Cash

Corralling Karyakartas

Ineligible to recontest in her incumbent district in Chikoowadi due to the change in reservation, Seema began the 2012 election season almost entirely unknown to Daulat Nagar’s forty thousand-voter-strong constituency. Seema was not alone; a newly implemented 50 percent seat-reservation requirement for women (up from 30 percent in 2007), in combination with the existing 30 percent caste-based reservation for candidates belonging to Other Backward Classes (OBC), Scheduled Castes (SC), or Scheduled Tribes (ST), unseated 70 percent of Mumbai’s sitting corporators during the 2012 election, while frustrating the aspirations of scores of would-be candidates. Moreover, on top of the gender and caste reservations, all of Mumbai’s major political parties formed pre-poll alliances during the 2012 municipal corporation election.22 Thus, while party leadership hammered out seat-sharing agreements and candidate lists for the 227 electoral wards, reports emerged from across the city (stories reported on gleefully by the city’s excitable media) of bare-knuckled jockeying and threats of defection, with multiple social workers in each ward claiming it was “their turn” to contest the election on the various party tickets.

Unmoored from an area where she—by her own estimate—commanded the loyalty of at least two thousand karyakartas, Seema had expressed to party higher-ups an interest in contesting from Daulat Nagar, where she had resided since marriage but where she was unknown as a social worker.23 Seema was eventually awarded the National Congress Party (NCP) “ticket” in Daulat Nagar at the expense of at least four other social workers, each of whom claimed a right to the ticket. A longtime Congress Party social worker named Juned, for instance, was incensed that despite his years of work, the Congress Party leadership had ceded Daulat Nagar to NCP. As he saw it, the ticket was his rightful due—or at least that of his family; with the women’s reservation, he had lobbied Congress leaders for a ticket in the name of a close relative. While Juned made his anger publicly known early on—boycotting party meetings and allowing rumors to circulate about which candidate might be on the receiving end of his electoral might—conversations with other social workers suggested that his huffing and puffing was largely for show, an effort to communicate to the newcomer that she needed him more than he needed her. Indeed, since Daulat Nagar falls within the boundaries of a legislative assembly district held by NCP leader Mastanbhai, it was hardly surprising that Daulat Nagar was given to NCP. “Why don’t you call him?,” a veteran Congress Party loyalist counseled Seema early on during the campaign, when Juned’s allegiances were still up for grabs. The man explained that Juned himself had indicated that he was boycotting Seema’s campaign only because she had not yet approached him “nicely,” acknowledging his position and formally requesting an alliance (preferably accompanied by a cash gift). Seema, however, suspected that Juned was a lost cause, having heard that the Congress karyakarta had accepted a generous cash gift from a senior member of a third party from which she herself had been expelled shortly before accepting the NCP ticket: “[The party leader] has probably paid [Juned] a lot of money,” Seema surmised; “I had a falling out with [the party leader] so now he’s trying to defeat me in any way possible.”

Another frustrated contender was Hasina, the area’s former NCP corporator from two terms prior (the last time the seat was reserved for women). As one longtime party worker explained to me, Hasina had been confident that she was in line for the ticket again and had already spent months shoring up her social networks and mulling over possibilities for future collaborations, particularly with the party’s ward president—a woman named Sushma. When rumors began to circulate that the ticket would go to Seema—an area newcomer—an incensed Hasina convinced Sushma to approach Mastanbhai with an ultimatum: if the ticket was given to Hasina then Sushma would throw her weight wholeheartedly behind the party; otherwise Sushma herself would contest the election as an independent candidate, taking along her loyal voters, composed largely of the hundreds of area women participating in the local savings groups (bachat khata) that Sushma facilitated, and a few hundred families involved in a Slum Rehabilitation Scheme that she was rumored to be organizing (in collaboration with Mastanbhai, who was known to have good connections inside the Slum Rehabilitation Authority).24 When Seema was awarded the coveted NCP ticket, Hasina promptly declared independence, filing a candidature application on behalf of her niece (a budding social worker in her own right). Sushma, the NCP district president who had apparently been convinced by Hasina’s confidence of being awarded the NCP nomination and had thus taken pains to distance herself from Seema, now phoned Seema in a panic to explain and mend fences: Hasina had only been using her, Sushma explained, and professed her loyalty only to Seema.

Seema thus began the campaign season not only entirely unknown but faced with a sociopolitical landscape riven with deep wounds and fissures from the bitter fights over the party tickets. In this context, the first order of business was to corral the support of the karyakartas, particularly those with Congress or NCP affiliations who were presumably amenable to alliance. Indeed, while Seema herself was unknown, her party was not; the NCP boasted a strong network of social workers, many having long-standing personal loyalties to Mastanbhai, the standing MLA. Once her NCP candidature was announced, Seema thus found herself under the tutelage of a sprightly, diminutive, seasoned social worker named Hakim. He specialized in water, and before his kidneys failed, he spent long hours at the local water department office, pushing papers and negotiating hydraulic favors for area residents. Hakim was well known in Daulat Nagar—for his temper, his impatience, and above all for his unwavering work ethic. One well-known story has Hakim waiting for a municipal work crew that he had summoned to unblock a clogged drain. When the crew failed to arrive by midday (thereby putting Hakim’s reputation on the line), the exasperated social worker is said to have leapt into the open drain, clawing out the muck and filth with his bare hands. Hakim’s affiliation with Mastanbhai was long-standing, and his loyalty unwavering—particularly in the years since the MLA began picking up the bill for Hakim’s monthly dialysis treatments. Indeed, not even when Hakim’s own niece accepted a nomination from a rival party was Hakim’s commitment to Seema’s campaign called into question. This would not the first time that Hakim would manage a campaign for a newcomer: Hasina’s own victory a decade earlier was widely attributed to Hakim’s reputation and networking skills; before that, Hakim had installed a woman named Sowmya in office on behalf of the Janata Dal: “Hakimne usko jitaya” (Hakim made her win) was how Sowmya’s victory was generally recounted.

Seema’s status as a newcomer and an unknown personality rendered her campaign highly vulnerable to the forces of rumor. Thus, the very night after Seema’s candidature was announced, Hakim counseled Seema that their first order of business was to sort out the troubled relations with local NCP and Congress karyakartas: Sushma, Hasina (and her niece-candidate), Juned, and another longtime NCP party worker named Sonu, who had unsuccessfully sought the NCP ticket for his wife. Most important were Sushma and Hasina, who seemed open to collaboration; Juned and Sonu, who were reported to already have aligned themselves with the Samajwadi Party campaign, were quickly dismissed as lost causes. Despite Hasina’s declaration of her niece’s independent candidacy, she had made it known (through carefully spread rumors) that she would withdraw the application if (and only if) Mastanbhai called her personally to seek her support for Seema’s candidacy. As Seema explained to me, the only way that Hasina could rejoin the party while preserving her reputation and dignity (i.e., her reputation as having strong networks independent of her association with Mastanbhai and his party) would be if she could proclaim that Mastanbhai himself had recognized the extent of her influence among area voters and had thus personally requested that she withdraw her niece’s candidacy. Mastanbhai, however, was having none of it; as he explained to a gathering of 150 or so party workers a week before polling day, “Hasina? The public rejected her. She asked for the ticket, but we did a survey in the area—her image was tarnished. . . . We told her: ‘We’ll give you other responsibilities and then next time we’ll see.’ She said okay, but then put up her niece!” The standoff between Mastanbhai and Hasina was never resolved, and Hasina did not withdraw her niece’s candidacy.

As for Sushma, her reputation as a powerful social worker was rumored to have an extended reach—“Us ki public bahut hai” (She has a lot of public!), it was often said of Sushma—and owing to this reputed extent of Sushma’s “public,” Hakim counseled that Seema would do well to have Sushma on their side—or at least not campaigning against her.25 Indeed, after Sushma’s initial phone call—during which she had apologized and pledged her support for Seema—the NCP ward president had been conspicuously absent and difficult to reach, having yet to come and meet Seema in person. Seema had requested a meeting earlier that very afternoon, but Sushma had put her off, telling her to “come tomorrow.” Sitting in Hakim’s home late that first night, Seema rang up Mastanbhai to ask his advice: “Leave Sushma behind,” he counseled. “We’ll get a new ward president. She’s out of the party.” Seema, however, was not convinced and went to meet Sushma the following day. Mastanbhai had called a meeting of party workers for the following evening, Seema explained, and she needed a crowd; Sushma was, after all, known as the NCP ward president, and “her people” were needed.

Notwithstanding these intractable rifts, it was with some confidence that, with Hakim at the helm, Seema set out to build a network of support for her candidacy. On a breezy night early in the campaign, our entourage (composed of Seema’s immediate family, me, and Hakim) followed Hakim to a meeting that he had arranged with a group of men—butchers by profession—in the shade of the ramshackle tin roof of the neighborhood’s open-air market, where I observed the following exchange:

Seema: [addressing the men] What are your problems? Speak openly.

Man A: Water!

Hakim: Get your papers together and I’ll arrange for new connections.

Man A: We don’t have papers.

Hakim: Okay, there are other ways, but I can’t talk about it here in the open. Come to my home, we’ll talk at my home.

Man B: [animatedly] And demolitions!

Seema: Have I ever taken your money? Never! See, I’ll protect you, you can trust me.26

Man B: [gesturing at the muddy, uneven ground] We want to build a new market hall, a pucca [permanent, solid] one. If you build it with your corporator fund, then no one can complain.

The legal status of built space and infrastructures sat at the heart of these area voters’ concerns, and the meeting thus gestures toward two interrelated risks that voters were attempting to navigate, concerns on the mitigation of which the act of voting would ultimately speculate. First, did Seema have access to networks of power and authority that would enable her to successfully navigate the legal contradictions governing the built space and infrastructures of their neighborhood? Making rounds with Hakim—who was well known in Daulat Nagar for his success arranging municipal water connections for residents who might not be in possession of the right combinations of documentary “proofs” surely went some way (or at least attempted to) in producing some confidence that Seema’s networks would extend inside key offices of the municipal corporation. But—and second—what was to say that Seema would use her authority and connections to make the apparatus of the state and the “law” work in their favor rather than to their detriment?

Local social workers and community leaders sought to mitigate these not-insignificant risks in the run-up to the election both by forging reciprocal relations of obligation between candidates and groups as well as by relying on already-existing signs of shared interest and identity. For instance, during rare moments when she was not busy in meetings arranged by Hakim, Seema proceeded in her campaign efforts by reaching to prominent leaders of community organizations having affiliations with her husband’s family’s regional and linguistic background (as well, of course, to individual members of her extended family itself).

We head over to the office of a neighborhood “welfare society”—an NGO run by members of a particular self-described “community” of Tamil-speaking Muslims—where we’re greeted by five men. One of the men, who appears to be a leader of sorts, tell us that 70 percent of Daulat Nagar belongs to that particular “community.” Since this is Seema’s husband’s “community,” I had expected to be greeted warmly, but they’re guarded and receive us with open skepticism: “We’ve never met you,” the man says flatly; it seems like an accusation.27 “I’ve been busy in Chikoowadi,” Seema replies, without apologizing. The man responds—still a little coldly—that he’d heard there was a standing corporator in Chikoowadi now fighting the election here in Daulat Nagar; their society has held many events, but they didn’t invite her because they didn’t know her personally. Now I can’t tell if they’re accusing her or apologizing for not inviting her; maybe both. Seema nods and repeats: “I’ve been busy in Chickoowadi.” They seem to soften a bit, but then one of the men who hasn’t spoken yet jumps in: “You’re not going to run around making complaints about illegal construction and demanding money like Hasina did, are you?” “No, no!” Seema says quickly, anxiously. “You can ask anyone in Chikoowadi whether I did that—absolutely not. [The MLA] has offered me the ticket [in his constituency] because of my good work in Chikoowadi.” She smiles and laughs a little nervously: “[The MLA] told me he’d be behind me with a whip if I ever did that in his area.” They seem to accept this and nod. The first man says: “Okay, the main problems here are water, blocked gutters, and we need more toilets.” Seema nods; this is nothing surprising. Then suddenly the second man starts talking about their group’s programs—and now it seems they’re selling themselves to Seema. “We’ve given out schoolbooks, we gave out mutton on Eid, we give out sewing machines . . . and we’ve never taken money from anyone!” Now it’s Seema’s turn to nod. After we’re outside I ask Seema to explain what the MLA had said to her about unauthorized construction: “Is he opposed to making complaints and then collecting money? Does he instead want you to make complaints and then actually follow through?” She shakes her head vigorously: “No no,” she says, “[Mastanbhai] has told me not to interfere; he says it’s not my job.”

The palpable distrust that permeates this encounter is matched by the anxiety that runs through the exchange. The society leaders, for their part, tack back and forth between (on the one hand) trying to sell themselves to Seema—to convince the candidate, that is, of their standing in the neighborhood, their status as benevolent patrons who “never take money from anyone!”—and (on the other hand) attempting to assess, under conditions of absolute uncertainty, what Seema may or may not do if elected to office. The question posed to Seema—of whether she would run around making “complaints”—was clearly not a literal question but rather a straightforward expression of the deep uncertainty and anxiety that underpinned the decision of whom to support.

Seema spent much of the initial days of the campaign in this way, rounding up social workers and other prominent people for an inaugural campaign meeting (organized by Mastanbhai), where the strength of each’s following would be assessed. The evening before the meeting thus found us (at the invitation of a childhood friend of Seema’s husband) in the five-thousand-voter-strong area of Daulat Nagar known as Phule Nagar, where Seema addressed a gaggle of social workers, instructing each of them to bring at least fifty people to the gathering. “They’ll be fed and paid,” Seema explained, at the rate of two hundred rupees each per day, with the money given as a lump sum to each social worker, to be further distributed (or not) by each social worker as he or she saw fit. Thereafter, Seema continued, she would need these people to work for her—to accompany her on rallies.

People arrived in droves to the party meeting, and the two thousand chairs rented for the occasion quickly proved insufficient to accommodate the throngs of people, who stood in lines along the back wall. Seema was visibly relieved at the impressive turnout. Her sister Razia explained: “They’re all karyakartas; this is a karyakarta meeting, not a public meeting. Most of the people here are paid to be here.” Indeed, Razia and a few other of Seema’s relatives were standing at the entryway of the school grounds and circulating through the rows of seats to write down the names of social workers and count the number of supporters that each had brought. Sushma—in her capacity as NCP district president—had promised to send a hundred women to the meeting. When Sushma’s “hundred women” turned out to number around twenty, Seema’s team set about speculating over whether this disappointing attendance was a sign of Sushma’s weakness or of her lack of commitment to Seema’s campaign. Such assessments of party worker strength and loyalty—indicated by the numbers of each party worker’s “people” who turned up—was, Razia explained, the primary purpose of the meeting.

Yet extrapolating from the evening’s events, the meeting served several other purposes simultaneously and held different meanings for different actors. For party higher-ups—most importantly, for Mastanbhai—such a large and elaborate event allowed for a performance of personal commitment to Seema’s campaign and to signal longer-term interest in the goings-on of the neighborhood. The first half of the two-hour meeting was thus devoted to inviting onstage a parade of prominent party-affiliated social workers to be garlanded by Mastanbhai in the presence of the audience. The tone of the meeting was celebratory, with the audience’s status as honored and invited guests signaled by an elaborately choreographed (and what would otherwise have been disproportionately time-consuming) distribution of wobbly little cups of scalding tea. Mastanbhai made it clear that he intended for Seema to win, and the pomp and ceremony with which he recognized and honored the social workers in the audience indicated that those among them who would help Seema win might in the future be able to leverage Mastanbhai’s support—and his network of powerful contacts—in their future work.

Yet from the perspective of the social workers themselves, the meeting held a somewhat-different significance: “We need to show Mastanbhai how much strength we have,” one young karyakarta explained. “He should see that we’re getting him attention.” Indeed, whatever Mastanbhai’s intentions for the meeting, social workers described the meeting primarily as an opportunity to represent themselves to Mastanbhai and to Seema as important wielders of power and influence. By turning up with a large crowd, each social worker attempted to portray him- or herself as someone who commanded the confidence of many voters—someone to whom the party would be indebted in the event of a victory. Indeed, the goals of social workers (to demonstrate personal strength) could sometimes work at cross purposes with the needs of the campaign (to assess the strength of various social workers’ loyal constituencies), insofar as the personal and political aspirations of individual social workers can lead not infrequently to the passing of misinformation to party higher-ups. As one karyakarta explained, “See, the lower-level workers are also looking out for themselves, so they have to make it seem like they are the important one.” Pointing at a young boy who had just delivered tea, he continued: “If you’re Mastanbhai and you come to me and I introduce you to this fellow here and I say, ‘He’s one of my men—he’s a very big and important man in the neighborhood!,’ now why would I do that? Because then Mastanbhai will think, ‘Oh, what important and powerful people I have in my team!,’ and I gain esteem. So, you see, sometimes the karyakartas don’t give good information.”

Given that such rallies seemed to offer mutual (if sometimes contradictory) benefit to both Seema’s campaign and to various social workers, what should be made of the distribution of cash? At one level, the cash that Seema funneled through networks of area social workers functioned rather straightforwardly, as wage-like payments for the labor of accompanying Seema on rallies. Yet the work accomplished by cash distributions to social workers has another, more crucial dimension: as productive and performative of alliances between Seema and the social workers. Seema’s campaign energies were largely devoted to intense relationship-building and alliance-forging activities, in which gifts, promises, and especially money played a central role in both assessing and producing loyalties.

The very night Seema’s candidacy was announced thus found us snaking our way through the dark lanes of Daulat Nagar until we emerged in an open expanse on the edge of a marshland; we had been invited by a local “community leader” who had immediately reached out to Seema’s cousin’s uncle’s brother—a man named Nasir, who lives in the area—to arrange the meeting:

We duck into a small, anonymous-looking structure. Inside the tiny space at least thirty not-young men in tall green hats are seated on the floor, facing a small shrine at the front of the room, next to which is seated—on a large orange pillow—a large, imposing man in bright white elaborately embroidered tunic. Behind the seated men in the hats, the walls are lined with younger men—at least fifteen of them, casually dressed, social worker types. They’re Elae Hadis, Seema’s husband tells me, from Ajmer; there are probably about two thousand voters from their community here in Daulat Nagar. They’re strong Congress supporters, he tells me, and they invited Seema as soon as they heard about her NCP candidacy.28 We sit down in front of the man on the pillow, but he doesn’t look at me or at Seema; he talks to the men—first to Nasir. Nasir hands the man on the pillow a thick wad of thousand-rupee notes, which he promptly refuses. Nasir laughs nervously, insisting, “It’s just our donation—for renovations.” The man on the pillow nods and directs Nasir to hand the cash to another man, seated behind us, who accepts the money and touches the notes to his forehead. The man on the pillow says to Seema’s husband, “We won’t run around for you, but Seema can count on the vote here.” Seema hands the man on the pillow her business card and says, “If you have any work then call my man and we will be here in fifteen minutes; we live close by.” The man on the pillow laughs as he accepts Seema’s card and places it on the shrine: “Yes, we plan to call you; that’s why we invited you and took your card.”

This particular meeting seems to have served two purposes. First, in the context of widespread defections among Congress-affiliated karyakartas, the man on the pillow clarified to Seema any confusion over whether or not his people would vote for her, communicating to Seema that her future win would put her in debt directly to them. The meeting, in other words, firmed up an agreement: votes now in exchange for “work” over the next five years. The formal offering of a cash gift thus functioned neither to purchase the votes of the individuals in the room nor to carry any burden of reciprocity; votes were promised not in exchange for the money but rather for future work. The cash worked both as a performance of Seema’s access to powerful, moneyed networks that would enable her to perform that future work, as well as a show of her personal generosity. By handing over cash—not in an envelope, moreover, but as a thick stack of notes—Seema demonstrated not only her beneficence but also—significantly—that she has the means, knowledge, and material resources to act on it.

Second, and at the same time, the man on the pillow made it clear to the senior members of his own community—as well as to the crew of neighborhood social workers lining the walls—that they were to support Seema. The man on the pillow’s proclamation that the people of his community would not “run around” for Seema’s campaign is thus significant. The solemn and stylized performance formalized the agreement, working to produce trust in both directions—by reassuring area social workers that they could advise their neighbors to support Seema in the confidence that, in the future, their work would get done, all the while demonstrating to Seema that, even though people from the area might not “run around” for the campaign, her future win would put her in their debt.

Prachaar

While members of this particular community would not openly campaign for Seema, the campaign experienced no dearth of manpower. During the two weeks leading up to polling day, Seema paid at the rate of 200 rupees per day for anywhere from fifteen to one thousand people (mostly women) to attend rallies and to accompany her on prachaar—the Hindi/Marathi word for advertising or publicity that is widely used during election season in reference to candidate-led parades around the neighborhood.29 The prachaar crowds were “provided” by various social workers to whom Seema paid the cash at the end of each day, according to the number of people provided. Because most of the social workers were unknown, the immediate task of Seema’s core team (made up exclusively of her immediate family) was to assess the credibility of the various social workers’ claims. A telling predicament was posed when Seema received an invitation from a prominent social worker who was well known from the previous election to have supported the current councilor, Furqan—who, with the change in ward’s gender reservation, was now running a campaign on behalf of his aged mother.

Seema, her husband, his two friends—Aslam and Raju—and I head over to the home of a Tamil-speaking woman named Rookiya, who Seema tells me called her up that afternoon to request a meeting. We arrive at Rookiya’s one-room home and some boys are there too—three of them, probably in their early twenties, maybe younger. They sit quietly on the floor nearby. Rookiya laughs easily and has a straightforward, honest way that makes me like her. She speaks confidently, convincingly, telling Seema in no uncertain terms, “I will make you win; whoever I support wins.” She runs a few chit funds30 in the area, so she’s widely known and well trusted. But Aslam is skeptical: “Look,” he says, “you worked with Furqan last time.” She nods, unfazed, stating simply, “I’m not working with Furqan this time.” Seema nods slowly. Rookiya promises to have her boys round up as many people as Seema needs for her campaign—for rallies, for distributing fliers, for door-to-door campaigns. “People listen to me,” Rookiya tells Seema, repeating, “whoever I work for, that person wins.” When we’re outside again, Aslam turns to Seema’s husband: “How do we know that [Furqan] hasn’t come to her first? Maybe she’s just calling Seema in order to pass information to Furqan.” But Seema seems inclined to trust her: Rookiya’s family is from the same village as Seema’s husband, she points out; they had even spoken to one another in Tamil. “Maybe because of this link she’ll feel some closeness and work for us.” Her husband is pensive, concluding: “We can’t trust her . . . but we can’t let on that we don’t trust her. We have to make sure that these people feel trusted.”

Notwithstanding the need to “make sure that these people feel trusted,” Seema did not call Rookiya back, and Rookiya did not call again. While it is quite possible that commonalities of linguistic and regional Tamil identity had informed Rookiya’s initial effort to reach out to Seema and offer the services of her “boys,” the social worker’s closeness to Furqan made her untrustworthy.

As Seema’s campaign swung into motion, her newly inaugurated campaign office was bombarded daily with social workers wishing to send their people on Seema’s campaign rallies and processions:

A woman walks into Seema’s office and sits down. Seema greets her but doesn’t know who she is. Is she going to help you?, I ask. Seema’s husband shrugs: “We don’t know. She says she’ll help and that she has so many people.” I ask, But how do you know how many “people” someone has?, I ask, and what does it mean to “have people” anyway? He shrugs: “Even we don’t even know.” Hakim asks the woman, “Who are your karyakartas?” She doesn’t give any names—just gestures with her hand, “Down there, the butchers.” Hakim instructs her to write down a list of her karyakartas and their contact information. She bobs her head, yes, yes. She continues: “Actually, I would have come earlier but I just found out about you—I just got the call.” Hakim: “From who?” She becomes a little flustered, answering: “Actually, . . . I don’t know his name.” Hakim: “Just bring your karyakartas.”

After a social worker appeared like this to announce that he or she had so many “people” behind her, one of Seema’s men would go to “ask around” in the neighborhood where the self-proclaimed social worker professed to have support: What work has this person done? Do people really support this person? If the “survey” was promising, then Seema’s team would have to settle on a number of the social worker’s supporters that Seema would pay for participation in campaign rallies. Notably, since all the major campaigns were offering cash for a crowd, there is no reason to think that a person receiving money from one or another party would have any reason to be inclined to vote in any particular way. Indeed, while the rally participants of course needed to be paid for their labor (many people having taken time off from regular jobs in order to make themselves available for this work), the significance of the money inheres in the relationship between Seema (or Seema’s team) and the social worker, rather than the voter. The long-term-relational (as opposed to immediate-exchange) function of the cash transfers was further demonstrated when one of Seema’s men eventually spotted Sushma (the elusive NCP ward president) at a Samajwadi Party rally. On that particular day, Seema had employed forty of “Sushma’s ladies.” After some handwringing over whether or not to pay these women for that day’s work (she did eventually pay them), Seema explained to the women that their leader seemed to have switched parties and instructed them to please not return the following day; there were other social workers eager to send women in their place.

The relationship-forging work of these cash transfers recalls anthropology’s long-standing interest in gift, reciprocity, and exchange. Marcel Mauss tells us that the giving of gifts, while appearing to be “voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous,” is in fact “obligatory and interested.”31 As one or another party is necessarily in a state of obligation—since gifts are by definition not reciprocated immediately but only after the passage of time—gift giving, Mauss tells us, produces enduring (and asymmetrical) social relations mediated by indebtedness. Mauss’s influential insight—that social relations are not a precondition of exchange but rather are constituted by gifting—is powerfully demonstrated and elaborated in anthropologist Webb Keane’s ethnography of marriage exchange negotiations on the Indonesian island of Sumba.32 Detailing the embodied, interactive contexts through which the social is actually worked out in practice, Keane shows that for the parties to an exchange, “the practical unity” of each group is itself “produced by the goal of constructing good relations with an affine”:

Formalized encounter such as the negotiation of marriage payments is an important locus not only for solidary action and acts of exchange but also for the display of the group as such, as it is physically assembled and represented as a united front to face the affine. It is also the preeminent site for naming relations, identifying actors, and specifying the nature of the relationships in play—many of which cannot be assumed concretely to preexist the scene of encounter. . . . Repeated cumulative scenes of encounter and exchange serve to give the alliance and its constituent parties a palpable form.33

Seema’s negotiations with social workers can usefully be understood through Keane’s formulation of exchange negotiations as “scenes of encounter,” as it is precisely through such exchange-mediated displays of assembled crowds that transactional partners are “identified” and relationships with them “ratified.”34 Social workers, for their part, offer their support for Seema’s campaign not (only) through verbal promises but by actually producing/performing the scope and strength of their “publics.” It is not enough, in other words, for a social worker to simply declare that he or she “has so many people.” Rather, the “practical unity” of the social worker’s public is made manifest through “repeated cumulative scenes of encounter and exchange” that comprise the campaign season. By the same token, Seema’s verbal promises of support for social workers’ future (post-election) work are made “binding, efficacious, and serious” by cash gifts.35

That the money Seema gave to area karyakartas produces and inhabits enduring social relations (as opposed to mediating an immediate purchase contract in which a relationship begins and ends with the exchange of money) is evidenced in a few of the conflicts that emerged over election-time cash prestations. Seema had on one occasion tried to save money by inviting an influential social worker named Renu to come on a rally alone—without any of her people. Renu was incensed: “It will hurt my image if I do not bring my people!” In the end Seema conceded, agreeing to employ eight of Renu’s “people.” Renu attended with sixteen supporters in tow—all of whom were eventually paid in full. Seema shook her head helplessly as she explained to me why she had paid them all: as Renu had clearly stated, her reputation was on the line. By bringing the uninvited people, Renu had—intentionally or unintentionally—tested the strength of her budding relationship with Seema. By paying them all, in other words, Seema had openly demonstrated her commitment to Renu, thereby shoring up Renu’s authority in her neighborhood. For her part, Seema well knew that if Renu were to lose the confidence of the twenty or so families over whom her opinion ostensibly held sway, then those families would not trust Renu’s advice on voting day. Area voters would vote for Seema, after all, not because Seema had employed or paid them (indeed, any number of candidates or parties were willing to do that), but on Renu’s advice.

Un-purchasable Loyalty

On February 15, a day before polling, one of Seema’s men overheard a conversation between a rival party’s social worker and a woman doing laundry in the lane outside her doorway. The exasperated woman had dismissed the young man: “All you people have been coming to our doors to tell us how to vote. But we listen to Rookiya.” Indeed, on the final days before the election, Daulat Nagar’s lanes were choked with spies. Seema’s team had posted an estimated one hundred boys (one for every four lanes) throughout the area, where they loitered, listened, and sent text messages back to Seema’s office with reports of which areas were safely “ours” and which needed some more “attention.” When a message arrived that the hawa (wind) was blowing in the wrong direction in a particular area, Seema would reach out to her most trusted karyakartas in those areas, asking for introductions to key people (prominent social workers, heads of large families, doctors, teachers, or popular business owners—a cast of characters referred to by the campaign team as “mains”) who might be able to turn the tide.36 After the report that this particular area was loyal only to Rookiya, we headed back over to try and make amends. When we arrived, Rookiya spoke angrily: “I called you the first day and told you I wanted to work for you! But you never called back, so now I’m working for Furqan.” It was too late. Two weeks earlier it might have been possible to build a relationship with Rookiya. By employing Rookiya’s women and making after-hours home visits to prominent residents, Seema might have boosted Rookiya’s standing in her neighborhood by establishing the strength of Rookiya’s connection to the party of the standing MLA. But while Rookiya’s people would quite possibly still have listened to her if she directed them (even at the last minute) to vote for Seema, Rookiya herself had no reason to believe that throwing her weight behind Seema would be good for her—or for her neighborhood—in the longer run. Seema had squandered Rookiya’s offer of alliance, and Rookiya was deeply insulted by Seema’s last-minute effort to win her support.37 Rookiya’s disdain at Seema’s offer reveals how the materiality of tokens of exchange (cash in this case) renders their meanings susceptible to slippage among “alternative regimes of value.”38 At the start of the campaign season, Rookiya had invited Seema into an alliance that might be shored up with a cash gift. Seema’s last-minute appeal, by contrast, introduced the short-term ethic of market exchange into the negotiation—a misrecognition of Rookiya’s socio-ethical landscape that resulted in insult.

Money’s “semiotically underdetermined” character, moreover, cuts both ways:39 just as Seema could not convert Rookiya at the last minute, Seema herself proved unmovable by late-in-the-game offers of cash-lubricated loyalty. Only a few hours after we left Rookiya’s house, Seema was summoned to another meeting, invited by someone whom she had not yet met. We walked into a room and were greeted by eight serious-faced men. One of them handed Seema a business card that indicated that they were from a small, unregistered political party. One man spoke, explaining that their group had forty or so members—meaning two hundred votes (at an average of five votes behind each member). Seema, exhausted (both physically and financially), asked the spokesman to “Speak directly. What do you want?” He responded: “fifty thousand.” Seema shook her head. “Maybe if you had been with us for the past ten days for our rallies . . . but voting is tomorrow. How can we give you so much money for just one day?” “Not for work,” the man explained, “we’ll give you the list [of our voters].” Seema refused: “At this point that’s too much to ask. I don’t know where you’ve been these days, but you haven’t been with us.” The man insisted that they hadn’t been with anyone. As we turned to leave, Seema whispered to me: “They were running around with RPI [Republican Party of India]; one of my men saw them.”

Money as Sign

All of the major parties contesting the polls in Daulat Nagar were reported to have distributed cash to social workers in exchange for lists of voters during the final days of the campaign. In Seema’s campaign these cash transfers functioned not as payments for votes per se but rather to shore up and affirm the alliances forged over the previous weeks of rallies, late-night negotiations, and chooa (mouse) meetings, a reference to the time of day in which such meetings tend to take place: late at night, when the mice run around. Social workers offering lists of voters did so not in conjunction with any compliance-enforcing mechanism (proposed or implied) but rather as a demonstration of their pull in the neighborhood, as well as to show area residents the strength of their alliance with Seema. While it is tempting to interpret cash transfers in purchase terms, that such cash disbursements work in the same semiotic register as the earlier-described display of notes to the Elae Hadis community is demonstrated in this account related to me by a party worker named Prakash:

The day before the election, I asked [the candidate] for money to pass to someone in my area who told me she had thirty-one votes. I had a few people like this. [The candidate] said: “Okay, I’ll have [the people handling the money] call you.” Then [the money man] said he’d give money but [the amount] wasn’t enough; I said: “It’s not possible, people are giving [much more]. How will I look?” He said, “Okay, I’ll see,” but then he didn’t call back. The woman kept calling, asking me what to do. Finally, I said to her: “Give your votes to whomever you want—I can’t get you the money.” She told me she was going to give her votes to Furqan. In the end, whoever didn’t know who to trust gave to their vote to Furqan, since they already knew his work.

This last phrase is telling: Prakash’s inability to direct a flow of cash to the woman called into question his claims to have access to the networks of power, knowledge, and authority that are so crucial for navigating everyday life in the city. Prakash knew this and thus did not even attempt to convince the woman.

If money works not as the medium of purchase but rather as gifts that are productive and performative of enduring relations and alliances, then what is the significance of cash as the material substance of such gifts? In the context of Mumbai’s elections, cash distributions have a third dimension as an index of access to the most crucial kind of urban knowledge: how to navigate the opacities, dangers, and promises of the city’s little-understood but palpably real economies. Residents of Mumbai’s non-elite neighborhoods—particularly young people who are eager for a foothold in the city’s enigmatic economies—are constantly on the lookout for reliable knowledge that might be used in navigating this perilous but crucial dimension of urban life. Cash woos social workers and voters by signaling networks of access to the worlds of opportunity and promise inhering in a city’s enigmatic economies. While the eventual landslide victory by Furqan’s elderly mother was credited by person after person to the reach and strength of Furqan’s networks—connections with local businesspeople, the municipal bureaucracy, the police, various party leaders—discussions of the strength of the campaign almost invariably involved reverent references to Furqan’s own business and personal wealth. While few could account for the precise origins of his affluence or with what kind of business he might be involved in, the strength of his money-making networks was evidenced and signified both in the grand, three-story palazzo he had built at the heart of this working-class neighborhood as well as in his liberality with cash: cash for marriages and dowries, cash for school fees, cash for medical bills, cash for home repairs.40 “He is always very charitable,” one area resident explained. “That’s how he made a name for himself.”

Furqan’s financial reputation has lent his authority an almost transcendental quality. “God has been so good to me!,” he is rumored to have proclaimed during his 2007 bid for office, when he purportedly carpeted the neighborhood in cash. To explain this relationship between authority and munificence we might turn again to Mauss’s discussion of potlatch among the Kwakiutl people of the American Pacific Northwest:

[A chief] can keep his authority in his tribe, village and family, and maintain his position with the chiefs inside and outside his nation, only if he can prove that he is favorably regarded by the spirits, that he possesses fortune and that he is possessed by it. The only way to demonstrate his fortune is by expending it to the humiliation of others, by putting them “in the shadow of his name.”41

Notably, Furqan’s wealth was popularly ascribed to his translocal sociopolitical networks in much the same way as Mauss describes the display of personal fortune in potlatch—as evidence that he stood in the good graces of the city’s inscrutable higher powers: various party leaders, the municipal bureaucracy, the state police and urban economies—that is, of inherently murky sources of material and supernatural authority. It is these networks that are held to have underpinned Furqan’s business successes—successes evidenced by his displays of abundant wealth.

That cash is a (visible, material) sign of other kinds of (invisible, immaterial) resources is of course not very surprising. Yet the power of election-season cash in Mumbai is not contained by the exchange value printed on the bills; money, in other words, does not work as Bohannan famously described, to facilitate exchange of dissimilar goods by “standardiz[ing] exchangeability value of every item to a common sale.”42 Social theorists who have sought to complicate classic money theory provide some useful tools of analysis. Parry and Bloch, for instance, have argued that, in and of itself, money does not necessarily transform social relations the way Simmel has argued; such a line of reasoning, they suggest, is more an indication of the Western fetishism of money than of money’s own properties—a fetishism that, they charge, has “been taken over somewhat uncritically by the anthropologist.”43 Rather than presuming that money causes and signifies a regime of “free convertibility” that “ushers in a world of moral confusion,” Parry and Bloch suggest that “not only does money mean different things in different cultures, but . . . it may mean different things within the same culture.”44 They suggest that we might instead think of money as inhabiting “two related but separate transactional orders”: “on the one hand,” they write, “transactions concerned with the reproduction of the long-term social or cosmic order; on the other, a sphere of short-term transactions concerned with the arena of individual competition.”45 Indeed, as the accounts in this chapter show, the very same money can simultaneously inhabit these two “orders,” with money flowing from Seema to social workers working—gift-like—to produce and reproduce longer-term sociopolitical networks (if not quite a “cosmic order”), while a portion of that very same money often is transferred to rally participants as transactional, wage-like payments.

Yet the third register that election-time cash inhabits—the semiotic—invites us to consider not only the temporality of money exchange but also money’s communicative work and multiple meanings. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork about the centrality of monetary exchange to cultural life in the Republic of Palau (Micronesia), anthropologist Richard Parmentier identifies the connection between the “work” money does in producing and coordinating exchange transactions as well as the way money works to “demarcate, mediate, and emblemize social status and relations.”46 Parmentier emphasizes the necessary coexistence of both these dimensions of money—on the one hand, “the tendency to put money into play, to let it travel along important transactional paths,” and on the other hand the amassing of large sums of wealth for periodic display.47 At stake here is not simply a reenactment—through conspicuous demonstrations of wealth—of a past history of successful transactional relations, but a performative enactment—through actual real-time exchange—that one is a transactional partner worth engaging. As Parmentier explains, “a man thought to have financial resources who does not commit them when required . . . not only gains a reputation as being stingy, but the money he does hold will be devalued since others will not be eager to be financially involved with him.” Cash transfers, in this sense, are at once performance and performative—working simultaneously as a sign of the “sedimented embodiment of accomplished power” and as the “transactional mechanism for its attainment.”48

The performance/performative valence of election-season money exchange in Mumbai that I have described might usefully be explained in similar terms: while gifts of cash to karyakartas work to establish relations, the money itself is also a sign of “accomplished power.” This also helps to account for the apparent paradox that while Furqan’s electoral success was frequently attributed to the candidate’s wealth, the 2012 campaign itself actually spent relatively little. A social worker who had campaigned for Furqan in the previous election (during which Furqan himself is rumored to have been quite liberal with cash) explained that this time around it was not necessary to actually distribute cash: “Furqan is the master of hype—even he just gives a hundred-rupee note, people run around saying, ‘Furqan is distributing so much money!’” For Furqan, rumors of cash were as good as cash itself—the work of the cash being less that of actual exchange than of shoring up reputation. By the same token, for an unknown candidate like Seema, establishing a reputation for being in command of transactional networks of power and authority demanded—as Prakash’s disappointed account suggests—that she put her money where her mouth is by producing hard cash itself.

“Everybody Flips”

The transfer of cash—both the giving and receiving—can thus be characterized as simultaneously a performance and a wager. As Prakash explained, “Giving money is a gamble because everybody flips. During a corporator election everyone flips at least once.49 Sometimes people take money from one candidate and then distribute it in the name of another. But you have to try—if you spend money then maybe people will vote for you.” For Seema, the “gamble” involved assessing various social workers’ claims to command so many votes, and then to bet her limited resources on the right ones. For the social workers the game is no less risky, since the decision of which candidate to support has far-reaching consequences that last long after election day. Thus, the campaign loyalties of karyakartas remained quite fluid, even up to election day; during a rally three days before polling, I overheard one karyakarta laugh as he chastised his friend (who was at that moment wearing three NCP hats and a scarf), “Just work for one party, okay?,” to which the boy responded, “Party-warty kuch nahi hai! [I have no party!].” In this context, the weeks of campaigning—of sending supporters on rallies and presenting party lists in exchange for cash—must be understood not only as performative relationship-building facilitated by gift-like cash transfers but also as performances of access to networks of knowledge, authority evidenced by the cash itself. In Prakash’s case, his inability to direct cash from Seema’s campaign to the woman with the thirty-one votes led the woman to doubt that Prakash—and perhaps Seema herself—had sufficiently effective networks. Moreover, Prakash explained, this inability called Seema’s “winnability” itself into question; if she was unable to produce the cash in this case, how many other social workers might she have also disappointed? It is quite likely that after this incident Seema lost not only the woman’s thirty-one votes but also those of Prakash’s entire network: as he himself put it, “Everyone flips at least once.” Indeed, for a social worker like Prakash, who would live and do business in the neighborhood no matter who won, betting on the right candidate is of crucial importance. At issue here is not so much the risk of revenge by the victor against areas from which he or she did not win support, but rather the danger of putting someone incompetent, shortsighted, or vindictive at the helm of the ward.50

What Money Can Buy

Less than two years into her term as elected corporator, Furqan’s ailing mother passed away. A by-election was called, and furious voters—who had so recently demonstrated their overwhelming support for Furqan but were now enraged at what was described as his “disappearance” following his mother’s election51—handed a landslide victory to an independent candidate, a young man named Santosh whose wife had contested in 2012 on a Samajwadi Party ticket but who himself had recently been expelled from the Samajwadi Party after a video clip circulated through the city in which he appeared in police custody, demonstrating how—using a small machine—he had been “duplicating” credit cards. Santosh (whose wife had outflanked Seema in the 2012 election by a few hundred votes but had still garnered less than a third of the votes cast for Furqan’s mother) had reportedly blanketed the neighborhood in cash in 2012; inside sources report that his campaign spent double what Seema’s campaign had. When I had expressed to one of his social workers my shock at the scale of this misplaced investment, the man shook his vigorously: “No no! He didn’t expect to actually win this time around. But see, before the election, he was known around here only as ‘duplicate-note-wala Santosh’; but after the election he became ‘election-wala Santosh!’”52 Santosh used the 2012 election to whitewash his reputation, establishing himself as a generous and reliable benefactor; indeed, following his failed 2012 bid he hammered this point home by taking his entire contingent of campaign workers on a promised (“whether we win or lose”) weeklong holiday to Goa. Following another cash-infused bid for office, Santosh won the 2014 by-election in a landslide. A longtime Congress-affiliated social worker summed up Santosh’s victory like this:

For a candidate, the most important things are to have contacts with the police and with the BMC [Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation]. If you have approach with these two, then you get the people. Santosh is a known criminal—duplicate notes, duplicate credit cards, plenty of cash. There’s so much corruption that people here want [to elect] someone who has plenty of money to pay the police and the BMC. And Santosh showed he had plenty of money—he gave money to the mains in each lane. See, there are groups that form at the time of elections, and Santosh was there—he was always around, talking to these groups, listening to their problems and making promises and paying them money, lots and lots of money. See, Santosh and his brother are in construction business. Construction is a lucrative industry and is also a great way to whiten money. But see, to succeed as a builder around here you need to keep your houses from getting torn down [by the authorities], and to do that you need contacts.

A local housing contractor named Karim explained to me what this means in practice. When he is preparing start new work, Karim tells me,

I call up everyone—the corporator, local offices of political parties, the various departments [of the] municipal corporation, the police, everyone. But still, people from the neighborhood can complain—they can take a photograph and complain. When that happens, the BMC will call me and tell me to “manage that person.” If that person is serious complainer—if they follow up on the complaint—then I have a problem; in this case the BMC will come and demolish a little bit. Then take their own photograph proving that they have responded to the complaint with this demolition.53 But of course, then the BMC and the police officials are vulnerable, so they tell me, “Go ahead but do the work fast.” Speed is key to the success of my work.

Being a successful contractor in Mumbai’s popular neighborhoods—where the contradictory and opaque regulatory frameworks governing infrastructural investment amount to an ever-present vulnerability to allegations of “illegality”—requires not only that a contractor maintain networks of connections with local officials but also that in order to “do the work fast” one must have reliable, on-demand access to all the materials required for construction: cement, sand, water, labor, and cash. These are materials and resources that are difficult to procure—particularly sand and water, the securing of which is legally and infrastructurally complex. To be a successful contractor, in other words, requires elaborate networks of trust, not only in the neighborhood but throughout the city and beyond.54 Indeed, Karim tells me that although he calls himself a “contractor,” his role is really more that of a “point man.”55 He doesn’t manage the actual work of building and construction itself, he explains; rather, he’s the one with whom the client makes the “contract.” I ask him what he means by “contract,” since, after all, much of the work over which Karim presides has an ambiguous (sometimes even antagonistic) relation to formal law and urban policy. In this context of legal contradiction and vagary, what good is a contract? Karim takes out his smartphone and pulls up a document. The document specified the details of the work to be done—the scope of the work, the duration (move-out and move-back-in dates), the cost—and is signed by both parties as well as a “witness”—some person that both parties know, trust, and respect—to whom they can appeal in case of any eventual dispute. Because of the legally ambiguous nature of the work, Karim tells me in impeccable English, “We don’t have it validated by courts or anything.” For this reason, “reputation” and “guarantee” are very important. “Other contractors, if there’s a dispute, maybe they run off with the deposit or something. But with me I’ve never had a dispute. I keep goodwill with everyone.” Maintaining “goodwill,” Karim explains, is the essence of the work of being a “point man.” In the case of our contractor-turned-corporator Santosh, all of which is to say, the imperviousness of his houses to the destructive forces of “complaint” demonstrated the strength and reliability of his networks, signaling to area social workers and voters that Santosh might indeed be a very good person to represent them in the municipal corporation.

Cash as Infrastructure of Publicity

This chapter has demonstrated how cash is enlisted in three interrelated kinds of election-season work. First, money plays a rather conventional role in constituting a scale of value that enables commensuration and exchange—paying for things like flags or police permissions, or the labor of flag-bearing under the midday sun. Second, money produces enduring sociopolitical relations; gifts of cash work performatively—much like any other gifted good—producing relations of debt, reciprocity and trust. And third, cash performs semiotic work, signaling access to powerful networks of knowledge, resources, and authority. Election-season cash simultaneously inhabits these three registers: since it is common knowledge that many election-rally participants are paid for their participation, the size of the crowd indicates—among other things—the strength of the collective investment in putting on a good show. And at the same time, in its crowd-assembling modality, cash works as the crowd-show’s infrastructure.

What does it mean to characterize cash as infrastructure? In a historical account of the word infrastructure—its introduction and absorption into the English language—anthropologist Ashley Carse points to the two-part contemporary meaning of infrastructure suggested in the word’s Oxford English Dictionary definition. On the one hand, infrastructure is “a collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking.” Something’s infrastructure is its “substructure” or “foundation.” And at the same time, “infrastructure” refers to particular phenomena in themselves: “the permanent installations forming a basis for military operations, as airfields, naval bases, training establishments, etc.”56 In the former part of the definition, infrastructure can be distinguished from concepts like “system” or “network” insofar as infrastructure (literally “that which is below a structure”) explicitly signals a hierarchical relationship: an infrastructure is subordinate—spatially beneath or temporally prior—to whatever “undertaking” it facilitates. And at the same time, the word infrastructure entered English at a particular historical moment in order to describe something historically specific and concrete: NATO’s international military program. Carse cites NATO’s 1949 general secretary’s clarification of the term’s meaning in the context of 1949 Common Infrastructure Program:

[infrastructure] has been adopted by NATO as a generic term to denote all those fixed installations which are necessary for the effective deployment and operations of modern armed forces, for example airfields, signal communications, military headquarters, fuel tanks and pipelines, radar warning and navigation aid stations, port installations and so forth.57

By conceptually holding together a wide variety of material phenomena previously imagined as distinct (say, pipelines and airfields), the concept of “infrastructure” enabled the conjuring into being of something entirely new: a “common” international military program. Carse points out how its imprecision and dual valence initially led to suspicion of the word and to derisive allegations of conceptual “promiscuity.”58 And yet the usefulness of “infrastructure” inheres precisely in the concept’s promiscuousness. In Mumbai, we have seen how money is at once substructural to the undertaking of producing and shoring up the social relations that its circulation facilitates, while also (and necessarily) having a concrete material form that indexes historical relations; it is the skillful wielding of money’s multiple valences that can bring into being new social relations and forms. And at the same time the dangers of semiotic slippage among the various registers leads to constant suspicion, rendering money—both cash and concept—inescapably subject to allegations of promiscuity.

I asked a longtime political party worker named Rakesh to explain to me the significance of cash-infused crowds at election rallies: “If everyone here knows that everyone else is paid,” I asked, “then what’s the purpose of the crowd? Everyone knows it’s just a lot of natak [acting]!” “People need to see a crowd; they need to know how much public you have,” Rakesh answered—using the English-origin word public. I pressed: “But . . . everyone knows you’re paying the public!” Rakesh shrugged, “People don’t mind that the public is paid. The public will come for money also, there’s no shame in this. You look powerful if you can manage such a huge public! You show you’re wealthy and strong by showing you can get the public.” So, I asked, if the hordes are hired, then is the size of a crowd simply a proxy for the wealth of its organizers? Rakesh laughed and demurred: money alone can’t gather a crowd. Rather, he explained that “to get the public, people must believe that you can get work done.” He used the word believe. The crowd, in other words, indexes the scope and scale of public belief in a candidate’s “capacity” and willingness to “get work done.” Ethnographic attention to cash flows in election-season Mumbai—as well as to the moralizing talk that attend such flows—reveals that elitist readings of election-season cash as the obviating of substantive public discussion on matters of shared concern by a myopic, cash-poor electorate concerned “only with their handout” are misplaced.59 Rather, cash is a crucial component of Mumbai’s infrastructure of social relationality—a material-discursive technology whose circulation brings into being a myriad of possible and actual publics.