Notes

1. Bombay’s name was officially changed to Mumbai in 1995 when (following a blood-soaked season of politically orchestrated rioting) the linguistic- and regional-chauvinist Shiv Sena assumed control over the Maharashtra state government (for an illuminating discussion of the city’s renaming, see Hansen, Wages of Violence). However, this “before-and-after” story elides the nomenclatural complexities of the contemporary city. Many people continue to use “Bombay,” especially (but not always or exclusively) Urdu-speaking Muslims, portions of the political left, and the city’s intelligentsia. Many people will use both names—sometimes alternating according to the language (or accent) in which they are speaking: “Mumbai” when speaking Marathi, “Bombay” when speaking Urdu, Hindi, or English. What’s more, because Bombay, Bambai, Bumbai, and Mumbai exist along multiple spectra of vowel and consonantal sounds, it is not always clear (and perhaps intentionally so) exactly which name is being used.

2. Shivaji Park is the largest public park in the Island City; the twenty-eight-acre open space is beloved by cricketers, morning walkers, and evening friends’ groups.

3. On June 29, 2022, after a heady week of tortuous legal maneuvering that reached the Supreme Court, Thackeray resigned from his post as Maharashtra chief minister.

4. Khoka comes from Marathi—the official language of the state of Maharashtra and the native language of around 40 percent of Mumbaikars—but has made its way into the everyday “Bambaiya” Hindi that is Bombay’s lingua franca. For a discussion of Bambaiya see Pemmaraju, “Dalvi.”

5. That is, 500 million rupees, equivalent to around $6 million US at that time.

6. Deshpande, “Mumbai Dasara Rallies.”

7. The Black Lives Matter movement was spurred by the unchecked police violence against Black Americans, and expressed outrage at this police violence and at the apathy and inaction of the country’s political classes on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

8. Elam, “Hong Kong.”

9. Nikas, “Pro-Bolsonaro Riots.”

10. See Chowdhury, “Figurative Publics.” For a discussion of the “crisis” thesis, see Tormey, “Contemporary Crisis.”

11. Anthony, “Occupy Wall Street.”

12. Quoted in Giridharadas “The Real Battleground.”

13. Giridharadas.

14. The unseated president declared that the recent election had been “so corrupt that in the history of this country we’ve never seen anything like it,” that “your leadership has led you down the tubes,” and that it was up to them—“the real people”—to “save our democracy.” For the full text of Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech see Naylor, “Read Trump’s Jan. 6 Speech.”

15. In 2008, UNESCO inscribed Ramlila on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. See UNESCO, “Ramlila.”

16. Except for 2020 and 2021, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

17. On Maharashtra’s party system, see Palshikar and Deshpande, The Last Fortress.

18. The election is still pending at the time of writing.

19. Khapre, “Why BJP Only a Spectator.”

20. S. Banerjee, “Sena versus Sena.”

21. The Indian Express described the Dusshera rallies as “mega battle of optics between the two Shiv Senas,” with the BJP “a spectator in the grand Sena shows.” Khapre, “Why BJP Only a Spectator”; Banerjee, “Sena versus Sena.”

22. Eshwar and Palod, “Gaddar vs Khuddar.”

23. The quote is taken from news media NTDV’s YouTube video feature “Team Thackeray vs Team Shinde at Big Dussehra Rallies.”

24. I follow Talal Asad’s notion of “embodied practices” as those that facilitate “the acquisition of aptitudes, sensibilities, and propensities through repetition until such time as the language guiding practice becomes redundant. Through such practices, one can change oneself—one’s physical being, one’s emotions, one’s language, one’s predispositions, as well as one’s environment.” Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 166.

25. Dalton, Democratic Challenges; Hay, Why We Hate Politics. See also Chandhoke, “Revisiting the Crisis of Representation Thesis.”

26. By “fundamental rights” the Freedom House report means the right of a sovereign people to choose its leaders through free and fair elections, to express themselves and engage in free exchange of information and ideas, and to be protected by fair and equal protections of the rule of law. India’s Freedom House status remains at “partly free” at the time of writing. Freedom House, “India.”

27. Vaishnav, “Indian Women”; “India Sees Six-Fold Jump in Voters”; M. Banerjee, Why India Votes; Mitchell, Hailing the State; Auerbach et al., “Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics.”

28. For a wonderfully succinct review of these debates and of new interventions, see Auerbach et al., “Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics.”

29. I borrow this representation/re-presentation formulation from Friedland, Political Actors.

30. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 9.

31. Laclau, “Power and Representation,” 97–99.

32. Disch, van de Sande, and Urbinati, The Constructivist Turn.

33. Michael Saward, The Representative Claim, 4, quoted in Tawa Lama-Rewal, “Political Representation in India,” 163.

34. Plotke, “Representation Is Democracy.” Joseph Schumpeter’s minimalist notion defined democracy as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 269.

35. Scholars have challenged the conceptual distinctions among representation, participation, and deliberation, noting how representation necessarily figures also in deliberative and participatory settings. Young, Inclusion and Democracy; Urbinati and Warren, “The Concept of Representation”; Mansbridge, “Clarifying the Concept of Representation.” See discussion in Tawa Lama-Rewal, “Political Representation in India.”

36. Frank, “The Living Image.”

37. Lefort, Political Forms of Modern Society, 279, quoted in Frank, “The Living Image.”

38. Friedland, Political Actors, 20, 32.

39. Friedland, 55.

40. Friedland, 6.

41. Frank, “The Living Image.” Elsewhere, Frank argues that “populism” is insufficient to the task of “thinking through the particularity of popular assembly as a form of democratic representation,” because political crowds are not “direct expressions of such sovereignty” but rather are themselves representations. See Frank “Beyond Democracy’s Imaginary Investments.” And yet Frank’s formulation hinges upon the same counterposing of presence with representation that the material in this book will destabilize.

42. Friedland notes how the eighteenth-century shift from incarnation to absence was in step with contemporaneous religious churnings: “Re-presentation is essentially analogous to the Catholic conception of transubstantiation in which the body and the blood of Christ are materially re-presented, or incarnated, within the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. I use the nonhyphenated form, representation, to refer to the process by which an intangible body is abstractly represented in spirit rather than in substance; this form is analogous to the various Protestant conceptions of the Eucharist in which the body and blood of Christ are symbolically referred to by the bread and the wine.” Friedland, Political Actors, 8–9.

43. Friedland, 21.

44. See Mazzarella, “The Anthropology of Populism,” 47; see also Jonsson, “Populism without Borders,” for a discussion of the normative valence of “populism.”

45. Mazzarella, “The Anthropology of Populism,” 47.

46. The chapters that follow have much to say about the “public sphere” and the notion of “public” more broadly; for now, suffice it to note that while a generation of critical scholarship (particularly feminist scholarship) has highlighted the gendered and exclusionary character of the public sphere as formulated by Jürgen Habermas—calling for the pluralization of the concept of publicity through attention to various “counterpublics”—embodied crowds tend to be characterized somewhat uncritically as an emergent, unmediated phenomenon born of collective affect. Habermas, Structural Transformation. For discussions of “counterpublics” see Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape; Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics.”

47. German and French conceptual history, also playing past the anglophone preoccupation with procedures of authorization and accountability that stem from presumptions of representation as absence, has a rich conceptual tradition theorizing the “symbolic” and “embodied” quality of political representation. For a discussion see Tawa Lama-Rewal, “Political Representation in India.”

48. Freitag, Collective Action and Community, xii, 6, 19. It was in this context, Freitag argues, that Indian nationalism struggled to incorporate community identities that had flourished independently from the British colonial state in the “public arena.”

49. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

50. Mitchell, Hailing the State, 21, 208.

51. Mitchell, 7.

52. Mitchell, 2.

53. Spencer, “Post-colonialism and the Political Imagination.”

54. Geertz, Negara; Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, 181.

55. Radcliffe-Brown, “On the Concept of Function.”

56. Geertz, Negara, 123.

57. Geertz’s characterization of spectacular performances of the theater state as “ritual” echoes developments in religious studies inspired by Austin’s notion of the performative. Before Austin, scholars of religion used the term “performance” to characterize ritual as the “execution of a preexisting script.” The idea of performativity invited scholars of religion to focus on ritual as action. Performativity offered scholarship on ritual some key conceptual innovations, most importantly by asking how “performative actions produce a culturally meaningful environment.” Bell, “Performance,” 208.

58. Cameron and Kulick, Language and Sexuality.

59. “Could a performative utterance succeed,” Derrida asks, “if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship, or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable as some way as a ‘citation’?” Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 18.

60. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2; Wedeen, Peripheral Visions, 16. See also Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly for an extended discussion of “performative assembly.”

61. Wedeen. Ambiguities of Domination, 14.

62. T. B. Hansen, “Politics as Permanent Performance,” 25.

63. T. B. Hansen, Wages of Violence, 54–56.

64. Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, 4, quoted in Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” 112.

65. Goffman further specifies that by “performance” he means “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers, and which has some influence on the observers.” Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 22. See also Clough, introduction, for an account of performativity that is attentive to audience—where the “performative efficacy” of discourse inheres in how it affects its interlocutors.

66. Llerena Searle, personal correspondence with the author, 2024.

67. In his critique of what he calls “media talk,” Asif Agha points out that “any social process of communication involves relationships between acts of communication and their uptake.” Much as political performativity seems to presume its own efficacy by virtue of methodological oversight to uptake, much contemporary talk about the totalizing power of commercial media (mediatization) problematically “narrows the gaze of social actors to a small sample of their own activities, [resulting in] a curious kind of performative enclosure made largely of media talk.” Like political performativity, “media talk” takes commercial media’s pretentions to power at its word by overlooking questions of uptake. Agha, “Meet Mediatization,” 164. See also Cody, The News Event.

68. Schechner, Performance Studies, 12.

69. Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” 109.

70. Eco, 110.

71. See Björkman, “The Ostentatious Crowd,” for a discussion of “ostentatious display”—a concept I develop drawing on Eco’s formulation of “ostention.”

72. Mediation of course is not a realm of activity unique to politics; rather, as Mazzarella explains, mediation comprises the “ambiguous foundation of all social life”: “Mediation involves the conceptual, technical, and linguistic practices by which the actually irreducible particularities of our experience are, apparently, reduced: in other words, rendered provisionally commensurable and thus recognizable and communicable in general terms.” Mazzarella, “Internet X-Ray,” 476.

73. See Björkman, Pipe Politics, Waiting Town, and Bombay Brokers.

74. Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” 113.

75. Pernau and Rajamani, “Emotional Translations,” 54.

76. The work of Brian Massumi would be an example of a “strong” version of affect theory.

77. Mazzarella, “Affect”; Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 53; Clough, introduction; Schaefer, “The Promise of Affect,” 3; Chumley, “Qualia and Ontology.” See also Keane, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning,” and “On Semiotic Ideology.” Indeed, while scholars of affect and multisensory anthropology sometimes position embodied-sensory approaches explicitly against language-based approaches to meaning-making (dismissed as “bloodless”), linguistic anthropology inspired by the work of semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, in attending to the materiality of signs, has come (from the other direction) to much the same conclusion. Lily Chumley describes how “sensory and somatic experiences” are semiotic processes—mediated by “qualisigns” that are imbued with value through processes that are both social and historical.

78. Chumley, “Qualia and Ontology.”

79. Taking discursive practices of problematization as a point of methodological and analytical departure builds on the insight of anthropologist Biao Xiang on the agentive quality of “the will and capacity to problematize the present.” As Xiang notes, “formal theories . . . often explain away rather than within problems” and in so doing “fall short in capturing how people feel, calculate, and struggle inside the practices” (Introduction). Here I share Piliavsky and Scheele’s call for anthropological attention to “ethnographically derived political concepts.” See Piliavsky and Scheele. “Towards a Critical Ethnography.”

80. Williams, Keywords.

81. This dual valence—at once performance and performative—is evident in the etymology of the word natak, which is derived from the Sanskrit natya, which Platts’s 1884 Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English defines as both “the science or art of dancing, or acting” and the “scenic art; the union of song, pantomime, dance, and instrumental music” itself (1112).

82. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce, pragmatics here refers to meanings of speech that are “inferred from context and paralinguistic features, including intonation contours and voice qualities.” Urban, “Metasemiosis and Metapragmatics,” 90.

83. Metapragmatics refers to the codes and conventions by means of which people go about interpreting non-semantic meanings of speech; for discussion see Urban.

1. All names of people and places are changed unless otherwise indicated.

2. The gender reservation for women was replaced by a reservation for candidates holding Other Backward Class certificates. Seema does not hold this certificate, and in any event the 50 percent reservation for women in the Mumbai Municipal Corporation means that parties were likely to allocate to men any tickets for seats not explicitly reserved for women. For a discussion of the history of caste reservations in government jobs and electoral politics, see Yadav “Electoral Politics”; and Corbridge and Harriss, Reinventing India.

3. Björkman, Pipe Politics.

4. Björkman, 232–33.

5. The Bombay Municipal Corporation officially changed its name to Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation in 1996 as part of a broader renaming initiative, while preserving the widely used acronym “BMC.” In line with popular usage in Mumbai, this book uses “BMC” and “the municipal corporation” interchangeably.

6. See chapter 2 for a discussion of natak.

7. Needless to say, I declined the request.

8. Quoted in Björkman, Pipe Politics and “Becoming a Slum.”

9. On June 25, 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency. During the twenty-one-month period of “the Emergency,” political and civil rights were suspended.

10. For an account of how these dynamics have played out in Delhi, whereby a “multiplicity of tenure regimes” have been obviated by an “aesthetic governmentality,” see Ghertner’s Rule by Aesthetics and “India’s Urban Revolution.”

11. In conjunction with country-level Liberalizing reforms, in March 1991 the government of Maharashtra launched a new set of development control rules (DCRs) granting private-sector developers of tenement-style slum-redevelopment housing incentive-development rights as a kind of housing cross-subsidy. By compensating builders of slum-rehabilitation tenements with development rights, it was imagined, the urban poor could be rehoused at little or no cost to the state government. The basic idea behind the 1995 Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (an amped-up, more market-reliant version of the nonstarter 1991 Slum Redevelopment Scheme) was to use exclusively market incentives to demolish all of the city’s slums and to rehouse eligible residents in mid-rise tenement buildings—now as title-holding property owners. Political leaders in Mumbai sought to legitimize this highly peculiar policy framework (which antimigrant detractors denounced as “rewarding squatters” and encouraging migration) through a two-part strategy: first by excluding from Slum Rehabilitation Scheme eligibility any household that could not provide documentary proof of residence in a structure as of a January 1, 1995, cutoff date; and second through a government circular passed in 1996 on the heels of the new scheme, which disallowed even the provision of civic amenities and other permissions to houses and households whose structures (and whose residence in those structures) could not be proven to meet the cutoff date of eligibility for some hypothetical slum-rehabilitation scheme.

12. Elite Mumbaikars, incidentally, also rely on mediators for such things, albeit in somewhat different ways; see Björkman, Bombay Brokers.

13. Tenants make up an estimated 60 percent of so-called slumdwellers, who themselves are estimated at more than 60 percent of Mumbai’s official population.

14. This is demonstrated in chapter 1.

15. Scholars of Indian politics have used terms such as “broker,” “middleman,” and “agent.” See also J. S. Anjaria, “Ordinary States”; and Hansen and Verkaaik, “Introduction.” I have characterized such various activities as “brokering”—a conjunctural formulation that attends to the contradictions that are mediated through such practices, and to the particular people who cultivate and trade in the expertise necessary to do so. See Björkman, Bombay Brokers.

16. For an account of similar dynamics in the mid-sized North Indian cities of Jaipur and Bhopal, see Auerbach and Thachill, Migrants and Machine Politics.

1. See Srivastava, “Is Your ‘Bai’ on Long Leave?” Echoing this sentiment, another English daily announced on its front page a few days later that “rates for buying the votes of slum dwellers [were] Rs1000 to Rs1500.” Makne, “BMC Polls.”

2. The candidate on whose campaign I focused my research during the 2012 election season spent nearly four times as much on her 2012 bid as she did on her successful 2007 campaign; estimates from other wards are similar. Campaign expenditures in 2012 were reported to range from 20 lakh (about $40,000 in 2012) to a crore (Rs 10 million, or about $200,000 in 2012) for “prominent candidates.” See Mankikar, “Cashing In on the Election Fever.”

3. Michelutti, “The Vernacularization of Democracy.” See also Piliavsky, introduction.

4. See, e.g., Scott, “Corruption”; Wit, Poverty, Policy, and Politics; Kitschelt and Wilkinson, Patrons, Clients, and Policies; Schaffer, Introduction.

5. This discussion recalls the classic distinction between “parochial” and “market” corruption. See Scott, Comparative Political Corruption, 88.

6. Scott, “Corruption.” More recently, Auerbach and Thachill have argued that “machine politics” in urban India can have potentially democratizing tendencies as well. See Auerbach and Thachill, Migrants and Machine Politics.

7. Mauss, The Gift.

8. See Scott, Comparative Political Corruption, for discussion of “market corruption”; see Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, for discussion of “generalized reciprocity.” My analysis here draws on Keane’s theorizations of marriage exchange negotiations in Indonesia. See Keane, Signs of Recognition.

9. Parry and Bloch, Introduction, 12.

10. Bohannan, “The Impact of Money,” 500.

11. Maurer, “The Anthropology of Money,” 20. Maurer provides a detailed review of the anthropological literature on money.

12. Maurer, 20.

13. Simmel quoted in Maurer, 23.

14. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities, 41.

15. Mauss, The Gift.

16. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things.

17. The reliance of vote-buying literature upon classic money theory is not overtly stated but rather is implicit in the framing of research agendas narrowly around the question of how cash-for-vote exchanges are enforced. The possibility that flows of cash might be doing some other kind of work altogether is foreclosed at the outset.

18. Jaffe, “Indexicality, Stance, and Fields.”

19. Parmentier, “Money Walks, People Talk.”

20. Parmentier, 52.

21. Keane, “Money Is No Object.”

22. In an effort to avoid splitting the so-called secular vote, the Congress Party joined forces with the National Congress Party (NCP). After weeks of high-profile horse-trading, the senior leadership of each party settled on a formula that gave 169 seats to the Congress Party and the remaining 58 to NCP. Meanwhile, the “saffron” alliance between Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party joined forces with Dalit leader Ramdas Athavale’s Republican Party of India, settling on a formula allowing each party to contest 135, 63, and 29 seats, respectively.

23. In a constituency of 40,000 people, this means that social workers comprise 5 percent of the population. While this number may seem like an exaggerated estimate, the notion that one out of every twenty people (or five households) engages—at least on occasion—in some form of “social work” does not seem far-fetched.

24. This rumor was given credence a few weeks after the election when, sitting in Mastanbhai’s office one afternoon, I witnessed an exchange between the MLA and some young social workers from his constituency who were involved in organizing local residents for a Slum Rehabilitation Project. One of the boys explained that of the twelve hundred houses in the project area, around eight hundred were without the proper combination of documents. The boys explained that the builder’s men were trying to put “their own people” on the list in place of those local undocumented residents—that is, to sell off the allotments and pocket the money. The boys had gotten into an “argument” (lafda) with the “builder’s men” and seemed shaken. Mastanbhai responded firmly: “No, no, everyone who was in your survey will get a room; all the people there will get rooms. Bring me the list of the undocumented people.” When the boys still seemed nervous, the MLA added encouragingly “I’m goonde ke bap [godfather of the rascals]; who’s going to tear down a house in my area without my permission? Tell them you’re from my village; they won’t touch you.” This exchange suggests that the boys were concerned that the builder would try to assert the superiority of his own networks of power and authority either by having the boys’ own homes demolished or else through threats of physical violence. The MLA’s statement reveals the slippage between the threat of actual physical violence (“they won’t touch you”) and the danger that the builder might use his network of connections to unleash destructive violence on their homes.

25. See chapter 2 for an extended discussion of the Mumbai use of the English-origin word public.

26. Here Seema is referring to the practice of accepting money in exchange for dropping an official complaint—a practice for which Hasina had become infamous during her tenure two terms prior. Seema’s rhetorical question (“Have I ever accepted your money?”) is an effort to distance herself from any demolitions that may have occurred in the past.

27. This conversation was conducted mostly in Tamil between Seema’s husband and the Trust leaders. The translation was provided to me in Hindi by Seema’s sister-in-law. Seema (who is Maharashtrian) understands Tamil but does not speak readily; direct exchanges between Seema and the Trust leaders took place in Hindi.

28. Recall that the Congress Party had forged a pre-poll alliance with the NCP for the 2012 BMC election.

29. The significance of prachaar as advertising is taken up in chapter 2.

30. A chit fund is a rotating savings and credit association system that is common in India.

31. Mauss, The Gift, 1.

32. For accounts in which relations constituted through exchange are shown clearly to be contingent and susceptible to failure, see also Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust; Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy; and Roberts, To Be Cared For. These, in different ways, reverse the received picture in which the terms of exchange follow unproblematically from degree of social proximity; see Sahlins, Stone Age Economics.

33. Keane, Signs of Recognition, 144

34. Keane, 144.

35. Keane, 87.

36. See chapter 2 for discussions of hawa and mains.

37. As this particular exchange happened in Tamil, it was unclear whether offers of cash were made by Seema and her team. However, judging from other meetings in which cash was discussed, it is quite likely that a cash transfer was at least implicit in this conversation.

38. Keane, “Money Is No Object,” 69.

39. Keane, 69.

40. Notably, Furqan no longer resides in this neighborhood; he built the house around the same time that he moved to Navi Mumbai (to minimize commute times to his office), suggesting the importance of the house as a spectacle of wealth.

41. Mauss, The Gift, 37–38.

42. Bohannan, “The Impact of Money.”

43. Parry and Bloch, Introduction, 12.

44. Parry and Bloch, 22.

45. Parry and Bloch, 24.

46. Parmentier, “Money Walks, People Talk,” 52.

47. Parmentier, 66.

48. Parmentier, 65.

49. Here, “everyone” refers to social workers.

50. The aftermath of the election—not only in Daulat Nagar but across Mumbai—was notable for the absence of any retribution against neighborhoods that booth-wise polling data showed to have voted the “wrong” way.

51. Furqan explained to me that he regretted having disappointed his constituents, but he had been called away by his duty to care for his mother.

52. The suffix “-wala” means something like “the one who.” So “election-wala Santosh” would mean something like “the Santosh who contested the election.”

53. The option, Karim tells me, is that “once the ground floor is complete and I’m about to start on the first floor [which is where the building becomes vulnerable to complaint] I go to the BMC and pay money to the officials for a ‘stop-work notice.’” He shows me one on his phone. “This way, see,” he goes on, “if someone asks the BMC ‘why haven’t you stopped that work?’ then the officials can say ‘we did stop the work.’ So, like that, they’re safe and I’m also safe.”

54. Many construction materials are sourced beyond the territorial boundaries and administrative jurisdiction of the city.

55. The role of “trust” in Karim’s work as a “point man” recalls Mattison Mines’s account in Public Faces, Private Voices of “big men” in Tamil Nadu, for whom “the degree of trust” someone commands is given by “the reliability of a relationship in terms of the knowledge of the other party or parties in that relationship.” Which is to say, a person’s trustworthiness and reliability is bound up with their socio-relational networks. “A person who can claim good connections with influential people finds it easier to accomplish social objectives and to influence others” (Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, 58). The reliability of these broader relational webs that comprise the basis of an individual’s “reputation”—a “public sense” established over time—that he or she will behave in “predictable and reliable ways” (32).

56. Carse, “Keyword,” 27.

57. Carse, 31.

58. Carse, 34.

59. To be clear: this is not a normative argument in defense of the influx of cash into elections, but an upending of elitist discourses of “vote buying.” For discussion of the many perverse effects of money’s influx into Indian elections, see Kapur and Vaishnav, Costs of Democracy.

1. Badla is a Hindi-Urdu word that means “compensation” or “exchange”; Badlapur therefore means something like “place of exchange.”

2. For an in-depth account of those hydraulic interventions, see Björkman, “The Engineer and the Plumber.”

3. For a thorough account, see Kidambi, Making of an Indian Metropolis.

4. See Gayer and Jaffrelot, “Muslims of the Indian City,” 21. Anthropologist Radhika Gupta thus makes a powerful argument for the need to reconceptualize urban areas in Indian cities that are discursively marked as Muslim “ghettos”—areas like South Bombay, for instance, which is the ethnographic basis of her own intervention. The “ghetto,” Gupta argues, ought not to be conceptualized as “material space or territory” where some population is segregated (whether by force or volition); rather, she calls attention to the myriad sites and situations where “processes and relationships of power and hegemony in society that led to the creation of the ghetto, whether forced or voluntary, are manifest.” Gupta enjoins ethnographers to consider the diverse processes by means of which what she calls “the ghetto effect” is produced and reproduced, not least by the anthropologist’s own engagements. In a profoundly reflexive analysis, Gupta interrogates her own reproduction of this “ghetto effect” in her inadvertent selection of Mumbai’s inner-city areas as the site for her own field research on Mumbai’s Ismaili Muslims—a selection made unthinkingly, based merely on the area’s “outward markers of ‘Muslimness’” and its popular association with “the Muslim underworld.” Gupta adds that “such processes of othering lead to the homogenization of sectarian and sub-sectarian diversity among Muslims, particularly characteristic of Mumbai.” Gupta, “There Must Be Some Way,” 353–60.

5. Gupta, “There Must Be Some Way,” 353–60.

6. Sarkar, “BMC Polls.”

7. Sayeed narrated his biography for me over the course of two breakfast conversations.

8. While initial media reports described the demolition as spontaneous, an official inquiry commission later revealed that the events of December 6 were “neither spontaneous nor unplanned,” and held top leaders of the Hindu Nationalist Sangh Parivar—the Rashtriya Swayamansevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (the World Hindu Council), Shiv Sena, Bajarang Dal, and Bharatiya Janata Party—directly responsible for the illegal demolition. See “Babri Masjid Demolition.” For an overview of the broader historical context, see Davis, “The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot.”

9. As Hansen points out, “This claim was untrue; indeed, a group of high-ranking Shiv Sena leaders actually arrived in Ayodhya too late even to witness the demolition.” T. B. Hansen, Wages of Violence, 121.

10. T. B. Hansen, 121.

11. T. B. Hansen, 122.

12. Notwithstanding the hoped-for security in numbers, witnesses reported widespread violence and arson even in these Muslim-majority areas, evidence of which was later confirmed in the official government Srikrishna Commission inquiry report.

13. T. B. Hansen, Wages of Violence, 125.

14. T. B. Hansen, 125.

15. Real name.

16. As one Ulema Council spokesman told Hansen in 1993, “Our greatest contribution has been to wean people away from Congress and to ensure their defeat now in two elections”; Kashmiri himself had earlier been an active member of the Muslim League and represented South Bombay in the Maharashtra State Assembly. T. B. Hansen, Wages of Violence, 172.

17. Engineer, “Politics of Muslim Vote Bank.”

18. Rama is another name for the Hindu god Ram; see Davis, “The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot,” 31.

19. Davis, 49. “Muslims constitute a minority of about 12 percent of the Indian population, and for the most part form a poor, dispersed, politically insignificant, and unthreatening religious minority. What could cause such a hysterical reaction toward these people?” (49–51).

20. Davis, 49–51.

21. Davis, 47.

22. See Punwani, “Mumbai’s Muslims and ‘Friends,’” 16. This shift toward back-channel “broker” politics, Engineer writes, took place in conjunction with a sharp decline in Muslim support for the Congress Party, whose discredited local leadership had stood by as “helpless spectators” during the riots and the post-blast arrests. Support for the Congress Party had already been on the decline over the previous decade among Mumbai Muslims, who had grown impatient with its “soft Hindutva” stance especially on the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue. See Engineer, “Politics of Muslim Vote Bank,” 199.

23. I met Junaid for the first time during the run-up to the 2017 polls—but not through Sayeed. Rather, I was introduced to Junaid by a university colleague who knew him through literary circles. Bombay is in many ways a very small city.

24. Sayeed explained that he had never sought the limelight himself and that it was with some hesitation that he had decided to accept a party ticket for his first election, in 2012.

1. At that time, around $5 billion US.

2. Platts translates the Arabic word matlab (مطلب) as “question, demand, request, petition; proposition; wish, desire; object, intention, aim, purpose, pursuit, motive.” Platts, Dictionary, 1044.

3. See epigraph for Platts’s translation of natak.

4. The existence of a proscenium stage (the audience-facing, invisible “fourth wall” separating the audience from the action) to visually and architecturally frame the onstage drama is perhaps the most obvious contemporary architectural convention signaling that something is a performance, but as the rally-show indicates, it is neither necessary nor sufficient. While this chapter shows that natak can be clearly signaled without a stage, the following chapter, on political oratory, features stages that don’t signal theater.

5. I discuss janata (also transliterated as janta) later in this chapter.

6. For an account of the myriad meanings of love in a South Asian context, see Orsini, Love in South Asia.

7. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 44.

8. Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” 484. In this context, the Habermasian story goes, the procedures of representative democracy “should produce rational outcomes insofar as opinion-formation inside parliamentary bodies remains sensitive to the results of surrounding informal opinion-formation in autonomous public spheres” (488).

9. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

10. Here, “discourse” refers not merely to spoken or written words but rather to all of the material stuff—the media—that comes to count as a sign in any communicative encounter or event. See Gal and Irvine, Signs of Difference; see also Wortham and Reyes, Discourse Analysis.

11. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 90.

12. Gal, “Contradictions of Standard Language,” 173.

13. See, e.g., Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape.

14. Ajun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge propose the term “public culture” as that “space between domestic life and the projects of the nation state—where different social groups . . . constitute their identities by their experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life.” And yet where they characterize “public culture” as a “zone of contestation,” Christopher Pinney draws on Mbembe’s reflections on “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony” to note that this same space is “a zone where consumers appear to share in a common language of cultural agency, a zone in which as Achille Mbembe has observed, diverse positions are inscribed in ‘the same epistemological space.’” The Mumbai public—which is a noun rather than an adjective—lends support to this Pinney’s notion of a “common language” and “epistemological space.” Appadurai and Breckenridge, “Public Modernity in India,” 4–5; Pinney, “Introduction,” 14.

15. Here we can take a cue from William Mazzarella’s (re)formulation of “affect” which pushes past the persistent mind-body dualisms inherent in “strong” versions of neo-Spinozian affect theory posited by scholars such as Brian Massumi and Gilles Deleuze. Mazzarella demonstrates instead how “affect points us toward a terrain that is presubjective without being presocial. As such it implies a way of apprehending social life that does not start with the bounded, intentional subject while at the same time foregrounding embodiment and sensuous life.” Mazzarella, “Affect.”

16. The term heteroglossia, coined by M. M. Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination, refers to “the simultaneous use of different kinds of speech or other signs, the tension between them, and their conflicting relationship within one text.” See Ivanov, “Heteroglossia,” 100.

17. Anthropologist Ursula Rao demonstrates the interconnections among these multiple valences of public, showing ethnographically that the print-mediated public is also a materialized entity—a concrete collectivity that is actualized through material-practical engagements with print media. Rao, News as Culture.

18. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics”

19. Here I follow Mazzarella in his injunction to an “analytic of encounter”—where “encounter” is understood as a “resonant occasion and trigger for everything social theory understands as ‘identity,’ ‘culture,’ ‘desire,’ and so on; encounter as a moment of mimetic yielding that at the same time actualizes the intelligible differences that people then proceed to inhabit as ‘me’ and ‘you,’ ‘ours’ and ‘theirs.’” Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, 6.

20. Pernau and Rajamani, “Emotional Translations,” 54.

21. Jaffe, “Indexicality, Stance, and Fields.” Drawing on the Peircean distinction between “indexical” and “iconic” signs, Alexandra Jaffe describes how through the process of “iconization,” historical and social relationships can become naturalized, such that the actual associations are formalized as “styles” or “registers.”

22. Gal and Irvine, Signs of Difference, 88.

23. Mazzarella characterizes this sort of remembered sensory experience as an embodied “archive”: “the residue embedded not only in the explicitly articulated forms (linguistic categories) commonly recognized as cultural discourses, but also in built environments and material forms, in the concrete history of the senses, and in the habits of our shared embodiment.” Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, 8.

24. By contrast, in his account of the Rath Yatra that preceded the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Richard Davis shows how the orchestrators “sought to deny the religious lineage” of the procession’s iconography, even while acknowledging and encouraging “the devotional character of the response to the procession.” The imagery of the Rath Yatra was “more performative than representational,” Davis argues, seeking, through the mobilization of mass affect (the procession was strategically routed through “centers of Sangh strength”), to “displace ruling authority symbolically away from elected officials onto the leaders of the yatra.” Davis, “The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot,” 46.

25. Moores, Interpreting Audiences.

26. Goffman writes that “definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. That is my definition of frame.” Goffman, Frame Analysis, 10–11.

27. Hansen, “The Indar Sabha Phenomenon,” 109n32; here Hansen is quoting Vasudevan’s “The Melodramatic Mode.”

28. For a discussion, see Ulka Anjaria, Understanding Bollywood.

29. T. B. Hansen and Verkaaik, “Introduction.”

30. The word taaqat is derived from the Arabic t̤auq (طوق), meaning “to be able to do, or to bear.” Taaqat (طاقت) translates as “Ability to accomplish, capability; ability, power, energy, force, strength; ability to endure, power of endurance, endurance, patience.” Platts, Dictionary, 450–54.

31. Fareed speaks in Urdu-inflected Hindi (aka Hindustani) but uses the English terms awareness and civic issues.

32. Rekhta.org translates dikhavat as “exhibition, display, pomp, ostentation, show-off.”

33. Tarini Bedi’s account of “dashing as performance” shows how Shiv Sena provides a platform upon which people can perform their talents, leadership, organizational skills, and personality characteristics (“dashing and daring”). She demonstrates how Shiv Sena provides an opportunity for self-fashioning, social aspiration, and mobility that is unmatched by other parties (regional or national). This theatrical idiom of political communication—natak in the unmarked sense—is the hallmark of Shiv Sena’s political style. Bedi, Dashing Ladies, 40.

34. Fareed spoke in Hindi, but the terms in italics were spoken in English.

35. See Chowdhury’s Paradoxes of the Popular for a discussion of the meaning of janata in the context of “popular politics” in Bangladesh.

36. Janta chimb bhijli, Dillli maatr thijli.

37. In contemporary Bombay the words dalal and dalali are generally used disparagingly to mean “pimp” (and the act of pimping), either literally or figuratively. In Chowdhury’s work on Bangladesh, dalal has the disparaging meaning of “collaborator”—that is, someone who collaborated with India against the national liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. Chowdhury, Paradoxes of the Popular; for in-depth discussion, see Björkman, “Introduction,” 26–28.

38. Established in 1995 by the newly elected Shiv Sena government, the SRA is a planning authority under Maharashtra’s Department of Housing. Its mandate is to serve as planning authority for “slum areas” within the jurisdictional boundaries of the BMC. In 2014 the jurisdictional boundaries of the SRA were expanded to include areas within the Mumbai-adjacent Thane Municipal Corporation.

39. For a brilliant digital exhibition of Kamathipura and its redevelopment travails curated by a Bombay-based research team at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, see the MakeBreak website, https://makebreak.tiss.edu/kamathipura.

40. Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Act, 1976 (MHADA) outlines provisions for reconstruction and repairs of buildings that pay a “cess tax” (“cessed building” tax). In short, in contemporary Bombay, “cessed building” is development-speak for a crumbling tenement building located in the Island City of South Bombay (generally but not exclusively pre-Independence buildings, although MHADA includes provisions for buildings constructed as recently as 1959) whose owners pay this cess tax (or at least are supposed to be paying this tax) and are therefore potentially available to be brought under a market-driven cluster redevelopment scheme.

41. Schechner, Performance Studies, 12.

42. Goffman defines “demeanor” as “that element of the individual’s ceremonial behavior typically conveyed through deportment, dress, and bearing, which serves to express to those in his immediate presences that he is a person of certain desirable or undesirable qualities.” Goffman “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” 489. Here I follow Asif Agha’s use of “register” to refer to “cultural models of speech that link speech repertoires to typifications of actor, relationship, and conduct.” Agha “Registers of Language,” 23.

43. In the words of Abhijit Avasthi, a group creative director for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather: “Pappu is an underdog, a lovable character who is not smart enough. In fact, all of us have met some or the other Pappus at some point in our life.” Avasthi is credited with introducing “Pappu” to the advertisement world. Rajiv Singh, “‘Pappu’ Connects with Consumers.”

44. Platts provides a number of definitions. He defines maḥall (محل) as “place (in general; but orig. ‘place of alighting, or of abiding’), position, situation; abode, residence, house, building, mansion, palace; hall, or chamber (of a grandee’s residence).” He translates maḥalla (محله) as a “district, division, quarter (of a city or town), ward, parish;—a camp.” And he defines ahālī as “people (of a house, village, etc.), denizens, inhabitants; persons, individuals, members; dependents, followers,” and ahālī-mawālī, ahālī o mawālī as “people at large, poor and rich; courtiers; retainers, train, retinue, followers, dependents.” Platts, Dictionary, 1010. Timothy Cooper characterizes mohalla as “what is around or about.” See Cooper, “‘Live Has an Atmosphere,’” 655. In an ethnographic account of mahol’s Mumbai meanings, Sumanya Velamur writes that “māhaul is a concept that includes within its ambit a spatial culture, physical surroundings, and a spatial habitus.” Velamur, “Religion-Marked Spaces,” 165.

45. Cooper, “‘Live Has an Atmosphere,’” 652.

46. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 1.

47. Eisenlohr, “Latency.”

48. As Böhme points out in The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, however, “atmosphere” can be deliberately created.

49. To a certain extent, the work of “mains” in Mumbai electoral campaigns recalls Sara Dickey’s account of the role of film-star fan-club leaders in political campaigns in the South Indian city of Madurai. And yet there is a crucial difference: where Dickey’s club leaders seek to produce and develop their own “personal political power” by means of a “politics of adulation” that bolsters the reputations of their chosen stars (“the initial goal is primarily to promote not oneself but the image of the hero”), in Mumbai the reputational flow works in both directions, with the reputation and image of the abhi/neta produced by means of performed association with area mains. See Dickey, “The Politics of Adulation,” 361–62.

50. “Despite Note Ban, Cash Is King.”

51. Simon Chauchard, WhatsApp correspondence with the author, February 2017.

52. See the introduction for a discussion of “ostentatious display.”

53. Bedi, Mumbai Taximen.

54. The rally-show recalls Shuddhabrata Sengupta’s description of wedding processions in status-conscious New Delhi, where the procession through public streets is captured on video, whereby the procession-as-image not only “sends out a series of messages to the world” regarding a family’s social status but also produces the social importance of those participating in the festivities: “People can display themselves and be seen for the display that they offer.” Sengupta, “Vision Mixing,” 296.

55. This discussion of relations on display recalls Mattison Mines’s discussion of temple processions in Tamil Nadu, in his book Public Faces, Private Voices. With a “big man’s” trustworthiness bound up with the reputations of those comprising his associational networks (Mines, 39), these relations are periodically put on display through such public performances and ritual processions: spectacular events whose organizers go to great lengths to assemble eminent personalities representing a “galaxy of institutions” (68) to be displayed along strategically chosen procession routes where “sponsors have clientele . . . among whom the leaders wish to publicize who they are” (67), and before crowds of onlookers who turn up precisely to watch who has turned up to display themselves alongside whom. A key difference between Mines’s account of such dynamics of display in 1980s Madras and this account of contemporary Mumbai inheres in the source of reputational authority. In Mines’s account—even while he points out that inherited forms of “social capital” do not automatically translate into reputation, and that “even hereditary leaders have few followers when they lack charisma and skill” (57)—reputation appears to be an affordance of inherited caste and class position. In Mumbai, on the other hand, what Bedi calls “jaalu” in Mumbai Taximen is comprised by more horizontal and unpredictable forms of social value and urban expertise. For discussion of “publicity brokers” in Mumbai, see also Björkman, “Introduction”; and Björkman and Collins, “Publics.”

56. This anticipates the discussion in chapter 4, where the ruling party’s rallies were disparaged as “only natak” because the flag-bearers were bused in from outside Bombay. Which is to say, the problem with theatrical crowd inheres not in the fact of its being cash-mediated but rather in its being nonlocal while professing to be otherwise.

57. See Bedi, Mumbai Taximen, on the meaning of “choke” in Bombay parlance.

58. Waghorne, The Raja’s Magic Clothes, 166.

59. Waghorne, 166. “The combination of garlands and dancing girls properly belong[s] only in the retinue of a royal personage, in a wedding procession, or in the house of a God” (Waghorne, 46).

60. R. Kaur, Performative Politics, 75. Ganapati—literally, “father/leader of the people (gana)”—is a commonly used name in Mumbai for the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesh. Kaur demonstrates how, in the context of colonial prohibitions on political assembly, the religious festival of Ganapati Utsava was a forum for articulation of social critiques (including critiques of colonial rule).

61. Kaur, xv. Kaur further describes how “colonial prohibitions on political gatherings was circumvented with the use of a religious festival to publicly disseminate views against the ills of society, including the excesses of colonial governance. Such events signaled the rise of an indigenous populace conscious of its force as a ‘people’ with particular rights and claims to democratic participation” (3).

62. Recent years have seen a rising concern in both popular and scholarly writings in India about the “danger” posed by a “culture of political veneration” whereby political leaders are “treated like Hindu deities”—a phenomenon that Sen and Nielsen characterize as “political deification.” Outlook, “Danger of Deification,” cited in Sen and Nielsen, “Gods in the Public Sphere.” While flower garlanding has obvious origins in Hindu religious and ritual practice, the ubiquity of flower garlanding as part of political processions in Muslim-majority localities in Mumbai calls into question any clear “political deification” formulation that would read the transposing of religious iconography onto political ritual as “the inseparability of aspects of religious and political life.” See Sen, “Between Religion and Politics,” 631. The festooning by pious Muslims of political leaders (of any religious persuasion) is a common and religiously unproblematic practice in Mumbai (and in India more generally) destabilizing a facile reading of religiosity into such practices and gesturing instead to the ritual, theatrical, and festive dimensions of political life. In contemporary Pakistan, by contrast, where the semiotic dominance of Hindu festival life is less pronounced, flower garlanding appears less common (although anthropologist Timothy Cooper suggested in a personal conversation that the festooning of political leaders in Pakistan is probably still done in “rural areas of Punjab and Sindh where the residual influence of Hinduism is still strong”).

63. Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, 119. Mazzarella draws on Žižek in this formulation.

64. Mazzarella, 5.

65. Thanks to William Mazzarella for pointing this out.

66. As James Ferguson point out, “sociality (and especially the sociality of ritual solidarity) is not fundamentally a matter of transmitting information, but of sharing a distinctive kind of experience.” Ferguson, Presence and Social Obligation, ii.

67. Quoted in Rizzo, “President Trump’s Crowd-Size Estimates.”

68. Rizzo.

69. Rizzo writes in the Washington Post: “It’s a bit absurd to imagine 30,000 people or so squinting at a Jumbotron while the president addressed a much smaller crowd of 5,000 to 6,000 inside the venue.”

70. William Mazzarella, personal correspondence with the author.

71. Critical theory—borrowing the concept of “critique” both from a Kantian conception of criticism as probing the limits of knowledge as well as from Marx’s effort in Capital to provide a “critique of political economy” that reveals the knowledge structures underpinning and perpetuating relations of capitalism—entails the effort to use reason to interrogate seemingly natural forms of knowledge. By revealing how oppressive social relations are disguised by the naturalization of historically specific ideas or concepts (like reason itself), early critical theory was conceived as a project that aspired toward social transformation and emancipation from structures of domination. See, e.g., Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Adorno and Horkheimer’s later joint work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, what was earlier conceptualized as a self-reflexive attempt to use reason to probe the limits of knowledge is radicalized as a critique of reason as a totalizing force.

72. Bedi describes a similar situation wherein Mumbai Shiv Sena party workers would “invok[e] the performative act of ‘giving’ darshan [visibility or appearance]” to party leader Bal Thackeray: “[M]ost Shiv Sena women were not as interested in ‘taking’ his blessings in the form of darshan as they were in making themselves known to him, thereby allowing darshan to become a relationship that creates visibility not for the deity, but for the devotee.” Bedi, Dashing Ladies, 50.

73. This recalls Mines’s discussion in Public Faces, Private Voices of the role of public procession in the production of public authority among “institutional big men.”

74. Thanks to Lisa Mitchell for helping me think through this point.

75. Schechner, Performance Studies, 42.

76. Rotman, “Baba’s Got a Brand New Bag,” 39.

1. See chapter 1 for an account of Seema’s 2012 bid for municipal office in Daulat Nagar.

2. See chapter 1 for elaboration of the term prachaar.

3. As Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs explain, “Locke’s theory of language . . . stands as a cornerstone of ‘scientific’ conceptions of language that rest upon the conventionality of the linguistic sign, the cognitivist linking of the linguistic sign to ideas, the privileging of the referential and propositional functions of language in the service of rational, philosophically rigorous thought and expression as against everyday ‘civil’ discourse, and the suppression of indexicality (including prominently intertextuality) as inimical to pure reference.” Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 190.

4. As Goffman points out, conversation is “not the only context of talk.” Drawing attention to speech that “comes from a podium” (“political addresses, stand-up comedy routines, lectures, dramatic recitations and poetry readings”), Goffman calls attention to episodes of talk in which “hearers” are not “a set of fellow conversationalists” but rather an audience. In this context, the role of the audience “is to appreciate remarks made, not to reply in any direct way.” Goffman, “Footing,” 12.

5. Irvine, “Shadow Conversations,” 131. The problems with the model are multiple: what counts a communicative act (or “utterance”)? What’s the relationship between some specified snippet of speech and the broader “discourse” of which some utterance comprises a part? What role is played by the broader social and material context within which some “speech event” occurs?

6. Keane “Voice,” 271.

7. An entity or person that “physically transmits” words is the animator of words; the author of an utterance is whoever has “selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded”; and the principal is “the person whose beliefs have been told, who is committed to what the words say.” Goffman “Footing,” 144.

8. Asif Agha cites Irvine’s 1990 chapter on “Registering Affect” to define speech registers as the “voices a speaker takes on in different social situations.” Registers are made up of both linguistic and nonlinguistic signs, which come to be associated (through a process Agha calls “enregisterment”) with a stereotyped “population of users.” Agha, “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.”

9. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.

10. Goffman “Footing,” 144.

11. Goffman, 136.

12. Peirce wrote to Philip E. B. Jourdain in 1908 that it is “anything which is on the one hand so determined (or specialized) by an object and on the other hand so determines the mind of an interpreter of it that the latter is thereby determined mediately, or indirectly, by that real object that determines the sign.” Quoted in Fisch, Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, 342.

13. Agha, “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment,” 76. People can often recognize many more semiotic registers than they themselves are capable of speaking, Agha points out, and the “range of registers” that one speaks enables access to a range of social situations, with some registers being more highly socially esteemed than others. Agha, Language and Social Relations, 167.

14. Irvine, “Shadow Conversations,” 131.

15. See Björkman, “The Ostentatious Crowd,” for an ethnographic account of a theatrical rally that was widely described as having been “hijacked.”

16. Irvine, “Shadow Conversations,” 140.

17. Irvine, “Shadow Conversations,” 141.

18. What Goffman calls the “participation framework.” Goffman, “Footing,” 11.

19. Irvine, “Shadow Conversations,” 141.

20. The expression is developed in Caroline Jones’s article “The Mediated Sensorium” and cited in sensory anthropologist David Howes’s review on “Multisensory Anthropology.” In that article, as in most of his work, Howes has made a case (theoretically and ethnographically) for approaching “the senses” not as distinct from one another but rather for exploring the “variable boundaries, differential elaboration, and many different ways of combining the senses across (and within) cultures” (20).

21. The 1983 Hindi cult classic Jaane Bhi do Yaaro (Just let it go, friends), uses the trope of “gutters” to highly comedic effect during the funeral elegy for a recently bumped-off municipal commissioner who has—just a few frames earlier—been shown accepting large sums of money from a shady builder in exchange for official permissions to overbuild shoddily constructed buildings. Speaking from atop a just-inaugurated new bridge (whose sand-heavy composition will soon result in its spectacular collapse), the new commissioner gets choked up while recalling his dead predecessor: “Mr. De’Mello used to say: the progress of a nation, if it can be recognized by anything, it is by this: gutter [Desh ki unnati ki pehchaan, agar kisi cheez se hoti hai; toh woh hai gutter]. He lived for gutter [chokes back a sob] . . . and he died for gutter. And while he was dying [breaks into sobs], his last word was: ‘gutter’ [applause].”

22. I met Sayeed while conducting research in Gowandi for my book Pipe Politics.

23. A kurta-pajama is traditional South Asian men’s attire consisting of two pieces: a kurta and pajama. A kurta is a long, loose-fitting tunic that typically falls to the mid-thigh; the pajama is a pair of loose-fitting trousers that tapers at the ankle. Like the jacket and trousers of a Western pantsuit, the pieces can be worn separately, but like the pantsuit, the kurta-pajama is intended to be worn as an outfit.

24. A hijab is a head covering; a niqab is a face covering.

25. For a history of the Bombay Improvement Trust see Kidambi, “Housing the Poor.”

26. The Suriya Namaskar, or yogic Sun Salutation, had been proposed as a required daily practice for all children in municipal schools. Mumbai’s Muslim clergy and political leadership vehemently opposed the initiative as heretical.

27. For a discussion of “personhood” see Agha, “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.”

28. This Urdu-mediated encounter about Urdu-medium taleem recalls Bakhtin’s notion of “multivocality,” which point to aspects of discourse that are not attributed solely to the individual speaker but rather point to the existence of another party—a “relevant other,” in Irvine’s terms—whose “utterances are invoked by the one at hand because they are partly imitated, quoted or argued against.” As Irvine points out, any episode of talk “has implicit links to many dialogues, not only the present one, which together inform its significance, influence its form, and contribute to its performative force.” Irvine, “Shadow Conversations,” 140.

29. For a discussion of the relations between Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani see Kachru, “Hindi–Urdu–Hindustani.”

30. Sarvi is introduced in Interlude II.

31. Thanks to Lisa Mitchell for this phrasing.

32. Bohras are known for their high level of education, which in Mumbai is equated with literacy in English.

33. As Agha writes, “The term voice is based on a corporeal metaphor of phonation—the friction of air over vocal chords—even though the phenomenon it names is not restricted to, and hence has no necessary connection to, oral speech” (39).

34. Five years later the toilets remain unconstructed; apparently the shop owners hadn’t been so bothered by the smell after all.

35. See Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, for a discussion of “resonant encounter” as a “moment of mimetic yielding that activates differences that people then inhabit” (289). The skills in “activating resonance” that the campaign team displays recalls Mazzarella’s discussion of what Marcel Mauss calls “the collective forces of society” that “activate attention and harness commitment.” Mauss quoted in Mazzarella, 16.

36. Muslim women rarely wear saris in Mumbai.

37. As mentioned earlier, Asmi’s name is unchanged, since his position renders him easily identifiable.

38. See Interlude II.

39. Jazbaat is the plural form of the Persian word jazba (جذبه), which is defined in Platts as “Passion, rage, fury; violent desire.” Platts, Dictionary, 378.

40. Since Jains are vegetarians, there had been a proposal to close the slaughterhouse in order not to offend their sentiments.

41. The Indian National Congress Party.

42. Bakra Eid, also known as Eid al-Adha (the Festival of Sacrifice), is one of the most important Islamic festivals celebrated by Muslims worldwide. The word bakra refers to the goats that are ritually slaughtered in conjunction with the festivities.

43. Pemmaraju, “Dalvi,” 286.

44. Bate, Tamil Oratory, 79–80.

45. Bate, 80.

46. See chapter 2 for a discussion of mahol.

47. Bate, Tamil Oratory, 80.

48. “Mumbai Civic Polls.”

49. Nastaliq is the script common to Persian and Urdu.

50. See Björkman, “The Engineer and the Plumber” and Pipe Politics.

51. Gershon, “Media Ideologies.”

52. “Placing post-1980s media technologies on a continuum with these older forms of the bazaar,” Jain writes, “makes the changes wrought by liberalization appear more as an intensification and layered expansion than a fundamental transformation.” Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy, 23.

53. “Kuch log yeh dabba ley kar ghum rahe hain, ye log samajte hai key Badlapur in ki milkiyat [propriety/property] hai, ye yahan ke zameendar hain. Jis din Sayeed Rizwan apni pe aa gaya to [restaurant] par la kar itna marunga na.”

54. Hasan’s account of “propaganda” recalls Sayeed’s disdainful dismissal of jazbaati politics.

55. In Mazzarella’s terms, this means “activat[ing] attention and harness[ing] commitment” (The Mana of Mass Society, 138). For a rich account of the “cyber volunteers” comprising the BJP’s social media “digital army,” see Chaturvedi, I Am a Troll. Chaturvedi’s account reveals the fraught role of money inside this work: while her interlocutors adamantly deny they are paid for their digital labor (“we are true bhakts [devotees], and do the work for our ideology”), the accounts are littered with suggestive and oblique references to questions of employment: “But how does he manage to make a living? He looks around, lowers his voice and says, ‘See, I am committed. . . . But others I have heard are looking for payments per tweet and even forming companies to get digital and social media campaigns of ministries’” (Chaturvedi, 84). For an account of the BJP’s pioneering use of social media campaigns intentionally professing to be “nonpolitical,” see Jaffrelot and Verniers, “The BJP’s 2019 Election Campaign.”

56. Hasan’s words recall the previous chapter’s discussion of natak in the deceptive sense.

57. K. Kaur, “Review of the Fake News Ecosystem,” 23.

58. Saldanha, Rajput, and Hazare, “Child-Lifting Rumours.”

59. Stiegler “Telecracy against Democracy,” 172; emphasis in original.

60. Cody, “Metamorphoses of Popular Sovereignty,” 62.

61. Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy, 16. “Little withers in the age of mass reproduction,” Jain astutely notes; “There’s just more of everything” (178).

1. S. Gupta, Khan, and Khan, “Protests Spread across India.”

2. Quoted in Dutta, “Face of the Jamia Protests.”

3. Agrawal, “Shaheen Bagh.”

4. Vats, “Liberation Square.”

5. Quoted in Vats. One lakh = 100,000.

6. Vats.

7. Vats.

8. “Do or die,” Gandhi announced to a crowd of unprecedented scale (estimated between 40,000 and 100,000) assembled for the oration. Demanding British withdrawal, Gandhi announced that “We shall either free India or die in the attempt.” See Gandhi, “The ‘Quit India’ Speech.” For location, see South Bombay map in Interlude II.

9. Strassler, Demanding Images, 243. Considering the “eventfulness” of images, Strassler suggests, means attending to how “specific images police and disrupt the public ‘space of appearance’” (243). She borrows the phrase “space of appearance” from Arendt, who characterizes the “public realm” as a space where (as Strassler puts it) “people are, ideally, enabled to see and be seen, recognizing each other’s perspectives on matters of common concern” (16). Her formulation also draws on Rancière’s argument in The Emancipated Spectator that an image “is always an alteration that occurs in a chain of images which alter it in turn” (quoted in Strassler, 250).

10. Strassler, 137–38.

11. Mazzarella, “Political Incarnation as Living Archive,” 5.

12. Preety’s surname identifies her as belonging to a relatively elite “Baniya” caste background—known as a community of businesspeople, merchants, and traders.

13. Platts translates the Persian word awaaz (آواز) as “Sound, noise; voice, tone; whisper; echo; shout, call, cry; report, sentence.” Platts, Dictionary, 101.

14. Kunreuther, Voicing Subjects, 2.

15. Kunreuther, 3.

16. Strassler, Demanding Images, 137.

17. This poster was clearly produced by someone affiliated with Communist Party of India (Marxist), which, due to its small size, tends to be characterized in Mumbai more as a social organization than as a political party. For a discussion of the role of Mumbai’s political parties in relation to the protests, see the next chapter.

18. Afzal had been found guilty of involvement with a 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament.

19. Part of the speech is accessible and commented on the YouTube page of the Hindustan Times. See “Kanhaiya Kumar Speech at JNU.”

20. Dutt, “‘Hum Kya Chahte? Azaadi!’”

21. “Aa nahi ban’na mujhe Slumdog Millionaire; yeh slumdog hai mission pe”; “I’m not doing this to get rich [to become a ‘Slumdog Millionaire’]; this slumdog has a different mission.”

22. Manuvaad (caste discrimination) and brahmanvaad (rule by dominant castes) were replaced by bhed bhaav—which translates roughly as “discrimination” without specifying the basis.

23. “There’s No Mainstream Voice.”

24. See chapter 2 for a discussion of mahol.

25. Bonilla and Rosa, “#Ferguson,” 5.

26. Papailias, “Witnessing.”

27. Taqiya is a type of cap worn by many Muslim men.

28. “ta‘dād, s.f. Numbering; enumeration, computation, number; amount, sum; measure, extent, length.” Platts, Dictionary, 326.

29. The ubiquity of Urdu poetry in the anti-CAA movement was perhaps most famously noted with regard to Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Urdu nazm (versed poem) “Hum Dekhenge” (“We Shall See”), which was originally penned in 1979, in protest to Zia Ul Haq’s regime, before being widely embraced as an anti-CAA anthem; see “Who’s Afraid of a Song?”

30. D. Banerjee and Copeman, “Hindutva’s Blood,” 1.

31. Banerjee and Copeman, 24. Banerjee and Copeman further explain how, in the writings of Hindutva’s founding father, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, “blood operates . . . as evidence of an original Hindu-Muslim consanguinity, at the same time as it portends violence and death if Muslims do not give themselves over for incorporation into a Hindu body politic” (4).

32. “I don’t remember the exact year or the context in which it was written,” Indori told Indian Express reporter Sana Fazili in 2019, who had asked for his thoughts on why the couplet had found such contemporary resonance among anti-CAA protesters; “I have recited this ghazal at many mushaiaras [symposia] and had even forgotten about it, but I don’t know what’s happened in the last three to four years that like a crop rises again, these words have risen again.” Fazili, “‘Kisi Ke Baap Ka Hindustan Thodi Hai.’”

33. For a discussion of “Hindustan” in the context of CAA protests, see Taneja, “‘Hindustan Is a Dream.’”

34. کتنے ہی خوش نما انہیں یارو بنائ

تتلی کبھی نہ بیٹھے گی کاغذ کے پھول پ

35. Translations are by the unpoetic author. This couplet is by the nineteenth-century Lucknow poet Manzoor Ali Aaqib, “Hansti hai kaenat bhi insan ki bhul par.”

36. خط پہ خط لکھیے گا اے شاہ سوار

گھوڑی کاغذ کی بھی دوڑائیے گا

37. In other words: “I know you’re busy and all, but send some letters [paper horses] my way, would you?” From “Sar miraa kaat ke pachhtaaiyegaa” by Khwaja Mohammad Wazir.

38. ہائے لایا نہ کوئی قاصد دلبر کاغذ

ہو گیا غم سے ہمارا تن لاغر کاغذ

39. Couplet from classical Lucknow poet (and contemporary of Mirza Ghalib) Imam Bakhsh Nasikh, “Hae laya na koi qasid-e-dilbar kaaghaz.”

40. Mathur, Paper Tiger, 131,

41. Orwell quoted in Mathur, 131.

42. Mathur, 130–31.

43. Harriss and Jeffrey, “Depoliticizing Injustice,” 508. Harriss and Jeffrey’s gloves-off critique is responding to Akhil Gupta’s portrayal in Red Tape of the structural violence wrought by everyday bureaucratic action in India government offices as authorless.

44. My own writings on Mumbai’s popular neighborhoods describe how even when people furiously recount histories of (say) taps drying up at the hands of documentary regimes, those critiques are directed not at documents themselves—and only rarely toward the institutions and offices by means of whose procedures these personal histories of loss might have transpired—but rather toward particular people (social workers, government officers, elected politicians) who had turned out to be either incompetent or duplicitous in putting papers to work. See Björkman, “The Engineer and the Plumber” and Pipe Politics, for accounts of creativity and agility in the official use of paper documents to facilitate rather than occlude water distribution.

45. For an extended ethnographic explication of this point—i.e., that the power of papers is processual rather than intrinsic to the document—see Björkman, Waiting Town.

46. Ravi Shankar Prasad is quoted in “No Question of Linking CAA to NRC.”

47. For instance, “Brown parents explaining to their kids that, in an arranged marriage, the wedding happens first and then the love happens afterwards, on its own.” Ritu Singh, “Amit Shah’s Epic.”

48. Gajara, “Bombay HC Lawyers.”

49. “Kaaghaz Nahi Dikhayenge” is a reference to Varun Grover’s poem “Hum Kaaghaz Nahi Dikhayenge,” discussed earlier.

50. Harikrishnan, “Anti-CAA Protests.” That same week, the Maharashtra government issued a circular making it compulsory for primary school children to recite the Preamble in school beginning January 26, 2020. The circular sought to implement a General Rule (GR), passed by the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly seven years earlier, by a Congress-controlled government, but never implemented; the enforcement of the 2013 GR in the midst of the anti-CAA protests sought to emphasize what Congress leaders insisted was the unconstitutionality of the CAA. See “Maharashtra: Reciting Preamble Mandatory in Schools.”

51. As noted in the epigraph to this chapter, the Persian term kaaghaz is derived from kaagh (sound or noise) and da (giving forth): the giving forth of sound.

52. While Mumbaikars busied themselves making paper placards and reading aloud from paper printouts of the Preamble, the fraught relationship between the identity documents and the Constitution played out in a Bombay courtroom, making headlines when a local magistrate acquitted a Bengali-speaking Muslim couple falsely accused of “living illegally in India” by citing the couple’s election card as “proof of citizenship.” “Even the election card can be said to be sufficient proof of citizenship as while applying for the election card or a voting card, a person has to file a declaration with the authority in view of Form 6 of Peoples Representation Act to the authority that he is a citizen of India and if the declaration is found false, he is liable for punishment.” The magistrate concluded—echoing Preety’s sentiments—that while “a person may lie, the documents will never.” And yet while documents may or may not “lie,” there is certainly plenty of disagreement about how to “read” the “paper truths” that they speak. See Samervel, “Election Card Is Proof.”

53. This interview was given to APB News and first uploaded on October 4, 2019. Details can be found in Venkataramakrishnan, “Who Is linking Citizenship Act to NRC?”

54. As Ashok Bharti, chairman of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations, remarked: “When the government of India did not give any citizenship documents to Indians ever, how can they ask for it?” Quoted in “Newly-Convened Alliance Underscores Potential Impact.”

55. In this context, the home minister’s use of the Hindi word dastavez is supremely (if unintentionally) apt: derived from the Persian word dast, which means “hand,” dastavez as “document” explicitly references centrality of the human hand in authorizing documents. The final part of Platts’s comprehensive unpacking of the term thus equates dastavez with a favor-seeking gift or bribe: “what a man takes with him as a means of promoting his suit; what one gets into his hand and depends on; a signature; a note of hand, bond, deed, title-deed, voucher, certificate, instrument, charter, etc.;—a small present to be given into the hands of a person whose favour is sought” (Dictionary, 516).

56. This faith in paper and suspicion of the digital of course flies in the face of commonplace notions proffered by anticorruption champions of “e-governance” that digital technology affords “immediation” and “transparency.” For discussion, see Mazzarella, “Internet X-Ray.”

57. See chapter 2 for discussion of natak.

58. In counterposing of the theatrical with the real, of course, Rohit rehearses the common contemporary counterposing (discussed in the introduction) of representation with embodiment—of representation with re-presentation.

59. Rohit’s train-mediated flash of creative inspiration was of a piece with a recurrent theme of train-mediated encounters that emerged in my conversations with anti-CAA protest participants (recall that I had met Preety on the train). For a historical account of the Indian railways as an infrastructure of political communication and claims-making, see Mitchell, “‘To Stop Train Pull Chain.’” The role of the Bombay local train in the city’s social life has been the subject of popular and scholarly writings. Annelies Kusters writes about how Deaf Mumbaikars traveling in the less-crowded handicapped compartments enlist the train compartment as “space to communicate.” Kusters, “Deaf on the Lifeline of Mumbai.” The role of the Bombay Local as not merely a means of transport but as social-communicative (and gustatory) infrastructure rose to silver-screen fame in Ritesh Bhatta’s award-winning 2013 film The Lunchbox, in which the train-mediated deliveries of homemade food to office working menfolk become an accidental vehicle for the transmission of lunchbox-tucked exchange of handwritten notes between two strangers, who are thereby drawn into an emotionally cathartic (and romance-tinged) correspondence. For an ethnographic account of the role of the Bombay local trains in producing and shoring up food-mediated kinship relations, see also Kuroda, “Shankar.”

60. A Pathan suit is a long shirt (kurta) worn with baggy trousers. It is commonly worn by men across the South Asian subcontinent but is often associated with Muslims because of the garment’s origins in the Muslim-majority areas in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.

1. In the summer of 2011, anticorruption activists launched a national campaign and mass mobilization demanding the creation an independent ombudsman office that would have the power to prosecute government officials accused of corruption. See Nigam, “Staging the ‘People,’” for a discussion of the differences between the two mass mobilizations.

2. “We decided to let the leftists and students lead,” I was told by one major-party leader who had been instrumental in organizing the gathering. The Azad Maidan event that Preety skipped, by contrast, was devoid of any explicit signs of political party involvement. That event was convened by the Joint Action Committee (JAC) of Maharashtra, a student-led organization that came into being in January 2016 in the wake of the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit university student whose suicide following months of caste-based harassment was the JAC characterized as “institutional murder.”

3. Barnagarwala, “10 Days, 20,000 Participants.”

4. We saw this in especially in chapter 3; see Auerbach and Thachill, Migrants and Machine Politics, for a discussion of credit claiming in the medium-size North Indian cities of Bhopal and Jaipur.

5. See chapters 2 and 3.

6. On March 14, 2020, the Business Standard reported that Devendra Fadnavis had “alleged [that] the Maha Vikas Aghadi government was playing politics on CAA, NPR and NRC” issues. See “Fadnavis Attacks Maha Govt.”

7. Name unchanged.

8. Bedi, Mumbai Taximen, 59.

9. Here, the appeal further reads: “This is a special day for two reasons: this is the day (in 1927) of martyrdom of Ramprasad Bismil and Ashfakullah Khan; this is also the day (1947) when Mahatma Gandhi visited Ghaseda village in Mewat (now Haryana) to appeal to Meo Muslims not to leave for Pakistan (70,000 Muslims walked back from Pakistan border responding to this call).”

10. One lakh = 100,000.

11. Longtime Mumbai journalist Joyti Punwani describes the pernicious effects this has had on public protest as means of political communication in Mumbai: “Interaction between the protesters and the public was the life blood of the protests. It was essential that Mumbaikars knew why a section of them were so worked up that they were marching down the roads in the blazing sun.” Indeed, Punwani recalls one Marathi slogan that stood out, “baghta kai / shaamil wha,” meaning “why are you watching? / Join us.” The slogan would be directed “at bystanders on the footpaths and people who crowded the windows of the buildings . . . drawn out from the insides of their offices by the din of slogans.” This all “died” in 1997, with the creation of the sequestered “designated space” for protest on Azad Maidan. See Punwani, “Remembering City’s Exuberant Morchas.”

12. The Bombay Aman Committee (discussed in Interlude II) played a key role during the 1992–93 riots and in the Srikrishna Committee report on the riots (discussed below).

13. Punwani’s accounts, drawn from her reporting work during and in the aftermath of the riots, appear in a short book, Justice Denied—Why? The Srikrishna Report and the Maharashtra Government’s Responce, compiled on the request of the Bombay Action Committee and published in 1998; Punwani, “‘My Area, Your Area,’” 237. Punwani personally recounted to me having walked in Khan’s funeral procession.

14. Aloud, in writing, or electronically, via email or messaging.

15. In India, marriages among Muslims are considered “private” matters, internal to the community, and therefore are not required to be registered with civil authorities (unless the couple decides to do so, under the Special Marriage Act of 1954). See Esposito and DeLong-Bas, Women in Muslim Family Law.

16. Suneetha, “The Real Debate.”

17. As expected, the Supreme Court ruled that the land on which the Babri Masjid had stood would be handed over to a government trust for the building of a Hindu temple. The court also ordered the government to hand over five acres of land to the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Waqf Board to build a mosque, as compensation for the demolished Babri Masjid. See “Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid Case Verdict.”

18. The term “Bahujan”—meaning “the many” or “the majority,” or sometimes “plebeian”—is used in politics in reference to people belonging to Scheduled Castes (i.e., formerly “untouchable” castes, also known as Dalits), Adivasis (indigenous people, also known in India as Scheduled Tribes), so-called Other Backward Classes (a mix of lower but non-Dalit castes), and (sometimes) lower-caste (Pasmanda) Muslims. For discussion, see Corbridge and Harriss, Reinventing India, especially chapter 9.

19. See discussion in chapter 4.

20. CNN reports that the Jamia and AMU protests were of a piece with simultaneous protests that occurred in at least nine Indian states. S. Gupta, Khan, and Khan, “Protests Spread across India.”

21. Punwani, “‘Thank You, Uddhavji.’” Gowalia Tank was the original (and still in use) name for August Kranti Maidan, which was renamed sometime after Independence in remembrance of the site’s significance as the place from which Gandhi launched the “Quit India” movement. The term “Gowalia”—from the Gujarati and Marathi words for “cow” (gao) and “keeper” (wala)—was a reference to the public water tank where cattle owners would come to bathe their cows. While cowsheds were moved out of the downtown area in the 1950s, the term “Gowalia Tank” is still commonly used.

22. Punwani.

23. The police officer quotations are taken from “Mumbai Anti-CAA Protest.”

24. The reporter notes that it took her over a half hour just to find the event, which was “squeezed between food stalls and an underground walkway.” Deodhar, “What Happens at a Pro-CAA Rally in Mumbai.”

25. Deodhar.

26. “For and Against.” To the latter effect, the article merely quotes Fadnavis saying that all the Bangladeshi infiltrators (घुसखोर) need to be expelled from India.

27. See chapter 3 for an extended discussion of sabhaa.

28. A tempo is a three-wheeled delivery vehicle (a small truck).

29. The color saffron is widely recognized as a signal of support for Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva.

30. When I watched the video, however, it was unclear to me how the trucks and volunteers were being identified as party-affiliated.

31. See discussion of natak from chapter 2.

32. “Media events,” Yarimar Bonilla writes (drawing on Dayan and Katz’s formulation), are distinguished from mere “news events” both by their effective monopolization of media platforms and by their real-time character: “The fact that the events are unfolding in real time means that they are unpredictable,” Bonilla explains, thus creating a particular kind of narrative tension—viewers are not just watching history being documented, but rather history unfolding unpredictably before their eyes. In addition, the immediacy of the broadcast creates a sense of community and participation in the event. Bonilla, Non-sovereign Futures, 159. See also Dayan and Katz, Media Events.

33. See chapter 4.

34. From the official Twitter handle of the BMC (@mymbc).

35. Ahmed, “In Maharashtra.”

36. This echoes Ursula Rao’s account of how Hindi newspapers in Lucknow practice a “policy of naming” by means of which editors seek to meet “the desire of urban citizens for publicity,” thereby enabling ambitious citizens “to create an advantage in face-to-face negotiations.” Rao, News as Culture, 47–48.

37. Ahmed, “In Maharashtra.”

38. “Uddhav, Jagan Rule Out NRC Exercise in Their States.”

39. “Maharashtra: No Detention Centre Will Be Set Up.” The article goes on to state that “these foreign nationals are kept in detention camps during the time till they complete their documentation process for deportation. So, there is no need [to fear detention camps].”

40. Ahmed, “In Maharashtra.”

41. Here Feroze echoes Punwani’s account of how, in the aftermath of the 1992–93 riots, mass mobilization of Muslim Mumbaikars was increasingly obviated by broker-mediated channels of communication. Punwani, “Mumbai’s Muslims and ‘Friends.’”

42. Wajihudin, “Sanjay Raut to Speak.” JIH is the Indian offshoot (post-Independence) of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist organization whose stated objective is “Iqaamat-e-Deen”: establishing and maintaining an Islamic way of life. JIH’s primary activities are religious and social, involving evangelical outreach, interfaith dialogue, and social welfare activism. While JIH does have a small party (the Welfare Party of India), the organization pursues political goals (“democracy in politics is possible,” its website states, “only when justice and equality in social life”) primarily through social welfare voluntarism and activities. JIH has an extraordinarily active and well-organized students wing, the Students Islamic Organisation (SIO), whose influence is described by John Esposito as “out of proportion to its numbers” due to its “disciplined organisation, welfare work, its reputation for honesty and street power.” SIO volunteers were extremely active in organizing anti-CAA protests in Mumbai, where—as I later learned—young professionals enlisted a variety of skills in orchestrating and coordinating some of the larger events, playing a largely behind-the-scenes role in things like event management (lighting, sound, stage setup), transportation logistics, advertising, and social media campaigning. “Secularism, Democracy, and Fascism”; Esposito, “Jamaat-i Islami of India,” 156.

43. “Both the Jamaat’s decision to invite Raut, and his presence at a meeting organized by the conservative Muslim religious body has raised eyebrows,” notes Jyoti Punwani in her Mumbai Mirror article about Raut’s upcoming address. “Raut is known for his hard-hitting editorials . . . in the Sena mouthpiece, Saamna, which have on occasion been stridently anti-Muslim.” Punwani, “‘Sena Is Now Part of Secular Coalition Govt.’”

44. Punwani.

45. Name unchanged.

46. Name unchanged.

47. Punwani, “What Was Sanjay Raut Doing?”

48. For a discussion of the ambivalent valence of dalal in Bombay, see Björkman, “Introduction.”

49. The RSS is a right-wing volunteer organization and paramilitary group promoting Hindu nationalist ideology. Founded in 1925, the RSS is today closely associated with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

50. As anthropologist Lee Ann Fujii points out, rumors are often less interesting for their veracity than for what they can reveal about available and relevant categories of meaning as people use preexisting concepts to make sense of the world. Rumors can thus be illuminating insofar as they render visible and intelligible the available ideas through which experience is made meaningful. Fujii, “Shades of Truth and Lies.”

51. “Don’t Put Labels of Caste and Creed on Nationalism.”

52. Punwani, “What Was Sanjay Raut Doing?”

53. “Sena MP Sanjay Raut Assures Muslims of Safety.” NDTV also printed a story on the meeting, under the Raut-quotation heading: “Daro Mat . . .” See “Maharashtra’s Lesson Is ‘Daro Mat.’”

54. “He Who Is Afraid Is Already Dead.”

55. Khan, “Government Accused of Continuously Lying.”

56. For an informative perspective, see Punwani, “‘Sena Is Now Part of Secular Coalition Govt.’”

57. कोई डरने की जरूरत नहीं, हम है आपके साथ (koi dharne ki zaroorat nahi, hum hai aapke sath).

58. A crore is equal to 10 million.

59. Indeed, two years later the coalition foundered on these very grounds; see conclusion.

60. “Mumbai Police Clamping Down on Anti-CAA Protests?”

61. Acharya, “Protesters Cry Out Appreciation.”

62. See “Parties Condemn Violence at JNU.” Media investigators later reported that the attack had been coordinated by WhatsApp groups with ties to the RSS-backed student organization Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. See Parth MN, “JNU Violence.”

63. “Parties Condemn Violence at JNU.”

64. Since the organizers hadn’t had time to seek permission for their gathering, they were relying on the goodwill of the police, who (as it was announced in the pre-gathering WhatsApp “call”) had so far been largely cooperative.

65. The meeting had been brokered by Bollywood film producer Mahavir Jain, often described as “Modi’s man in Bollywood,” and who had also orchestrated the infamous “Bollywood Selfie” just before the 2019 general election. See Pathak and Sethi, “The Real Story.”

66. Asian News International posted its video of Uddhav’s statement on its Twitter page immediately, at 9:43 a.m. on Monday, January 6. See Asian News International (@ANI), “#WATCH Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on JNU violence.” By 3:11 that afternoon the Mumbai Mirror had posted an article (with an embedded link to ANI’s video) which included the statement that Maharashtra students are safe and that he “understood” the rage of those gathered at Gateway.

67. See “A Wildfire of Student Discontent across the Country.”

68. Tweet from Devendra Fadnavis’s Twitter handle, @Dev_Fadnavis, https://x.com/Dev_Fadnavis/status/1214209648238055426

69. Tweet from Jayant Patil’s Twitter handle, @Jayant_R_Patil, https://x.com/Jayant_R_Patil/status/1214420467504816128.

70. The Sanjay Raut quote was, for instance, cited by Nagpur Today; see “Saamana Stands by Girl with Free Kashmir Poster.”

71. Z. Shaikh, “Protest against Violence at JNU.”

72. See chapter 2 for a discussion of mahol. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the announcement of a national lockdown in March 2020 put an abrupt end to the mass mobilizations in India against the CAA-NPR-NRC combine.