“The Real Show”

Representation/Re-presentation

In order to situate this book’s argument about representation, it will be helpful to attend to this fraught concept—and to distinguish it from the rather different notion that historian Paul Friedland characterizes as “re-presentation.”29 Contemporary scholarship on political representation often takes as a point of departure the classic formulation of Hanna Pitkin, whose influential 1967 book The Concept of Representation offered a deceptively simple definition: “Representation, taken generally, means the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact.”30 Pitkin’s book is concerned with the various ways in which the “sense of something” that is not present has been construed, and with the proper procedures and evaluative criteria for institutionalizing and assessing different forms of representation. Taking a Wittgensteinian “ordinary language” approach to representation, Pitkin asserts that in order to make sense of some word or concept, it is necessary to attend to the contexts in which the word is used. Pitkin thus identifies four distinct ways in which representation is invoked. “Formalistic representation” refers to the institutional arrangements by means of which political representatives are authorized and held accountable by their “not present” constituents. The other three kinds of representation that Piktin outlines—symbolic, descriptive, and substantive—describe other ways in which that which is “not present” is construed: if a representative acts in the interests of one’s constituents, this is substantive representation; the representative who resembles the represented in some iconic sense is of the descriptive type; the representative who “stands for” a constituency’s collective meaning (however understood) is said to represent symbolically. Pitkin’s formulations spurred a generation of Anglo-American scholarship, with theorists debating the benefits and trade-offs of prioritizing one or another form of representation and assessing the proper procedures for measuring and assessing the responsiveness and accountability of representatives to those they profess to represent.

Contemporary global political churnings have provoked a scholarly rethinking of Pitkin’s classic concept of representation. Political theorist Ernesto Laclau notes that representation entails a “logical impossibility,” since “perfect representation” would require “a direct process of transmission of the will of the represented, when the act of representation is totally transparent in relation to that will.”31 Transmission of the will, of course, requires that the individual “will” be fully constituted and independent of the process of representation, which is simply not the case: even if some individual interest (or “will”) were to be transparently transmitted through institutionalized procedures of representation, that interest would become inscribed in “complex reality different from that in which the interest was initially formulated” such that the interest itself changes. Noting that the classic formulation problematically presumes not only individual wills but entire constituencies as existing “logically prior” to their representation, Laclau’s formulation joins a “constructivist turn” in representation, attending instead to the recursive relationship between the representer and the represented.32 Focusing on how the identity of “the people” is conjured into being through “performative practices” construes representation not as a fixed (election-mediated) relationship of authorization and accountability but rather as a dynamic practice and “claim” that asks “what representation does, rather than what it is.”33 Of course scholarly debates over what representation is or does or ought to do are bound up with the particular historical conjunctures in which such debates emerge. Political theorist David Plotke points out, for instance, how in a Cold War context, procedures of accountability and authorization took on a particular political salience, since holding competitive elections was what distinguished democracy (minimally construed) from communism.34 Rather than sorting the pros and cons of the various sorts of representation generically understood (Descriptive is better! No, substantive!), Plotke questions a presumption at the heart of Pitkin’s seminal formulation: the implicit counterposing of representation with presence (recall that representation for Pitkin is defined minimally as conveying something that is “absent”).35 It is democratic theory’s preoccupation with representation as absence, in other words, that renders the embodied, fleshy presence of crowds so seemingly problematic.

This conceptual counterposing of representation with embodiment in contemporary democratic theory is largely a historical artifact, anthropologist Jason Frank notes, of the transition from royal to popular sovereignty during Western Europe’s eighteenth-century Age of Democratic Revolutions.36 French theorist Claude Lefort describes the “empty space” opened up by the eighteenth-century dethroning of European monarchs and argues that power in modern democracy is thus, by definition, disembodied. The legitimacy of democratic authority, Lefort writes, “is based on the people; but the image of popular sovereignty is linked to the image of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never claim to appropriate it. Democracy combines these two apparently contradictory principles: on the one hand, power emanates from the people; on the other, it is the power of nobody. And modern democracy thrives on this contradiction. Whenever the latter risks being resolved or is resolved, democracy is either close to destruction or already destroyed.”37 The seeming threat posed by the embodied crowd to contemporary democratic life is thus an existential one, inhering in the notion that in seeking to occupy the “empty space” proper to representation—in actually manifesting “the people”—the embodied crowd signals democracy’s destruction.

Things were not always this way. Paul Friedland traces this counterposing of embodiment with representation in so much democratic theory to the interrelated transformations in notions of both political and theatrical representation that took place in Revolutionary-era France. Prior to the Enlightenment, Friedland’s research demonstrates, people responded to political events (say, public oratory) in the same way they would if they were watching a play: with cheers and applause, or with disapproving whistles. This was because in both theater and politics, performance in pre-Enlightenment France was understood not as a representation of something absent but rather an act of actual incarnation: “re-presentation.” Comparing premodern theater to the convening of the Estates General in pre-Revolutionary France, Friedland notes how at the theater, “a successful performance depended upon the actor’s experiencing the passions of the character, on the actor’s literally becoming the character for the duration of the play”; similarly, the convocation of the Estates General was a “political spectacle in which spirit took on flesh, in which political actors re-presented with their own bodies a mystical body that had no substance of its own.”38 The shared conception of representation underpinning premodern politics and theater—that is, not representation as absence but re-presentation as “the act by which an intangible body is literally made present in concrete form”—upends the commonly held presumption that the relationship between politics and theater is merely metaphorical: “Theater was not ‘really’ about politics any more than politics was ‘really’ about theater. Instead, theatrical and political representation were particular manifestations of the same underlying representative process.”39 Friedland thus tracks the implications for both theater and politics of an extraordinary eighteenth-century shift in the underlying concept of representation:

The task of actors on both stages underwent a parallel redefinition: Theatrical actors were prevailed upon to represent their characters abstractly, in a manner that seemed realistic to the audience, rather than a manner that the actors experienced as real. And, at the same time, political theorists were slowly articulating a comparable reconceptualization of political representation. . . . Unlike previous political bodies that had claimed to be the French nation, the National Assembly merely claimed to speak on the nation’s behalf.40

It is precisely the notion that modern representative democracy no longer entails being the nation but rather speaking on its behalf—the “disincorporation” of political power41—that leads to so much contemporary hand-wringing over the stubborn persistence of human bodies assembling in what ought to be the empty space of the sovereign.42

And yet contemporary Mumbai exhibits no such unease with embodiment or presence; on the contrary, as the Dusshera gatherings demonstrate, “incorporation” is the very criterion for evaluating the “realness” of representation in the first place. If “everything changed” in 1750, it seems Mumbai didn’t get the memo.43 And perhaps Mumbai is no exception; perhaps in the so-called West as well, the change was less complete and far-reaching than chroniclers (past and present) would have us believe. Indeed, as anthropologist William Mazzarella has pointed out, conventional diagnoses of the contemporary global-political conjuncture often say more about the problematic premises upon which such framings hinge than provide insight about the actual societal churnings they profess to describe; as concepts, in other words, they tend to be more normative than descriptive.44 Noting that the term “populism” has been used to describe political movements as disparate as Trumpism, Occupy, and even Gandhi’s “Quit India” struggle to cast off British rule, Mazzarella points out that “populism” is better understood as a go-to word that observers periodically deploy when historical conditions bring to the surface contradictions that are actually inherent to the project of liberalism:45 the uneasy coexistence of political and legal equality with the actual fact of discrimination and domination; the legal enshrining of equal rights alongside their unequal enforcement; the humanist celebration of individual reason as the locus of political subjectivity alongside actual practices of political representation/re-presentation that are (still) shot through with affect and aesthetics, embodiment and incarnation, theatricality and performance. Which is to say, while it may well be true that Western political observers’ normative conceptions of representation changed during Europe’s Age of Democratic Revolutions—that extraordinary moment of global churning to which so much contemporary democratic theory can be traced—the uptake and internalization of those norms appears to have been somewhat uneven. And not merely in Mumbai (or India), where such conceptualizations of both theater and politics appear rather beside the point (except perhaps in some elite bourgeois pockets), but perhaps also in those Western seats of “modernity” where representative democracy is so often held to be in crisis.

Democracy’s Other Histories

Contemporary diagnoses of the embodied character and affective entailments of mass politics as excessive of the institutionalized procedures of democratic representation are an artifact of the methodological operationalization of the presumptions of liberal democratic theory: the constitution of a democratic people (the demos of democracy) by means of universal suffrage; the formation of political preferences through engagement in a liberal public sphere; the procedures of election as both the legal-institutional mechanism by which representatives are authorized to carry out the mandate of the people as well as the mechanism by means of which representatives are held accountable to that mandate. Within this framework, embodiment is always already defined in opposition to the properly channeling of political preferences through the institutions and technologies of “public” communication and representation (conceptualized as absence).46

And yet while the Anglo-American world has rediscovered representation of late, seen from elsewhere these debates appear rather parochial.47 Dispensing with unhelpful anglophone preoccupations with “presence,” historians and anthropologists working in postcolonial contexts have long attended to the contextual specificity of embodied practices of political assembly and have demonstrated how “putting people on the ground” accomplishes things politically—and that this set of performative practices is easily intelligible when not refracted through Eurocentric theory. In a rich historical account, for instance, Sandria Freitag distinguishes the “public sphere” of Western European state formation from what she calls the “public arenas” of colonial North India. Seeking to explain the emergence in North India of “politicised community identity” in the nineteenth century, Freitag explores how festivals, processions, and cultural spectacles (“crowds and rites, music and sword play, sacred space and sacred time . . . ritual, theater and symbol”) provided the symbolic vocabularies by means of which “politicised community identity”—Hindu and Muslim in this case—were constituted and enacted. The “public arena,” Freitag writes, provided an “alternative world to that structured by the imperial regime, providing legitimacy and recognition to a range of actors and values denied place in the imperial order.”48 It was in this space of the “public arena” that a transition from the face-to-face interactions and exchanges by means of which “relational communities” were constituted locally were transformed throughout the nineteenth century into to the broader “extra-local” identity categories of “Hindu” and “Muslim”—dynamics set in motion by new technologies of mass media and communication that historian Benedict Anderson calls “print capitalism.”49

Similarly emphasizing the communicative entailments of embodiment, Lisa Mitchell’s longue durée account of popular assembly in the Indian subcontinent from precolonial times to the present theorizes crowd gatherings as highly coordinated communicative acts—strategically employed to “broadcast” concerns into a public sphere, making “use of escalating strategies to create spaces of discursive contestation where interests can be raised and recognized enough to even be brought into public discussion.”50 Expanding a classic (Habermasian) notion of a “public sphere” to include mass politics, Mitchell insists that “the collective emptying and filling of public spaces for the purposes of gaining recognition, making representational claims, amplifying unheard voices, gauging public support for substantive agendas, vying to shape political decision-making, performing power, and holding elected officials accountable to their campaign commitments, is not only quite widespread, but also forms a fundamental feature of the way that democracy works in India between elections.”51 Mitchell points out that while Arab Spring or Occupy movement crowd events captured global media attention due to their construal as “spontaneous and exceptional, understood as rejecting existing state structures and seeking to create alternative sovereignties,” contemporaneous assemblies of much larger (even staggering) scale in the southern Indian state of Telangana—assembling to call attention to elected representatives’ unfulfilled campaign promises—failed to register globally as newsworthy, because such crowd events are “understood in India as neither spontaneous nor exceptional in form.”52 Mitchell’s long durée account demonstrates how embodied mass politics is itself a material technology of political communication, and one that has a democratizing impetus—employed strategically and instrumentally by marginalized citizens, not as a challenge to the state, but rather (and on the contrary) to get its attention—making grievances heard by state officials, who are thereby held accountable to their constituents.

Beginning not with eighteenth-century Europe but rather at a much earlier moment and in the Indian subcontinent, such alternate genealogies of democracy render untenable the broad-brush reduction of contemporary political churnings to the abiding contradictions of liberalism, and gesture toward rather different questions (both normative and empirical) of the global political contemporary—inviting not democratic diagnosis but conceptual curiosity. Indeed, noting the “semantic or cultural emptiness” of the concept of political representation, anthropologist Jonathan Spencer points out that while “we all know there is a link between representative and represented, what form that link may take” is an empirical question.53 Drama of Democracy takes up this question—and invitation—through an ethnographic account of political representation as embodied performance.

Performance and Performativity

While I will have much to say about the concept of “performance” in the chapters to come, it will be helpful here to briefly introduce how I use the term in this book, to outline how my usage relates to the vast body of extant scholarship on political performance and performativity, and to lay out the conceptual stakes in putting these ideas to work in a study of democracy. The theatrical and performative dimensions of social and political life have long attracted the attention of anthropologists and sociologists, with classic works interested in symbolic dimensions of political spectacle, as well the regime-legitimizing and (re)integrative work of performative enactment that Victor Turner famously termed “social drama.”54 Notwithstanding much internal debate and disagreement, anthropological work on political theater and spectacle is united by the basic idea that performance isn’t merely an aesthetic genre of entertainment but a practice that actually does something. This notion—that performance has effects in and on the world—has come to be known as performativity.

First outlined by British philosopher of language J. L. Austin, in a series of lectures published in 1962 titled How to Do Things with Words, the concept of the “performative” refers to the idea that words accomplish the very thing that they describe: “I do” pronounced in the context of a marriage ceremony, for instance, or “I apologize” in an attempt at relational repair. The idea that words do things fueled a generation of anthropological scholarship, interested largely in the role of performance in reproducing and preserving “traditional” social order and in shoring up power arrangements—especially in moments of crisis. For Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, writing in the 1960s, “the function of any recurrent activity, such as the punishment of a crime, or a funeral ceremony, is the part it plays in the social life as a whole and therefore the contribution it makes to the maintenance of the structural continuity.”55 Radcliffe-Brown’s “functionalist” theory of public life and state ceremony was critiqued by Clifford Geertz, whose influential work on the Balian “theatre state” (Negara) insisted on the priority of individual meaning-making subjects, where the “dramaturgy of state ritual” enacts shared cosmologies of belief: “theatre [is] designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality,” Geertz writes, “to shape the existing conditions of life to be consonant with that reality . . . and, by presenting it, to make it happen—make it actual.”56 Geertzian “dramaturgy of state ritual” is performative insofar as it actualizes the worldview that it expresses.

Geertz’s use of the word “ritual” points to the question of efficacy: what is a “ritual,” and what makes it effective?57 How, moreover, is ritual efficacy to be assessed? Questions of efficacy are at the front and center of Austin’s formulation, which distinguishes between two kinds of performatives: those that actually accomplish their intended effects (Austin calls these “happy” or “felicitous” performatives) and those that fail to produce their objects (performatives that are “unhappy” or “infelicitous”). Speakers’ intentions (what Austin calls illocution) may or may not line up with whatever outcome (or perlocution) is effected by some utterance. Assessing whether an Austinian performative has succeeded or failed thus hinges on knowing a speaker’s intentions.58 But can one really know another’s (or even one’s own) intentions?

This matter of intention was the crux of French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s critique of Austin’s concept of the performative. Derrida pointed out that in making sense of how words produce meaningful effects, what matters is not what the speaker may or may not have intended (if the speaker even thought about it) but instead what Derrida calls iterability: whether some performative articulates “forms of language that are already in existence before the speaker utters them.” Performatives “work,” Derrida suggests, through the repetition and citation of linguistic signs that are already meaningful.59 Derrida developed the notion of performativity as a way to describe how particular social subjects are actually produced through the repetition and citation of words and actions that are already laden with meaning.

Derrida’s notion of performativity has been taken up scholars of politics as a way to describe how particular social subjects and collective political identities are produced through words and actions—what Judith Butler describes as “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names,” and what Lisa Wedeen calls a “structural logic” whereby national identity is summoned into being through practices of declaration.60 Wedeen demonstrates that political spectacles are not mere displays of power but rather (and citing Geertz’s discussion of the Balian “theatre state”) are performative “instances of that power.”61 By “denaturalizing” political identities, Wedeen powerfully demonstrates how political relationality is enacted (rather than merely symbolized) by performance. Similarly drawing on Derrida’s notion of “citationality” and Butler’s formulation of the “performatively constituted” character of subjectivity, Thomas Blom Hansen’s account of political spectacle in 1990s Mumbai describes “public rituals” (protests, rallies, roadblocks) as “citational practices, drawing on a vast reservoir of popularized national history and religious myths and imagery.”62 “Strategic performance,” Hansen suggests, is the semiotic grammar through which political authority in Mumbai is articulated. “To be someone, to enjoy respect and authority is not a given fact,” Hansen writes, “but needs to be reproduced through reiterative performances of various kinds.”63

While such formulations are attentive to the performative character of political spectacle, accounting for the citational syntax of a “public ritual” does not explain when and how a performative iteration communicates and actuates the authority it sets out to produce; as Charles Morris puts it, making a Peircean point, “something is a sign only because it is interpreted as a sign of something by some interpreter.”64 To account for this requires ethnographic attention to the material enactment of political spectacle as performance. And as Irving Goffman reminded us long ago, performance must also consider the question of audience.65 Understanding performative effect means attending to what people do with some sign: Do they take photos and share over social media? What do they say about it? Do they deride it? Quote it? Laugh at it? Making sense of performance effects requires attending to how signs are taken up and set in motion in ever-changing ways by a myriad of audiences—whether known or unknown, intended or unintended. Attending to such practices of articulation pushes past intractable questions of intention and efficacy and asks instead about the next sign.

Far from a mere methodological quibble, this shift in attention has decisive implications for a study of politics: while studying political performativity yields important insights into the production of political subjectivities and the (re)production of authority, in the absence of attention to the performance question of audience—without attending to how performatives are perceived, evaluated, and rearticulated in ways that might be illegible to (or even subvert) authors’ designs (if and when such designs exist)—political performativity finds only authoritarianism. And this is because thinking about performativity without attending to questions of audience “assumes that a display of power is power,” rather than admitting the possibility that a display of power is a farce or is later ridiculed or even goes unnoticed.66 Understanding whether and how political performativity inhabits either authoritarianism or democracy requires attending to how people respond to performances—which is a matter of methodology. Drama of Democracy operationalizes a notion of performance that attends methodologically to questions of audience evaluation and “uptake.”67 This methodological move allows us to see how in Mumbai, performance pervades political life across the ideological spectrum—producing and inhabiting a lively terrain of relationality, contestation, and public debate that is proper to democracy.

Drama of Democracy takes up theater theorist Richard Schechner’s deceptively simple proposition notion that “performance” entails embodied practices of showing: “The more clearly you show what you are doing,” Schechner writes, “the more obviously you are performing.”68 Italian semiotician Umberto Eco recalls a thought experiment posed by Charles Peirce: “What kind of sign could have been defined by a drunkard exposed in a public place by the Salvation Army in order to advertise the advantages of temperance.”69 While Peirce himself declined to answer the puzzle, Eco’s own formulation is powerfully suggestive:

As soon as he has been put on the platform and shown to the audience the drunken man has lost his original nature of “real” body among real bodies. He is no more a world object among world objects—he has become a semiotic device; he is now a sign. . . . He stands for the category he belongs to [i.e., a drunk]. There is no difference, in principle between our intoxicated character and the word “drunk.”70

Yet, Eco notes, while words and things are both signs, they are not the same. There is, Eco suggests, “something that distinguishes our drunkard from a word”: while a word is “actively produced,” our drunkard, who already existed, has simply been displayed. Eco identifies this modality of signification as ostention: “ostention is one of the various ways of signifying, consisting in de-realizing a given object in order to make it stand for an entire class.” Ostention, Eco insists, is “the most basic instance of performance.” The chapters ahead demonstrate how material practices of ostention—what I call “ostentatious display”71—are a key dimension of the semiotic field within which virtuosity in the arts of political mediation and efficacy are performed.72 Words are unreliable in Mumbai, where spoken promises and written rules do not go far in rendering recognizable the means by which the material necessities of everyday life are produced.73 In this context, we see that more orchestrated and staged an event appears, the more persuasive and real it is as a sign of the orchestrator’s authority; as Eco writes, “the elementary mechanisms of human interaction and the elementary mechanisms of dramatic fiction are the same.”74

The concept of “ostention” (“de-realizing a given object in order to make it stand for an entire class”) calls attention to the materiality of sign vehicles and to the embodied character of performance as re-presentation. “Like written and spoken languages,” media scholars Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajamani write, “images, sounds, smells, tastes, shapes, and movements are cultivated into meaningful sign systems that form the media through which concepts are communicated, shaped, and changed.”75 Pernau and Rajamani’s formulation pushes past the persistent mind-body dualisms that would characterize embodied sensation as sites of “pure feeling,” unmediated by rational, language-based concepts. On the one hand, this offers up a critique of “strong” versions of “affect” theory, and on the other hand, of the dyadic approach of Saussurean semiotics, which is inattentive to the material and sensory affordances of sign vehicles.76 Indeed, through a shared anthropological attention to the irreducible materiality of social life, scholars working in somewhat separate fields of linguistic anthropology, multisensory ethnography, and psychoanalytic (“affect”) theories have converged (from their different perspectives) in a resounding critique of the persistent mind-body dualisms that haunt each of their respective fields: in his repudiation of “strong” versions of neo-Spinozian affect theory (and clear-eyed statement on what the notion of affect might be “good for”), Mazzarella explains how the notion of affect “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.” Similarly, Lauren Berlant, reflecting on what Clough describes as an “affective turn” in the social sciences, points out how the notion of affect “brings us back to the encounter of what is sensed with what is known and what has impact in a new but also recognizable way.” Affect, Donovan Schaefer writes, is “the missing link between discursive regimes and bodies, the arterial linkages through which power is disseminated. ‘The present’ is not an assemblage of texts and knowledges, bloodless discursive inscriptions on the body, but a felt sense out of which political circumstances emerge.”77 Affect, in other words, conveys knowledge much like semiosis78—an insight that allows us to dispense with the unhelpful performativity/performance distinction.

And indeed, back in Mumbai, we can see how the 2022 Dusshera gatherings were at once performative and performance. On the hand, each of the crowds sought—through the embodied act of gathering—to performatively incarnate the “real Shiv Sena.” And at the same time, the crowds were also a carefully curated variety of show, performed for innumerable potential and actual audiences: the media, the Indian Election Commission, the myriad mobile phone cameras who produced and circulated a bazillion digital images that evening. And of course, audience assessments regarding which of the two shows was more compelling (in its performance of becoming) would help decide which faction would actually be institutionally empowered (i.e., would legally become) the “real” Shiv Sena—which was of course the whole point. Because official recognition would accord those associated with the winning faction a desired identity and advantage in the upcoming election—a spectacular competition to represent.

Theorizing from Mumbai

The received framings of political theory, as this book shows, cannot account for the actually existing conceptual vocabulary through which Mumbaikars evaluate political life. Taking such evaluations into account, this book attends to the terms and categories by means of which Mumbaikars themselves appraise and “problematize” everyday political practices and processes of democratic representation.79 Each of the book’s five ethnographic chapters (interspersed with three scene-setting interludes) explores a distinctive domain of representation in Mumbai, each anchored by a related conceptual concern: meanings of money in relation to electoral accountability; political aesthetics and enjoyment; believability of words; material mediations of citizenship and belonging; the instability of image-representations and the partisan perils and political possibilities that such semiotic slippage affords. Each chapter explores the evaluative talk that surrounds a problematizing concept-keyword and attends as well to the array of subsidiary signs (words, things, concepts) that comprise the material and ideational terrain that the keyword’s ambivalence mediates.80 Attending to this material-discursive terrain of moralizing discourse and mediation, and treating evaluative terms of problematization as political-theoretical concepts in their own right, allows for an ethnographic account of the stakes—social, ethical, material, practical—of contemporary Mumbai’s political life.

The first chapter, “Cash,” follows election-season flows of money through the city, exploring the work that money performs in producing and reconfiguring sociopolitical relations of power and material authority in the run-up to the high-stakes event of the municipal election. The chapter is animated by the puzzle that while reportedly unprecedented sums of money changed hands in the run-up to polling, in the electoral district where the research for this chapter focused, the candidate who won a landslide victory actually spent minimally. Pushing past liberal hand-wringing over “vote buying,” “corruption,” and “clientelism,” ethnographic attention to the actual practices of election-season gifting and exchange demonstrates instead how money animates intricate, highly speculative social and informational chains of association by means of which relations of representation are produced, instantiated, and maintained over time—and how these relations are the means by which material contestations and substantive citizenship claims are articulated and made good; “you can’t buy a vote,” as one seasoned campaign worker explains. Instead, as the chapter demonstrates, election-season cash accomplishes a few interrelated kinds of work. Money is shown to produce enduring sociopolitical networks (gifts of cash work much like any other gifted good in producing relations of debt and obligation), and gifts of cash perform semiotic work, signaling access to powerful networks of knowledge, resources, and authority. Election-season cash simultaneously inhabits these various registers. And yet the materiality of money as an infrastructure of communication invariably leads to semiotic slippage between and among the registers, fueling suspicions about “vote buying” in a rumor-infused environment.

The second chapter dives into the theatrical register of contemporary Mumbai’s political life, anchored by moralizing talk about natak—a Hindi-Urdu-Marathi word that refers simultaneously to the performance of something and to the real-time, embodied practices entailed in a show’s performative enactment.81 Natak is a word that signals performance traditions and practices that are concerned with the conveying of emotions—as opposed to being primarily about narrative (as in the Greek-origin theatrical traditions as framed in Aristotle’s Poetics). The chapter explores natak through its real-time enactments, focusing attention on the assembling of a large-scale campaign rally on the final day of election campaign season. Rather than counterposing “theatricality” with “authenticity,” the chapter instead demonstrates how the rally produces an “image.” The evaluative criterion of popular assembly, in other words, is not whether a crowd event is deemed to be authentic or mediated, or even whether conveners are deemed to utter truths or falsehoods. Rather, what matters is whether a materialized crowd-image resonates in a way that renders compelling and believable the authority and virtues of an event’s conveners, and thereby actuates the social relations and political subjectivities that it professes to represent.

Chapter 3 is about the evaluation of words. Tracing talk about what is (and is not) to be “believed,” the ethnography focuses on the weeks and months of communicative and relational work leading up to the final rally that comprises the subject of chapter 2: the chowk sabhaas (street-corner meetings), the multilingual paper pamphlets, the public oratory at “public meetings” and “stage shows,” the door-to-door campaigns and late-night “mouse meetings,” the formation of WhatsApp groups and circulation of digital videos—language-mediated communicative-relational work that was “on stage” during the mass gathering. Indeed, while the final rally itself was spatially and temporally bounded performance, the show itself indexes a vast and heterogeneous communicative landscape within which language plays a key role. The chapter probes ethnographically the relationship between particular words and material landscapes within which “belief” is crafted—demonstrating how words are evaluated not merely for their (semantic) “truth” value but instead pragmatically, in light of the myriad of semiotic resources available in a communicative situation.82

The fourth chapter, “Kaaghaz,” attends to the recursivity between materially embodied mass gatherings and the images of those crowd events that are produced and circulated, especially over social media using mobile phone cameras. Focusing on a particular mass gathering that took place in December 2019 at August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai, in opposition to a new, highly exclusionary amendment to India’s citizenship laws, the chapter focuses on the material affordances of kaaghaz and khoon—of paper and blood—as each relates to ambivalences over representations of “The People of India.” Probing the conflict over kaaghaz’s contradictory meanings—at once vehicle of “authenticity” and as well as of “mere representation”—the chapter demonstrates how these contradictions are mediated by the affordances of kaaghaz itself: paper facilitates the enacting of collective subjectivity by virtue of the relational encounters that paper’s embodied materiality allows. Focusing on the vagaries of paper, the chapter troubles what is sometimes posed as a binary relationship between digital platforms such as WhatsApp—the immediacy and intimacy of which counterintuitively are often said to produce an effect of direct, unmediated communication—and the real-time, material modes of political assembly that are the staple of Mumbai’s political vocabulary. Rather than counterposing the real and the virtual, the chapter’s ethnography of kaaghaz attends to the broad spectrum of materials comprising the infrastructure of representation—paper placards, city streets, proximate bodies, mobile phones, digital images—yielding insight into the recursive relations between the material infrastructures of embodied crowds and those of their circulating image-representations.

Chapter 5, “Politics,” centers on the anxious efforts by religious leaders, political activists, and party networks to curate crowd-images and manage their metapragmatics.83 The accounts focus on efforts to convene or conclude (or sometimes altogether prevent) mass gatherings in light of the partisan perils wrought by the unstable affective resonances of crowd-images once put into circulation. As one interlocutor puts it: “The protests were becoming politicized.” Ethnographic attention to the elaborate behind-the-scenes work of gathering official permissions and securing the resources to facilitate the protest gatherings (or prevent them) demonstrates the tortuous and uneven relationship between behind-the-scenes mediations and the (onstage) image-events that they facilitate. Ubiquitous evaluative talk about the “political” character of the protests gestures toward the ambivalent role (and possibly suspect motives) of political leaders in facilitating protest gatherings. The evaluative criterion, the chapter demonstrates, is not whether gatherings are spontaneous or mediated; instead, what matters is whether gatherings signal robust and reliable political alliances or are merely flash-in-the-pan, cynical mobilizations of mass affect in service of the narrow “interest” of political elites. Assessments (and allegations) regarding the “political” and “interested” character of crowd-images points to general uneasiness about mobilizations and deployments of mass affect, and evaluative discourse is concerned with attributing, claiming, or disavowing responsibility for to some or another image-event. The chapter probes the stakes of such evaluations, which are not dismissive of party politics as such (far from it); rather, the political party comes into view as representation par excellence: a dense web of social and material relations facilitating communication, access to resources, and social belonging.

The inspiration for this book is rather straightforward: Mumbaikars put representative democracy to work toward ever-creative ends, displaying facility and fluency in the performative arts of political communication and representation. Drama of Democracy’s ambition is to chart a path through some of the conceptual impasses of the global present, where political representation tends to be evaluated according to its adherence to liberal precepts of absence: appraised for verisimilitude and accountability to an absent subject or else dismissed as dangerous deceptions or emotional manipulations. Drawing on Mumbai’s communicative creativity, theatrical acumen, and conceptual wealth, this book instead offers up an alternate evaluative vocabulary based on practices of representation as incarnation and embodiment. Theorizing from Mumbai thus opens new questions and concepts by means of which the political churnings of the global contemporary might be understood.