on the train the next day. It just, it didn't capture people's imagination. In 2008 after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the shooting up of the train station and so on and so forth, again there was absolutely no. It has just time and again shown itself not to be a compelling idiom through which people want to enact and perform their authority. On the contrary, in all of these cases, when there is a moment of sort of provocation, what we see is the institutions that you mentioned that often were sort of con or you know, came into being in the aftermath of the, of the 9293 riots. These institutions where, you know, when, when sort of Muslim Mumbai in scare quotes was conjured as a mass political subject, you know, as a kind of, as an object, object of violence, Muslim Mumbais got together and, and sort of very intentionally crafted relations with political authority, with the police, with the party, so on and so forth in order a. To prevent mass political gatherings which could be then seen as threatening and the target of sort of, you know, pushback or police violence, which is what had happened. What had sparked the riots in 92, 93 was a mass protest against what had gone on in Nyodia. And, and then the sort of opening of fire on this Muslim looking crowd which was positioned as threatening. So in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, all of these institutions were crafted. And so this allows us to think about, you know, again, the content of the performance. And so it's really interesting to me to see in different contexts across India, you know, what is legitimate and where and what is the difference between the kind of. There's like an interesting mismatch between the kind of rhetorical or discursive content of politics, like, and you were just talking about this, and what ethnographers across India have shown to be the extraordinarily pragmatic character of the Indian electorate, where they might say one thing and then, you know, they. They actually vote quite pragmat. So then this raises, I think, ethnographic questions about, like, what is that sort of violent talk and. Or actual violence accomplishing? Who is the audience for these sort of bids to perform power? And again, I want to just say, I want to take this opportunity to just talk about the methodological move that I make in using performance as a kind of a methodological tool. So there's a lot of work, a lot of really important and interesting, interesting work also in Mumbai about performativity as a register of power. So performativity, as many of your listeners are probably aware, is a concept which has been used to talk about the way that something actually accomplishes that which it professes to describe, right? So in it's a linguistic concept. So when you say I do during a marriage ceremony, then that actually makes you married, that kind of thing. So political performativity is an idea that by enacting one's power, it is in the enactment that the power is created. So by shifting to a performance register. The problem with performativity in doing an analytics of democracy is that it assumes that a performance of power is power without attending to questions of audience uptake, like, what do they do with it? Do they make fun of it? Like, somebody tries to enact their power and are they ridiculed? Are they ignored? Does anyone even notice? So a kind of a theory of political performativity can only really discover authoritarianism because it doesn't take into account how the democratic voting public audience actually interprets and engages and receives. So somebody might enact violence. This might be a performance of violence. But what we want to know is how are people talking about it? What is the uptake? Right? So what happens, you know, when there's like a. Some communal violence or something that goes on is one thing, but we can't assume what people make of it without attending to that ethnographically. So I think, you know, it raises the performance question, really pushes us as scholars of democracy. I think it pushes us in a hopeful direction to really think about what are people Doing and saying and talking about, with. With these performances, violent or otherwise.
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B
Yeah, thank you so much for that. Just as you were speaking and as you say, you know, what's the. What's the feedback? What's looping back? Do we know how citizens are responding to violence or the performance of violence? And a thought I had was films. So in the past decade, I think in my own memory, a number of films have started to center episodes of political violence. And the absolute maddening success of these films has somehow become a testament to the public wanting confirmation that the public believes that this violence is working. And I wondered if I could. I could sort of get your insights on that. I don't want to name these films now, but I know that films are, you know, the, the book is full of references to films, but I'm particularly thinking of lots of films in the recent past which have focused on Kashmir, on Bengal. There's this. Many of our listeners would also know of this trilogy of files films, right? Like, there's this idea that, you know, let's go back to. To events of political violence together as a collective. And let's see what the truth was, which political narrative was. It came out strong from those episodes of violence and just the overwhelming public interest in this kind of cinema. I wonder if that troubles what you were just speaking about, which was that, you know, there's no uptake, really, for the spectacle of violence. I wonder, films, where the films could be seen as evidence of this uptake. Just wanted to hear your thoughts on that.
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A
Thank you for inviting me to speak about cinema and film, which is something which is at the front and center of my book. And so I'm going to respond to your question by just talking a little bit about how I see and how my research has shown the relationship between political publics and film publics. And so maybe in order to maybe clarify what an ethnographic or anthropological investigation of this very good question might entail. So, you know, you mentioned the idea of public interest, right, In. In these sorts of things. And this. So you're, You're. You're inviting me to talk about the idea of the public. Now, one thing that really captured my imagination in Mumbai was that the word that people use to describe mass political gatherings is the same word that people use to describe audiences for theater, which is the English origin word public. And I've had friends and colleagues and who were working in different parts of India tell me that this is perhaps less common in other parts of India. I don't know. I don't work on, you know, Delhi or so on and so forth, but in. In Mumbai, so, you know, people who gather for a political rally, for a political oration, for a protest gathering, to see a film, to see a play. It'll be talked about as publics. And so this raises also the question. And so I talk about this a little bit in the second chapter of the book where I'm watching some political rallies and I ask some people on the side of the road who are watching this sort of mass political gathering, like, what is it that you guys are watching? What are you looking for when you stand here and watch these crowds? And. And this one man looked at me and he said, well, you know, he said, you have to advertise because no, no ad, no sale. And then he says, so one of his friends said, the size of the public will be the size of the image. The size of the public will be the size of the image. Now, this was interesting to me in a couple of ways. One is because he's first of all, again calling this, you know, electoral rally a public, right? So, okay, people are, you know, sort of processing behind this chariot which is moving through the neighborhood. So presumably they're with the candidate, and yet they are the candidates public. So they are. They're sort of assembled by means of their shared attention. That's how media theorists talk about publics and publicity. There's sort of a body which is constituted through sort of shared attention to an object and the sort of media circulation that allows that public to be aware of itself as sharing its attention to the public. So you've got this embodied crowd. So the crowd is a public, right? Which of course, is the opposite of how a lot of, you know, crowd theory talks about. Or public theory talks about crowds, which is the opposite. You have the public as a kind of rational public sphere, a Habermasian discursively produced public sphere. And then you've got the kind of irrational crowd here. We've got crowds described as publics on the one hand, but the. What I loved about this, this phrase that this man had said, the size of the public will be the size of the image is that the public, the crowd is also an image which. Which talks about the kind of multiple audiences of any particular performance or display. So, you know, there's the. The public or there's the crowd that the guy is standing there watching, right? That's one image of the crowd. And then there's that image and the way that it, that it travels and circulates, is photographed and thought of and talked about. So, you know, we have a multiple. A multiple public, the embodied crowd as well as the. The image of. Of the crowd. And so this invites us to think about, or invited me to think about. Okay, if the point here is about the size of the image, like the guy is saying, then what we're really looking at is, okay, how is the people, right, the people we're talking about, like the sovereign, the people, whatever, the democratic people. How is the public imaged and imagined? How is it being shown and displayed? And in fact, Hindi cinema gives us a vast repertoire of ways in which the public is imaged and imagined actually put on screen. And here we see a really recursive relationship between theatrical, between, you know, the cinema and the cinematic political and the. And the on the ground political crowd. So, you know, films like Rang Dibasanti, of course, we have, you know, crowds that are coming together in recognized places. And I was talking to a friend, scholar Tejaswiniganti, at a panel. She gave a nice reflection on the book at a panel discussion at Madison a few months ago. And she was sort of listing off these films where we see political crowds and their imaging and imagining on screen. Firbi Delhi, Hindustani. We see crowds emerging with flags. You know, films like Sri Char Sobis, Mehazad Hun Jawan, all of these films, we see the imaging and imagining of the people as are the public. So it's kind of. It's not very surprising that a kind of mass political rally would be kind of filmy. Right, because this is the way in which people are like these sort of images and circulations, which of course are themselves based on circulating images and imaginings. So there again, there's a kind of recursivity here which is utterly unsurprising. So, yeah, thinking about, again, not film and sort of, you know, filmic performance and political performance, like one being kind of epiphenomenal or sort of derivative or, you know, representing in a kind of entertaining way, but actually co constituting images and idioms and grammars of iterability and sort of, you know, what's the word? I'm thinking of intelligibility. Like how do people kind of see and recognize the kind of signs of what's going on? So, yeah, I mean, I think in terms of your question about. I mean, I also have been quite struck. I've sort of stopped watching a lot of popular film because it's so violent. And I think it's a very interesting question. I would love to read a book about this because I do think, yeah, there's something puzzling there. That kind of, not just the amount of violence, but the gruesome detail of violence on screen I think is something extremely interesting. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. Sure.
- [49:48]
B
Thank you so much, Lisa. And just as you say, you know, the figure of the public as imaged and imagined sometimes also feeds back into real life. So real and real are both co constitutive. And I want to, using this sort of theme, take you to the second half of the book where you start speaking about the Citizenship Amendment Act. And as many of our listeners will know, the Citizenship Amendment act was rather notorious law because it created a fast track route towards Indian citizenship, but it proposed a religiously differentiated basis and it excluded Muslims from making use of this route and the caa. Many scholars of democracy and of authoritarianism sort of claim that the CAA marked the announcement of a new strategy that Chappelle calls autocratic legalism. Right. Where laws were starting to be used to centralize authoritarian power. And here there was absolutely no farce, no kind of attempt to hide the fact that this was an anti Muslim in very deliberate autocratic law. And of course, as you see in the book, the country erupted in protest over the law, diaspora erupted in protest. And Bombay was no stranger to protest generally. And it also became a site of free, very strong, very ideologically oriented protests against the caa. What in your view was different, if at all, about these protests? And I wanted to also ask, as you speak about in the book, how did the CAA protests in particular engage with the very rich tradition of political subjectivity, of protest language registers that we'd already seen in Bombay. What were the departures that you could see when you were mapping the CAA protests in Mumbai?
- [51:48]
A
Yeah, thanks for this question. So, yeah, as you mentioned, the third part of the book takes as its sort of ethnographic point of departure these protest gatherings in the winter of 2019, 2020, in opposition to the amendment to India's citizenship law. Now, what was so curious to me when this happened was that while these mass gatherings were also quite clearly a variety of demonstration, right. Protests are often called demonstrations, Right. They're shows. So this kind of gets again, sometimes to get to push back against this like, crowd as being kind of spontaneous, unmediated. You know, this kind of, this was a variety of shows, Right. And yet the kinds of images that circulated both during and after those demonstrations, right. If you think about like the public as image, so we talked about size of the public will be the size of the image, the images of the public, of the crowd, public that circulated were, as well as the way in which they were being discussed and assessed by the media by, you know, people I was talking to were extremely different from the ways that people talked about publics and their images during the election season campaigns that I had been looking at or writing about. So and yet we also see that this was not a kind of mass political assembly which was being positioned against the state. Again, these protest mobilizations were actively involving political actors in securing police permission and negotiating for all kinds of things. Like there were party leaders on stage. So again, this was all sort of internal to. So the protest demonstrations were originally being. They were scheduled in order to try and speak to the government while they were still voting on the Citizenship amendment bill before it were it was to become a law. So when they originally planned this protest in Mumbai, it was scheduled in explicitly to speak to Delhi, to speak to. And it was. So they were curating a kind of nonpartisan public that would try and communicate across the political spectrum that look, the, the Indian public, the Mumbai public, this is, you know, this is, this is why we think that this is not constitutional, this is not Indian. This is, you know, all these sorts of things. And then the thing became a law and so they kind of repurposed in some ways. But in any case, it was never positioned to be outside of the formal institutions of politics. And yet it was very different. The kind of form of, the kind of assembly of the crowd, the infrastructures of assembly as well as the imaging and the infrastructures of circulation of images was very different. So, and we can talk more about that. I don't know why, perhaps we'll get into this more later. But I'll say that one of the ways that people would disparage the protest gatherings was by insinuating that somehow they were like electoral rallies, like they were na tuk. This is something that people would say. So there actually were a kind of set of pro amendment gatherings as well. The very, very large mobilizations were in opposition to the caa. But there was a small subset of pro CA demonstrations which commentators noted quite disparagingly looked like political rallies. They had mass produced and homogeneous placards as opposed to what we saw in the anti CAA protest demonstrations where people came with handwritten, hand designed, individual, unique placards that they had drawn. And this is, you know, obviously something which has a tradition, its own sort of tradition in, in sort of Indian protest politics, these sort of placard making and so on and so forth. But this was one of the ways in which people would disparage the. The protest or saying, oh, this is. This is just a. This is just politics, right? This is just. This is a kind of cynical mobilization of the affective register of theater and embodiment, but for the natural, for narrow political gain. Somebody is just sort of whipping up communal sentiment, scaring Muslims into thinking they're in danger. And this is quite cynical. So this was the kind of way in which the protests were sought to be delegitimized in both directions. And then the way in which the pro CAA demonstrations sought to counter allegations that they were cynically politically organized was by ensuring that the kind of uniqueness perspectives of individual participants was foregrounded. So there was no mistaking that this was something which was organized by a party. There was a sort of banning of party flags from protests, not because anyone was denying that party political leaders had been involved in helping to secure permissions, but in order to kind of prevent the kind of hijacking of the narrative and saying that, oh, you know, this is a sign of so and so politicians, public. Right? No, this was a different kind of way in which images were being circulated. So the images that were circulating were not of the crowd itself, but were of the individual handcrafted placards. So the ethnography in chapter four focuses on the production and circulation of images in the sort of media sphere, social media sphere, of individually handcrafted paper placards. So I talk a little bit about, okay, you know, what are the different kinds of material affordances of these images? Like, why bother with paper when the point is to have an image? And so then we get into kind of like, what is this paper? How do we assess the kind of material affordances of this paper as a kind of vehicle of representation? Because paper Cagas was the object of a lot of critique during the protests because the whole CAA affair was about the status and the way that paper documents were being proposed to be used as substance of Indian citizenship. So in this context, sort of reflecting on the media, the material substance of representation was a really kind of rich way of unpacking this.
- [58:51]
B
Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you also for sort of taking us to the direction of thinking about the media, thinking about material representations. And I particularly enjoyed the sections where you speak about Cagas. I remember at the time that the anti CAA protests were happening, I was living abroad and, you know, Varun Grover's poem just became such an anthem that brought together Everyone who was opposed to the passing of the caa. And I found it really interesting how in the book you speak about how that Kagas, the term Kagas itself is not just any paper. It contains relations built on intimacy. So it alludes to a kind of personal, affective relationship between the individual, the state, and institutions where authority is seen as embodied. But also something else you say in the book, which is really, I thought, really, really helpful analytically, is how the Cagus was at once being acknowledged as a site of exclusion. But that same Cagus was not being refused. They were. The protesters were trying to show how that Kagas also held the possibility of reform. It held the possibility of promise of overcoming its own exclusionary originary vices. And that I find so, so incredible that this. That the protest was signaling to both of these possibilities otherwise quite contradictory, being resident in that same Cagus. But I wondered whether there was something particular to the. The issue of citizenship that allowed this framing of Cagas. Would we be able to say this in respect of Cagas in other issues as well, where normativities are different? I'm thinking here of the Constitution and lots of Adivasi movements, the Pathalkadi movement, where the Constitution is printed onto stone. It's moved out of its Kagas form. Is that because there are certain normativities to that Kagas that. That don't allow for multiple possibilities to sit together. So I just wanted to understand from you whether at all there was something really particular in the normativity of citizenship in the registers, the modality, the material life of citizenship that allowed for Cagas to be used in that way. Or could we imagine a world where Cagas would perform these functions otherwise also?
- [61:23]
A
Yeah, I think what was so interesting to me about this Cagus discussion and the way that that word became, and the idea was at the center of these debates about citizenship was it really allowed us to attend to the material form of representation. Right. So that was really what was being debated. Like, what is the material substance of representation and the substance of citizenship? What is citizenship? How can it be represented, embodied? And where does Cagas fit here? And so what was so interesting to me as well, about, you know, so essentially we don't have to get into the whole backstory, but the documents, according to the citizenship law, documents were being treated as the substance of citizenship in themselves in a particular way, according to the new law. And yet we see, like, again, you reference Warren Grover's poem, which means we will not show our papers. It was this kind of a poem which Was a kind of call to mass. What's the word I'm thinking of disobedience. We won't show when they come and do the house to house survey to produce this register of citizens, we won't show the papers. What was so interesting to me was that Baron Grover's poem didn't say we will burn our papers because they are meaningless and are not actually the substance of citizenship. Right. Papers have value. What was being critiqued was the very cynical way in which the papers were being treated as if they were citizenship themselves. Separate from all of the ways the political mobilization, the social context within which papers are enlisted in producing the goods of citizenship, of demonstrating, of making, for instance, water connections appear. This the stuff that I had been writing about obviously earlier on. The people who are kind of mobilizing for an election are people who can take your documents and then put them to work such that your tap produces water. The document in itself does not prove or will not get you water. They have to be handled in a particular way through social relations, through the exchange of gifts and goods, through flows of money, through all kinds of things. So again, what was interesting to me was, you know, whereas, you know, Cagas, there's often, you know, talk about, oh, you know, kages is being counterposed with blood. For instance, there's a discussion in the book about the sort of featuring of kun and Kagas in protest poetry. Kun being blood, substance of the soil and this kind of thing. The way in which these different materials are being talked about as being the substance of citizenship. What Cagges allows is for us to really, well, not allows, but, but, but compels is attention to the way in which materials don't have. They don't in and of themselves don't do anything, but they have particular affordances that allow them to be enlisted in particular kinds of political projects. So as, as you reference in the book, I talk about how papers are, can be enlisted, you know, and have been empirically. There's a lot of research that shows how they are. The sign and sight of a lot of violence, infrastructural violence, refusal of citizenship, entitlements and claims. And yet they embody and entail the promise and possibility of those same things. It all has to do with the way in which they're enlisted. But that CAGUS is up to the task, right? That CAGUS can do this is never up for debate. Right. That CAGUS can be enlisted in ways that are kind of, you know, democratic or hopeful is not something that people deny Hence, it's not that we're going to burn our papers, it's that this is not the way that they should be used. This is not the context in which we can use them. So again, for me, as a scholar wanting to attend to the kind of materiality of representation, this is why this was so generative. Have for me.
- [65:47]
B
Thank you. I think as we sort of inch towards the end of this discussion, something I also wanted to ask you was the register of AVAs. Right. The Sonic register. And I'm interested in it based on my own work on sensory approaches to law and thinking about what the. The sonic does to our imaginations, our interpretations of law. And I wondered if you could speak to us about what the CAA protest showed about the utterances themselves, the sonic qualities of those utterances. I'm. I remember reading in the book just the choice of the word azadi was because it had a history of university protests. It was embedded in an anti establishment culture. What it's speaking certain words like azadi, who was speaking. Why did these things matter? And was there was a sufficient consciousness of these registers being relevant registers when the CA protests were being organized. And in relation to that, I was also thinking about the sections in the book where you really eloquently speak about how Awaz does multiple things. And as you said in our chat now as well in the CA protest, something that was really distinct was that people's personal perspectives were represented in the placards that they were carrying. There was an element of disrupting the idea of the monolith, the collective being a monolith. People had their personal preferences, their personal viewpoint sort of depicted on those placards was Ava's in a sonic way, also capable of accounting for this. That the differences between the collective and the personal, that's not something that's often paid attention to. And I wondered if you had thoughts on that.
- [67:34]
A
Yeah, this was super interesting to me. And one of the things. And there's a particular placard that I talk about in chapter four that I really loved because it really allowed me to kind of think through this thing. And it was a poster, a hand drawn poster. And it was a sort of invitation, it was a kind of notification that was circulated over WhatsApp. Come to this. Come to this protest. And it, it said, our Awaz is sharper than your batons, than your latis. Or something like this. Something like this. But it was saying, but the image of the. It was one girl. It wasn't an image of a crowd. Right. Speaking With a singular awaz. It was one face of a girl and her lips were closed. So she actually wasn't speaking in the sound. She was, you know, speaking in. In some other way. She was articulating her personal perspect in some other way. So this, you know, got me to thinking about the, you know, what does the awaz of the people look like? Right? Because something which I noticed was, notwithstanding all the talk about awaz and speech and voice and sharing our voice, for instance, this, this placard, was that the imagery or, sorry, the what was circulated afterwards, the way in which these kinds of publics and their images circulated was intensely visual. And part of that has to do with the affordances of digital media. You know, it like circulating a. Like a, you know, rowdy crowd chanting like, that's not very interesting. Whereas a clever placard that gets a chuckle or something witty or an interesting image that actually is an awaz, which gets looked at. So thinking about the kind of different material forms of awaz, meaning voice. And the interesting thing, and this is something Laura Kunruther, who's an anthropologist who works in Nepal, has written about how the Hindi and Nepali word awaz, it keeps intact, keeps together two concepts which the English language tends to separate, which is that of voice and sound. So, you know, rather than thinking about voice as being a kind of rational, discursive thing and sound as being the kind of, of, you know, noise, right, we think about awaz actually invites us to think about its own materiality. And so this is why I keep that word not as voice, you know, but as awaz, and where the kind of materiality of the awaz could be, you know, anything. So, you know, again, Professor Kunruther talks about the kind of, you know, the sound of the awaz, and I'm looking more about the imaging of. Of the awaz. And you know, what was also to come to the second point of your second part of your question. Oh, so awaz was doing multiple things, right? So, you know, a circulation of Azadi, that chant. And also this was like right after Gully Boy had come out, right? And so Azadi had been. This was like a protest chant which had been kind of repurposed multiple times over the decades and then had been a kind of track on a super hit Bollywood film and then kind of recirculated back into the political protest. And the work that that was doing really was a kind of affective one of mobilizing people into to come. So, you know, especially young people, student groups, those kinds of WhatsApp chat groups. This is where, you know, Varun Grover's poem was circulating. I spoke to, there's a person who I talk about in chapter five of the book who talks about having heard Varun Grover's poem. And this is what invited and impelled him to come out for the gathering was that, oh, you know, this was compelling, the kind of, you know, affective resonance of hearing that poem and of these sort of Azadi chants. There was this kind of energy that drew people together to kind of, to see and to do as that one person calls it, you know, together in one, one space, to move together as a singular kind of public. So there was that and sometimes there was some chanting as well. Like I remember hearing in the crowds, people chanting the, you know, Azadi chant. And yet this was something super interesting that wasn't the way in which, like the chants themselves were not the way in which people sought to articulate their individual perspectives, their personal awa. And in fact, in the run up to the protest gatherings, there was often explicit warnings that were sent around by organizers saying, you know, be careful with chanting because one way in which people are going to try and hijack the images and representations of our gathering is to come into our middle midst, chant anti national slogans or offensive things that will later be attributed to you. So if you hear somebody chanting, do not join them, you know, quiet. If they're saying something offensive, you know, quiet them down and, and just keep your voice on a placard. Right? So then, and there's one. And I found this so interesting again back to the material affordance of Cagas because we all know that, you know, digital media can, can change anything. But she said, you know, I wrote that, I wrote this thing up on a piece of paper because if I've written it on paper and somebody takes a photo of it, nobody can change that. I've captured my individual perspective. Now we all know that anything can be, you know, doctored, but this was the, you know, the impetus for her writing it herself that, you know, that, that I will not be having other people's words or ideas ascribed to me. So other people's rendering of the meaning of me being part of this public and of my Awad was like, let me be clear about what, what my perspective here is. And so she wrote her, she was a lawyer and she, she wrote her perspective. I think her placard said I, I don't remember exactly what the words are, so I won't try and reproduce it here. But it was something about the constitutionality and the unconstitutionality that she saw in that particular amendment. But again, this is really interesting to me because it invites us to. To think about the vehicle again, back to where we began this conversation where a lot of political theorizing tends to conflate form and content. There's a lot for us to learn anthropologically and ethnographically about democratic representation by attending to the relationship between form and content rather than assuming that they map onto one another. To actually ask, how is this relationship being construed? How is it being enlisted? How are people, people intentionally mobilizing the affective affordances of embodiment of sound, of visuals, of humor, of the crowd, of all the flowers, of garlands, of all these kinds of things, mobilizing this stuff, the material stuff of the world to do this work of communication and also to make sense of it. To make sense of it, to resonate with it. And then, you know, like. Like most films are flops, right? Most electoral campaigns fail. So, you know, there's not a kind of, like, strategy for communication that is surefire. There's a kind of assembling of, you know, materials and efforts to communicate. And then there always is the question of uptake. So what I'm really hoping with this book is that, you know, it will be a kind of, maybe an invitation to think sort of conceptually from Bombay about. About political turnings and might raise some. Some new sorts of questions and conversations.
- [75:42]
B
Thank you. Thank you so much, Lisa. This was such a refreshing discussion. And really, the book, I must say, it's not. You're not just observing the various registers of communication in a democracy, in the making and unmaking of democracies, but also stylistically, the book is put together in such a creative way. There are, you know, dictionary, ish notes. It's almost written like a theatrical play. You, you see, you, you. You're working through various forms of writing, of conveying through the visual, the sonic, the written, the textuals. So there's so many textures in the book itself. Like, I thought that was so, so creative and really the most appropriate testament to the sensory, sensory rich material you were commenting on. And I think for anyone interested in democracy, in the unmaking of democracy, in thinking about how law is communicated, legal ontologies. There's just so much this book offers. And I'm really glad I had the chance to talk to you about this book. And I hope, as you say it, this story of Bombay, this political ethnography of Bombay through important conjectures of protest and democracy making, can offer us many registers, many analytical registers, sensory registers to think about. Political churnings, as you said, taking place much beyond Bombay. Thank you, Lisa, for giving us this time and giving us this treasure of a book to. To sit with. Thank you so much.
- [77:22]
A
Thank you so much. This was really wonderful. And thank you for your generous comments as well.