Natak

“Yeh Public Hai, Public!”: “This Is the Public! The Public!”

In order to make sense of this dual register of natak (and before getting into some ethnography), it will be helpful to first attend to the somewhat curious use of the word public in Mumbai, where, as the print shop man’s words attest (“the size of the public will be the size of the image”), public describes crowds of people that gather for political events: things like protest marches, roadblocks, election rallies, and so on. At one level, this man’s words seem to echo those of Rakesh at the conclusion of the previous chapter: “People need to see a crowd; they need to see how much public you have.” And yet while for Rakesh the embodied crowd itself is the public—assembled in a particular place and space by means of the infrastructural mediations of cash—the print shop man’s characterization of the public not only as a materialized crowd itself but more importantly as something that yields an “image” warrants further consideration. What might it mean to evaluate a public as an image?

In considering this notion of public-as-image, it is instructive to turn to another infrastructure of circulation by means of which images and imaginings of the crowd-public are produced and set in motion: Mumbai’s world-famous—and world’s largest—film industry, Bollywood.

Yeh jo public hai, ye sab jaanti hai; public hai

This public here, it knows everything; it’s the public

These are the opening lyrics of film-song superhit “Yeh Jo Public Hai” (This public here), featuring in Manmohan Desai’s 1974 Bollywood blockbuster Roti (Bread). The scene opens with the film’s hero (played by silver-screen heartthrob Rajesh Khanna) whispering into the ear of a young woman (played by Bollywood beauty Mumtaz Askari), whose shocked expression gestures toward the urgency in what she has just heard (Figure 6). The scene cuts to the cunning face of the presumed subject of the whisper—the wink-eyed neta (politician)—before Mumtaz dashes across the street and into an open-fronted furniture store where she repeats the whisper into the ear of a seated trader (Figure 7). She pauses by a warehouse-like space to beckon women down from a balcony before reaching the open street, where all the people she has just summoned gather into a crowd—just in time for the arrival onto the scene of our sly-faced neta, who is intercepted at the intersection by our hero, Khanna. Khanna greets the neta with a gently derisive greeting, “Ai babu!” (Hey clerk!), and then gestures toward the assembled crowd, saying: “Yeh public hai, public!” (This is the public! The public!) (Figure 8).

Yeh jo public hai, ye sab jaanti hai, public hai

This public here, it knows everything; it’s the public

A man boasting a thick mop of black hair leads a white donkey onto the scene (our neta’s would-be steed), only to find himself abruptly de-wigged before the crowd of onlookers by the all-knowing Khanna, who points first to the wig and then gives a condescending pat to the man’s naked scalp while singing:

Aji andar kya hai, aji bahar kya hai

Ye sab kuchh pehchaanti hai

What’s [hidden] underneath, what’s [visible] outside

[The public] recognizes everything

An open-top jeep rolls up carrying a handsome film actor, who is soon swarmed by adoring fans waving rupee notes for signing (Figure 9). A smiling Khanna looks on, cautioning the smug-faced star:

Ye chaahe to sar pe bitha le chaahe phenk de niche

Pahale ye pichhe bhaage phir bhaago isake pichhe

If it wants to, it will lift you up [on its head], or will cast you down;

At first [the public] will run after you, but then you will be running after it

Tired of the crowd, the actor retreats behind a wrought-iron gate. While the star shuts out his adoring, disappointed fans, Khanna cautions:

Arre dil tute to, arre ye ruthe to . . .

Tauba kaha phir maanati hai

If you break its heart and if you make them cry

Then there will be no forgiveness

Cut to Khanna and Mumtaz walking alongside the donkey-mounted neta at the head of the procession as it proceeds over a bridge bearing graffiti enjoining the public to “vote.” On the far side of the bridge, the procession encounters an even larger crowd which is revealed to be seated at the foot of a stage from which a hatted man is speaking in front of a poster that reads (in Urdu and English): “Deena Nath Ko Vote Do / Vote for Deena Nath.” Khanna dashes to the foot of the stage, where he addresses the politician (presumably Mr. Nath), singing:

Kya neta kya abhineta de janata ko jo dhokha

Pal me shoharat ud jaaye jo ek pavan ka jhonka

Whether political leader [neta] or an actor [abhineta], whoever will cheat the janata [people]5

In a flash their fortune will fly away like a gust of wind

Khanna beats a retreat from the stage, taking along with him the neta’s crowd, which he leads toward an open field. In the field, before the eyes of the public and the disgraced neta, Khanna reveals sacks of hoarded grain hidden under piles of hay.

Bhik na mange, karz na mange

Yeh apna haq manti hai

It doesn’t ask for alms, it doesn’t ask for a loan

It [the public] knows its rights

The lyrics and imagery from this wildly popular 1974 film song offer some insights into the valences of “public”: the song’s opening scene—the whispers and the beckoning—gestures toward a public that is made up of robust and trusted relational networks. Here, the public holds a collective, shared knowing bordering on omniscience (sab jaanti hai), capable of adjudicating “mere surface appearance” (the wig) from underlying (bald-headed) “truths.” The public (a singular noun) is shown to love its leaders (netas) as much as its film stars (abhinetas): the song plays this up by emphasizing the shared etymology of neta and abhineta, political leader and film star, hammering home the point with the film-star digression. But if the public’s love for society’s heroes (political and silver-screen)6 is not respected and reciprocated, then the abhi/neta’s good fortune (which is anyway only on loan from the public) will evaporate; the public will rally behind the hero who enlists the power and authority of his or her position (power and position which are in the first place a gift bestowed by the public) toward the distribution of resources—not as gifts (“it doesn’t ask for alms, it doesn’t ask for a loan”) but for its rightful due (“it knows its rights”).

Of Crowds and Publics

It is useful to consider this silver-screen public in light of how contemporary social theory talks about publics—a strand of theorizing profoundly influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s classic formulation of the “public sphere” and theory of “communicative action.” In his 1962 classic, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Habermas outlines the emergence in early modern Europe of a print-mediated discursive space (a “bourgeois public sphere”) in which society’s literati wrote pamphlets, read one another’s writings, and met up in coffeehouses to hash out their opinions—the collective exercise of public reason that worked as a counterbalance to would-be absolutism of state power. Habermas characterizes the public sphere as a discursive space of “social interaction” where “plans of action of different actors are coordinated through an exchange of communicative acts, that is, through a use of language orientated towards reaching understanding.”7 State administration has its own rationality, Habermas argues, and administrative experts use the powers of their offices (say, law) instrumentally toward the state’s own ends. However (and this was Habermas’s conceptual innovation), state administrators cannot simply do whatever they want, because the administratively employed power of the state acquires legitimacy only and always by means of the communicative power generated in the public sphere. In this context, Habermas maintains, democratic life hinges upon the practices and procedures by means of which administrative power is made to respond to communicatively formed public opinion. Communicatively generated power of the public sphere “make[s] itself felt” indirectly, Habermas argues, “insofar as it assumes responsibility for the pool of reasons from which administrative decisions must draw their rationalizations. With the institutionalization of representative government, legal protections on speech, press, and (especially) rights to assembly, the public sphere—as both an idea and a practice—becomes the legally protected means by which the ‘general interest’ of society (as opposed to the ‘private interests’ of profit-maximization in a market economy) would come into being and find expression.”8

Building upon while also critiquing Habermas’s formulations, a second influential strand of contemporary theorizing about “publics”—taking a cue from Benedict Anderson’s classic work on “imagined communities”9—has explored how mass-mediating technologies (in Anderson’s case, print capitalism) enable people who might never actually meet in person—people who may not have very much to do with one another at all—to nonetheless “imagine” themselves as a collective; in Anderson’s case, the social collective imagined through the mediations of print media was “the nation.” Building on this Andersonian insight—that the mass-mediated circulation of discourse brings social collectives and political subjectivities into being—and following linguistic anthropological work on the circulation of “discourse”10 more generally, literary scholar Michael Warner outlines a more general notion of “public” as any collective subject that takes shape when “strangers” become aware of their mutual attention to some object of shared interest—a “social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.”11 In a similar vein, linguistic anthropologist Susan Gal demonstrates how “publics are created through the circulation of discourses as people hear, see or read a message and then engage it in some way.” It is through individuals’ “mutual awareness” of their shared participation in some discursive practice, Gal shows, that publics come into being, and act concertedly as such.12 These formulations are of a piece with a generation of scholarship that has pointed out the exclusionary (and especially gendered) character of the public sphere as formulated by Habermas, pointing instead to a myriad of publics and “counterpublics”13—potential and actual—that exist alongside (and in tension with) mainstream, hegemonic forms of bourgeois publicity, and to the wide range of speech genres, objects of interest, participation frameworks and material mediations that comprise “public culture.”14

At one level, the silver-screen public of “Yeh Jo Public Hai” bears a striking resemblance to notions of a discursively produced collectivity. We watch as exchanges of words and gestures draw individuals out from their private domains—their shops, their homes, their places of employment—and into the town square; this talkative and all-seeing public becomes a collective subject by virtue of its shared focus on an object of attention (“whether neta or abhineta”), and then holds institutionally empowered state actors (our sly-eyed neta) accountable for actions that betray the common interest (say, grain hoarding). Yet even as the discursively produced public of “Yeh Jo Public Hai” seems almost Habermasian in its reasoning and accountability-holding powers, there is something jarring to a liberal sensibility in the song’s implicit equating of the “public” as a collective, discursively assembled political subject with the embodied crowd as a throng of adoring fans—a collectivity assembled not by meaningful discourse (whispered words that lead to the holding of a corrupt official to account) but rather by “love” and desire for physical proximity to a fickle film star. The public of “Yeh Jo Public Hai” is conjured, in other words, not only by matters common to the public mind but to the public heart—a heart that is left broken and crying by the callousness of the beloved abhi/neta.

If you break its heart and if you make them cry

Then there will be no forgiveness

The ease with which “Yeh Jo Public Hai” moves back and forth between these two collectivities (the discursively produced and the affectively assembled) is jarring to discourse theories of publicity, perhaps because the notion of the public is so often counterposed (either positively or negatively) with the crowd—the reasoned communications of the public sphere juxtaposed with the fleshy, embodied energies of crowds. In this context, attention to our silver-screen public invites a twofold move: first to dispense with the unhelpful binary of discursive reason versus embodied affect;15 and second, to attend not only to the embodied public (the physical crowd) but also to its image—to the “this” (and accompanying onscreen hand gesture; see Figure 12) of “this is the public!”

Yeh public hai, public!

This is the public! The public!

Attending to public as both the embodied crowd as well as the images of that same crowd means asking as well about the “heteroglossic”16 character of the public—which not only comprises an audience but has its own (actual and potential) addressees.17 Indeed, as Warner points out, the notion of “public” has multiple valences: it can be an imagined as a “social totality” such as the nation; a “concrete audience” (an embodied crowd); or a collectivity that comes into being through the circulation of texts.18 What we see in Mumbai is the materially mediated co-articulations among these different but overlapping modes of publicity. When Khanna gestures toward the assembled crowd while saying to the neta “this is the public!” it is not merely the politician who is being addressed but also those of us who are watching the film (and/or looking at screen-captured images on a page). And indeed back in Bombay, we see that the rally-crowd too has multiple and overlapping audience addressees: not only the crowd assembled by virtue of shared attention (or devotion) to a candidate for office, but also people like the print shop man, to whom the demonstrated ability to assemble a large crowd makes the event’s object of attention (the abhi/neta) “look powerful”—“itna public utna image rahega,” as he put it: “the size of the public will be the size of the image.” The public thus comes into focus as a performed image.

After first characterizing the rally as “meaningless,” the man at the print shop revises his characterization, describing the communicative work of the gathering: the rally is “an advertisement of the size of your public.” He interprets the rally as a show, one that has been intentionally crafted by its organizers to produce a compelling “image” (“the size of the public will be the size of the image”) in order to “sell” something to its audiences (“no ad, no sale”). His characterization of the live-action rally-show gestures toward the event’s character as a performance—not merely a visual “image” but a multisensory, processual, rasa-infused “encounter.”19 Attending to the rally-show as a performance brings together insights from language-based approaches while also attending to the multisensory encounter that the rally-show affords. “Like written and spoken languages,” media anthropologists Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajmani 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.”20 Sensory encounters, in other words, are always already “socially framed” by memories that are at once both embodied and conceptual. Reading the crowd in this way thus raises key questions for both audiences and anthropologists: If sensory encounters in the street are the material infrastructures of “meaningful” political communication, then what is it that the rally-crowd might be said to mean, and to whom? Is the assembled crowd an actual public or its representation-image? Or both? If an assembled crowd is read as an indexical sign of a broader public, then who or what comprises the public that the rally-image would signify? How is the relationship between a public and its rally-representation construed by its audiences? Who are the rally-show’s audiences anyway—intended and otherwise—and what is the connection between embodied and imaged/imagined publics?

Linguistic anthropology teaches us that making sense of the relationship between signs and what they represent is a “socially contingent” practice of interpretation and speculation enacted by discerning participant-audiences.21 Susan Gal and Judith Irvine characterize this process of meaning-making as one of conjecture: “Participants conjecture—we could equally say they guess or hypothesize—by turning attention to potential signs. Existing knowledge suggests what could conceivably be a sign, as contrasted against its surround. Attention and contrast are presupposed in conjecturing something as a sign.”22 People make sense of the sudden appearance of a very large number of people in a Mumbai street on the final day of an election campaign by drawing on their personal and shared archives—embodied memories and genre repertoires23—to make conjectures: What are we looking at? Is this a show? If so, then what are we being shown, and by whom? While anything can be studied as a performance (by asking of it “performance questions”), in characterizing the election rally as natak, I am suggesting something different: not merely that the rally can be analyzed anthropologically as a performance, but that the rally-show explicitly signals to its audiences its theatrical character using collectively archived genre conventions (in Bombay-speak, the rally is “filmy”)—and that indeed the show is thus experienced and engaged by various audiences as theater.24

The accounts that follow train ethnographic attention on the creative work of assembling and performing the rally-show with which this chapter opened, as well as on the multisensory perceptions and intellections (yes, intellections) that “audiencehood” entails.25 The rally’s organizers are rather like film directors—not unlike Manmohan Desai in his direction of “Yeh Jo Public Hai”—borrowing freely from among a myriad of narrative “frames” and genre conventions.26 Indeed, the place of the final campaign rally within the broader sociomaterial and ideational contexts of the election season is like that of the song-and-dance sequence in Bombay cinema: as Kathryn Hansen writes (drawing on the work of Hindi film scholar Ravi Vasudevan), “the para-narrative of song and dance ‘inserts the film and the spectator into a larger field of coherence,’ one that comprises a complex series of intertextual references to practices that exist independently of the film.”27 Like a song-and-dance “para-narrative,” the final campaign rally is a spatially and temporally bound performance encounter that punctuates the longer-sighted temporal horizon of the campaign season, gesturing to the “larger field of coherence” similarly to how a song-and-dance number punctuates a film.28 The rally-show comprises a myriad of intertextual references that ostend to the drama (to recall Umberto Eco’s formulation from the introduction) the real-time material city: its streets and markets; its economies and livelihoods; its memories and imaginaries; its registers of language, comportment, and “charisma.”29

Taaqat: Strength on Display

I was well aware—even before the men at the print shop mentioned it—that many of the rally participants may well have been paid for their participation that day, having spent the previous weeks studying the careful negotiations and forging of relational ties that would be on full display during the final campaign rally. And yet as we saw in chapter 1, since campaigns tend to pay at fairly consistent (if gender-differentiated) rates, the size of a crowd is a sign not merely of ability to pay, but rather signals the size of the public’s “belief” (as Rakesh put it at the end of the previous chapter) in the extent and substance of a candidate’s established relations with various known and respected area leaders—NGOs, voluntary associations, businesspeople, and religious figures, for instance—people who can then recruit their friends, neighbors, and employees to join this rally rather than another. It is with these people that the campaign team forged and negotiated relations in the weeks and days before the final rally-show.

During the run-up to the 2017 polls, for instance, I followed closely the activities of a self-described social worker named Fareed. Fareed is founder-director of a small, rabble-rousing neighborhood NGO called Taaqat—an Urdu word that means something like capacity, ability, strength, power, energy.30 (Taaqat is not the actual name of Fareed’s NGO, but it is an apt one because the cultivation and display of taaqat is central to the organization’s work.) Taaqat’s mission, as Fareed described to me, is to create “awareness” about “civic issues” among the mostly Muslim residents of the chawls and tenement buildings among which the tiny Taaqat office is nestled.31 The weeks before the 2017 election, Fareed’s office was abuzz with businesspeople, community leaders, and social workers affiliated with all the major parties—from left-wing Socialists and Muslim identitarians to the regional Marathi chauvinist Shiv Sena party—the sometimes-ally, sometimes-adversary of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). When I asked his about his proximity to a party with an on-again, off-again flirtation with Hindutva and antimigrant regional-linguistic chauvinism, Fareed (who is himself an Hindi-speaking migrant from the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) shrugged simply: “That’s all just for show,” he said, using the somewhat disparaging/dismissive Hindi term dikhavat—which conveys a sense of self-aggrandizement or “showing off.”32 “It’s all acting,” he added, using the English word acting. I asked him to elaborate and he continued: “See, the Shiv Sena is practical. They do our work, so I support them.” I ask what he means by “they do our work,” and he responds with an example: Shiv Sena has set up an NGO in Mumbra, a Muslim-dominated area on the Mumbai periphery. “They’re my friends,” Fareed tells me, “the people running that NGO; they are all Muslims.” The NGO was actually set up by Shiv Sena people, he tells me, but the NGO has a different name, “in order not to alienate their non-Muslim vote base.” Fareed says of his friends running the NGO, “They are doing good work.”33 He tells me that, for this reason, the area’s (largely North Indian Muslim) voters might take the NGO’s advice and support a chauvinistic party candidate in the election. “This is election jadoo,” he says with a laugh—election magic. He tells me that earlier that day he had even gotten a call from a local BJP leader asking his support for a candidate contesting from a neighboring constituency, saying that “they need Muslim votes.” I ask: “What did you say?” “I didn’t reply.” Here in Badlapur, though, he explained, he had already decided to support Sayeed, the candidate upon which my research during the 2017 election had focused. Fareed tells me that he himself had been offered a party “ticket” to contest the election in a neighboring district, but had declined, preferring to pursue his work through the “medium” (madhyam) of Taaqat.

Fareed’s Taaqat-mediated work primarily involves compiling thick files of papers—documents acquired through official Right to Information (RTI) applications and punctuated with his own photography—of official failures to maintain and repair the built fabric of this low-income neighborhood. Armed with the paper-padded files, Fareed and his small team then organize regular “awareness campaigns”: door-to-door visits through the chawls and tenements, for instance, alerting residents to some particular issue, and then mobilizing the newly “aware” to put pressure on area political leaders to resolve the matter. Fareed explains:

Our goal is to create awareness about civic issues.34 If some road isn’t being repaired, [residents] should ask: Why isn’t it being built? If a gutter isn’t being cleared/cleaned, they should ask why isn’t it being cleaned? The corporator and MLA, the MP [Member of Parliament], they are doing good work! But they are so busy, in so many meetings, that many issues don’t reach them . . . [because] there are so many problems. Taaqat foundation has become a courier boy for the people [janata] regarding civic issues. We see many things and we take photographs, we note the names and numbers of buildings having civic issues. Then we correspond [correspondent kar ke] with the corporator and MLA and send our requests; we send the photos and addresses and make our humble entreaty with folded hands and say: “Sahib, please . . .” [Binti kar ke, haath jod ke: “Sahib . . .”].

Fareed characterizes his work at Taaqat as that of communication: a humble “courier boy” shuttling messages back and forth (correspondent kar ke) between elected officials and the people (janata) with Taaqat as the madhyam of that communication.

Courier Boy

Notably, Fareed characterizes the people among whom he seeks to raise awareness and mobilize around some issue not as a public—which would explicitly signal the theatrical register of his communicative work—but rather as janta: “courier boy ban gaya, janta ke lie.” Janta (also sometimes spelled and pronounced as “janata”—with three syllables) is a Hindi/Urdu/Marathi word derived from the Sanskrit jan, which means something like “person” or “living being.”35 Janta is a singular noun that casts a wide net, professing to describe a universal collective subject: “the people” or “all of mankind.” Commonly used across North India, janta found iconic all-India use following Narendra Modi’s announcement of a “Janta Curfew”—a nationwide lockdown announced on March 19, 2020, as part of an effort to halt the spread of Covid-19. Indeed, janta carries a sense of wholeness—“the people” or even “the nation” as a singular totality—which can lend the word a normative valence as those in whose name, in whose interest, and with whose authorization some leader professes to rule. Thus when the National Congress Party’s founding leader, Sharad Pawar, famously delivered a public speech in the pouring rain, the party posted the video of the drenched-to-the-skin octogenarian with the heroic caption: “The janta is soaking wet; Delhi [i.e., the central government] only freezes [i.e., remains still, stagnant].”36 “Janta” thus demands sympathetic attention to the position of that which is described as such.

While Fareed uses the normative term “janta” (rather than the overtly theatrical “public”), the context in which he makes this particular statement is richly suggestive of the dramaturgical frame within which his “courier boy” work is enacted. For starters, Fareed made these statements on camera, to a small-time paid-news operator who had come to Taaqat’s office (presumably on the “courier boy’s” invitation) in the wake of one such door-to-door “awareness” program. “What was the necessity of this program, taking your team door-to-door to highlight this issue?” the interviewer had asked, “especially when the elected officials in this area were already doing the work, why did you feel the need to take your team from house to house? Is this some sort of preparation for the election?” The interviewer’s final question is striking, as this exchange took place a full year prior to the 2017 civic polls. The question gestures toward the fraught interpretive work that attends the theatrical communicative register: Did the door-to-door campaign seek to hail people as a janta, or rather (as the interviewer’s question suggests) to perform Taaqat’s strength before an audience—a display enacted in the name of the janta? There is no clear answer that Fareed can provide to the question, of course, because in practice the distinction between everyday courier boy conveyances and the drama of prachaar (the Hindi word widely used in reference to election campaigning but which also refers to publicity and advertising; “You need to advertise, see, because ‘no ad, no sale’”)—collapses.

Gauging from the fawning attention paid to him by the various parties in the run-up to the February 2017 polls, Fareed did indeed seem to be something of an area kingmaker. Keen to understand the underpinnings and extent of Fareed’s influence, I took to hanging around Taaqat’s office, where—in bits and parts—I asked Fareed to tell me how and why he became active in politics. It all began with the 1992 riots, he began; he was just a kid—in the tenth grade maybe—but he had a “big group of friends” in the area. “We weren’t political.” He uses the English-origin word political (a term of problematization that is the subject of chapter 5). In fact, he and his friends found politics “dirty and corrupt,” and worse, “against Islam.” Fareed is from a devout Deobandi family, but in the aftermath of the 1992–93 riots, during which Fareed and his group of friends were active in relief work, he recalls that the “political people noticed” and approached him: “The [Congress Party] MLA came to my house with a letter, inviting me to his office to felicitate me. We were very honored to be approached.” Besides, he laughs, “we were teenagers, so we began to think maybe this is good thing because if we get into any trouble with the police then it’s good to have some political connections.” His uncle already had an affiliation with the Congress Party, as a journalist for the Congress-sympathetic Urdu daily Inquilab. Fareed recalls how he began to think that “maybe politics is not all bad like it is in films; I began to see that there are good people in politics too.” “Good people,” by Fareed’s reckoning, are those who use their networks and knowledge to help rather than harm.

Fareed rose quickly through the ranks, he tells me, within a few years assuming a position of leadership in the Congress Party’s youth wing. But he recalls growing increasingly disillusioned with the local party leadership, who struck him as more interested in doing the work of the area property developers than in helping local residents. “They’re all just brokers,” he told me with no little disdain, all “political dalals.”37 I ask him for a clarification: “What’s a political dalal?” He waves his hand dismissively: “Someone who gets clearances from the SRA [Slum Rehabilitation Authority] or from the BMC for redevelopment projects.38 Such people don’t advocate for the janta; they don’t ask questions like ‘Why is the area [of rooms in redevelopment buildings] so small?’ Because they are on the side of the builders.”

Fareed recalls that by the early 2010s he was constantly butting heads with party leaders, particularly in the context of a proposed cluster redevelopment project being promoted by the local MLA that proposed to flatten and rebuild a huge swath of his neighborhood—a working-class locality known as Kamathipura.39 Widely stigmatized as the historical center of the city’s storied red-light district, Kamathipura is home to both an extraordinarily diverse residential population (living in visibly precarious and officially “cessed” nineteenth-century tenement buildings) and a myriad of small-scale manufacturing workshops (suitcases, plastic mannequins, recycled jeans).40 Fareed recalled how he himself had sought to contest the 2012 Municipal Corporation elections but was refused the ticket because, as he put it, he’d developed a reputation for being “a rabble-rouser on behalf of Muslims,” and party higher-ups feared that he would “advocate too strongly” on the behalf of local residents. Fareed explains that he eventually left the party after a falling out with the party higher-ups: “Congress doesn’t let people move upwards in the party, particularly Muslims. The Congress Party’s support for Muslims is ‘all natak’; it’s all ‘manch pe’ [onstage].” He explains: “Muslims are divided in Bombay because our leaders aren’t strong enough to stand up to the party higher-ups. Everyone gets scared when the party people come around and say, ‘Don’t raise this or that issue because then we [Muslims] will be the target of communal backlash.’ Even the religious leaders say this! The religious people are the most corrupt. They’re paid off by the party higher-ups to say these things.” Fareed tells me he left the Congress Party because the sitting MLA was “a lobbyist” for the builders and didn’t want anyone “to get in the way” of proposed (and extremely lucrative) area redevelopment projects. It was after being denied the 2012 ticket that Fareed left the Congress Party and formed his NGO. “I’m beyond control of any party,” he adds with a laugh, and with no little pride. His commitment and involvement in “political things” haven’t changed since abjuring formal party membership, he explains; it’s just that now his work is done through the madhyam of his NGO. “There’s freedom this way,” he explains, “I scare [elected officials] into action by displaying my taaqat [apni taaqat dikha kar].”

Fareed’s NGO is at once the medium—madhyam—for pursuing his political goals and the media infrastructure through which he displays virtuosity in those pursuits. Taaqat is thus both site and stage for political action: the madhyam for “doing” as well as for “showing-doing” (to borrow theorist Richard Schechner’s phrase).41 In this context, Fareed’s self-characterization and promotional video of Taaqat as a humble “courier boy,” entreating political leaders with “folded hands,” is clearly tongue-in-cheek: a theatrical diminishment of his media-fueled self-image as the embodiment of nondeference and confrontational assertion. Fareed is (by his own measure) a “rabble-rouser” who does not shy away from the use of strong language—especially when speaking about the “corruption” of others. This disjuncture between Fareed’s performed “demeanor” as an assertive (even menacing) Lone Ranger type and his on-camera shift in register characterizing himself as a humble “courier boy” seems to come with a wink, perhaps eliciting a chuckle from an in-the-know public—a public thereby produced through its reflexive recognition of this shared and pleasurable appreciation of Fareed’s ironic hand-folding.42

Fareed has no qualms about the role that money plays in the forging and affirming of relations. Two days before the final rally in support of Sayeed’s campaign, the following exchange took place in Fareed’s little office: Fareed’s phone rings, and he looks at the screen. Fareed sighs, and before answering the call he shows his screen to the other person in the office, a man he affectionately (and playfully) calls Pappu, who is the proprietor of a well-known neighborhood eating establishment.43 Pappu looks at the screen and raises an eyebrow—presumably recognizing the name of the incoming caller. “Sayeed Bhai [Brother] should just manage him!,” Fareed says, suggesting that perhaps this isn’t the first time this particular caller has rung up. Fareed answers the phone, with a long, formal greeting. A few minutes go by, Fareed interjecting periodically “Yes . . . yes . . . yes. Yes . . . yes . . . yes.” The yes-ing goes on for a few minutes and I can’t quite make out the words on the other end of the line, but I can make out from the tone of voice that the caller is speaking emphatically and with no little frustration. Fareed hangs up, and I ask, “What was that about?” “It was a maulana,” Fareed tells me, “a teacher at a nearby Islamic school.” I probe: “What did he want?” “He wants to support Sayeed Bhai’s election campaign” (Fareed uses the word support). I ask, “So why was he calling to complain to you?” “He wasn’t calling to complain; he said he wants to offer his support.” I must have looked confused, because Fareed explains: “See, the maulana is poor. This is a poor neighborhood, no? He runs a madrasa, and for that reason he knows many people in this area. The maulana said that he wants to support Sayeed Bhai’s campaign. So he called to ask me, Why is Sayeed Bhai not supporting him?” I ask Fareed and Pappu’s opinion on the maulana’s request for “support” (which Fareed clarifies is of the cash variety), and they agree that “Sayeed Bhai should support him. And he will support him also.” I ask: “Was the maulana threatening to give his support elsewhere? To talk up some other candidate or to send his students to some other rally?” “No, nothing like that,” Fareed explains, waving his hand dismissively. Rather, the maulana asked Fareed to tell Sayeed that the maulana wants to offer his support to his campaign. But unless Sayeed supports the maulana as well—with a cash gift—then any advice the maulana might give to area constituents would fall on deaf ears. Why would anyone believe the maulana’s claim that the candidate would help them once he got elected—that he would “support” their school and students—if the candidate didn’t even bother to take notice of their “support” during the campaign? It seemed a good point. The money that the maulana requested of Sayeed was meaningful for its semiotic work—in displaying to area voters the strength of the maulana’s relations with the candidate.

Like the religious leaders that Fareed earlier castigated for receiving cash in exchange for saying and doing certain things in certain contexts, the maulana too was asking for cash support before throwing his full weight behind Sayeed’s candidacy—talking up the candidate and encouraging his students to attend the final rally. But while Fareed makes it clear that the schoolteacher should be compensated for his participation in the campaign prachaar (rally), in the case of the religious leaders mentioned earlier, the acting—saying and doing things manch pe—is characterized by Fareed as “corruption.” One kind of natak is celebrated (or at least enjoyed) as a good show, while the other is denounced as “corruption.” The difference between political theater and political deception lies in the extent to which the natak explicitly signals itself as such: where the audience of the drama (like the print shop men described at the outset of the chapter) is shown the stage (manch). Indeed, in their enjoyment of the show—standing on the side of the road—the men at the print shop became part of the crowd; the atmosphere of the natak enlists them not merely as audience but also as participants in the drama, while their participation helps in producing the very spectacle whose unfolding they had stepped out to watch.

This matter of participant-audience recalls our earlier discussion, drawing on Warner, of how “publics” come into being through reflexive attention to the circulation of their own discourse: in the film song “Yeh Jo Public Hai” the image of the onscreen “public” whose heart is filled (or broken) by the abhi/neta reflects back to the film-watching audience its own image as a public, conjured by collective attention to the film and shared love of film stars. In a similar way, the election rally-show reflects back to the assembled crowd-audience its own image as a public, assembled by mutual attention to the collective taaqat: a performed image of the scale and strength of the social relations and collective investments in the parade of personalities (business families and teachers; community leaders and candidates) now circulating through the very city streets and spaces both produced and inhabited by that taaqat.

Mahol

In the days following Sayeed’s successful 2017 bid for office, I spoke with his “personal assistant,” a young man named Wasim, who played a key role in both of Sayeed’s successful bids for municipal office, in 2012 and 2017. Wasim lives in Sayeed’s incumbent constituency in the eastern suburb of Gowandi—a dense, low-rise neighborhood generally referred to as a “slum.” Wasim explained to me the ultimate goal of the three-week campaign season was to “mahol create karna”—to create mahol.

The Hindi/Urdu word mahol (sometimes transliterated as mahaul) is generally glossed in English as “atmosphere,” “ambiance,” or “environment”—in senses both material and social. Mahol is an Arabic word, etymologically related to mahal (place or palace) and mohalla (neighborhood, or “what is around and about”) via the Arabic root ahl, meaning “resident” or “denizen.”44 Mahol describes an ambient feeling, both moral and material, whose origins are intangible, almost like weather. Anthropologist Timothy Cooper, reflecting on the meanings of mahol in Lahore, reflects that mahol describes “a sense of immersion” born of the work of navigating the “moral and social qualities of a particular setting.” His research in Lahore found two interrelated uses of mahol:

First, [mahaul] referred to a terrain that possesses the ability to act upon the world. The tactile earthiness of the term is somewhat reminiscent of the concept of terroir in environmental discourses: the habitat, contributing factors, and unique sense of place that can come to be embodied in a crop yield and shape the product from which it is made. . . . Second . . . mahaul describes what might be called a moral atmosphere. Unlike other possible synonyms—context or character, for example—mahaul is an avowedly social formation, referring closely to the cultural dynamics of value stratification, which describes the ways in which tone or mood are shaped by the principles of right and wrong.45

Mahol thus shares some conceptual overlap with philosopher Gernot Böhme’s notion of atmosphere. “What affects human beings in their environment are not only just natural factors,” Böhme points out, “but also aesthetic ones. . . . What mediates objective factors of the environment with aesthetic feelings of a human being is what we call atmosphere. The atmosphere of a certain environment is responsible for the way we feel about ourselves in that environment.”46 In his ethnographic account of Shia Moharram processions in Mumbai, anthropologist Patrick Eisenlohr draws on Böhme’s atmosphere formulation in characterizing the “feel” of Shia Mumbai during Moharram as “spatially extended emotion.”47 Cooper’s and Eisenlohr’s accounts of mahol echo my own sense of the word’s valences in Mumbai, where mahol seems to describe an intangible sense or feel of some space or place. For instance, I was once told by residents of a particular neighborhood that (for reasons that were never quite clear to me) I should avoid going over to the neighborhood’s far side: “Don’t go over there; the mahol isn’t good.” On another occasion, when a leisurely Mumbai evening chatting with friends grew late, someone observed with a satisfied sleepy smile that “mahol ban gaya” (the atmosphere has been made) which conveyed the sense that the mood of evening felt perfect and complete. Mahol, in other words, seems to describe an ambient effect of myriad factors—moral and material—rather than something actively curated or created.48 In this context, Wasim’s reflection that the goal of the three-week campaign season is to “create mahol” caught my attention because it seems to suggest a dramaturgical sense of intentional stage-setting. “Whoever creates the most mahol,” Wasim explained, “that person wins.”

In Wasim’s rendering, a campaign seeks to convince area voters by means of a multisensory and polyvalent neighborhood feel. Wasim explains: “Everyone’s talking and talking, and we want them to talk about Sayeed Bhai. Even kids are important. They don’t vote, of course, but you see them wearing hats and waving flags—people see this; it means we are winning!” Wasim recalled how during Sayeed’s previous election campaign in Gowandi he “handed out packets of biscuits to kids so they would run around during the days before the election yelling Sayeed Bhai’s name. They’d run up and down the lanes just yelling and yelling.”

Wasim explained that this competition for aesthetic saturation and semiotic dominance works differently in South Bombay, where people live in “buildings.” “Creating mahol is more complicated here because we need contacts with people inside buildings.” Indeed (and as the next chapter explores), during the weeks before the election, Sayeed’s campaign team found and forged contacts inside each and every building and commercial establishment in the constituency—contacts with “main people” whose established relations enabled them to assemble crowds for chowk sabhaas (street-corner meetings), gatherings in courtyards of residential complexes, or on building rooftops and in basements—people who then (after these meetings) lead the candidate through buildings, knocking on doors and introducing him to friends and neighbors. In the run-up to election day, Wasim explained, this kind of campaigning becomes very personal, especially among the youth of the neighborhood. “Izzat ki bat hai,” he explained—“It’s a matter of izzat [honor], because if you’ve been campaigning for someone, you must make sure he wins or else you lose izzat.” For this reason, Wasim explained, “main people” [jo main hai—those who are main] will start spending money from their own pockets—especially when it comes to the final rally. “They’ve been talking about this candidate for weeks so now they need to make sure he looks good! People start running around and expending their own energy and money—to create hawa—or wind.”49

The primacy of the dramaturgical, scene-setting work of election-season monetary expenditure was particularly poignant during the 2017 campaign season, which came on the heels of India’s notebandi (demonetization) initiative. In an atmosphere rife with rumors of notebandi-related cash constriction (and of remonetization-related corruption)—an environment in which no one was quite certain how much cash anyone else might actually have on hand or be able to marshal—the question of whether and how this or that candidate was cash-flush was both a topic of popular speculation and a staple of campaign speeches. Candidates across the ideological spectrum accused India’s ruling party of self-interest in the timing and manner of demonetization, while city journalists eagerly reported on rumors of collusion. “How come the BJP is flush with money in times of notebandi?,” one English-language daily quoted the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) party leader Raj Thackeray, translating from the Marathi-language public speech in which Thackeray accused BJP leaders of flooding candidates’ campaign coffers with cash; “What is the source of this money?” It is of course impossible to verify these sorts of implied accusations, and this is hardly the point. What is more interesting is how, under cash constraints of demonetization (whether rumored or real), certain things were interpreted as “signs” of access to cash: “Signs of the city BJP’s munificence can be seen everywhere,” grumbled a Shiv Sena party worker, citing big-ticket items like oversized billboards and resplendent newspaper ads.50 The BJP campaign office in one constituency went so far as to employ crowds of party-insignia-bedecked women to mill about in front of the party office for the entire duration of the campaign period—veritable walking-talking rupee notes.51 Yet notwithstanding the widespread equating of the BJP’s oversized ads and other forms of high-profile spending with the machinations of notebandi-related malfeasance, Shiv Sena’s own leadership did not distance itself from such ostentatious displays of expenditure but sought instead to keep pace.52 On one particular day, for instance, each and every one of Mumbai’s Hindi, English, and Marathi major dailies arrived with a glossy Shiv Sena pamphlet titled “Mee Mumbaikar” (I am a Mumbaikar) tucked into the pages. If ostentatious ads and hired hands indexed access to cash, then all the city’s major parties eagerly sought to perform their virtuosity in this signifying practice. Indeed, in the context of demonetization, candidates from all the city’s major parties seemed especially eager to demonstrate that their own networks had enabled them to offset any such cash-constricting effects.

Yet cash itself was undeniably in short supply, even for some major-party candidates. Sayeed’s campaign manager explained to me that due to cash shortage there were some campaign expenditures that had been significantly pared down in comparison with his 2012 electoral bid: TV promotions, for instance, had been completely cut, as had billboards, which are expensive both to produce and (even more so) to secure permission to display. Official “permissions” eat a good chunk of campaign budgets, he explained, but some amount of expenditure on permissions was unavoidable: official and unofficial permissions for public meetings and “stage shows” (the subject of the next chapter), for example, and perhaps most crucially for the final rally.

In this cash-strapped context, Sayeed’s campaign enlisted other semiotic vehicles—in place of cash—employing creative practices to perform cash-like spectacles, signaling access to the important relations and resources (political, social, material) about which voters were keen to know. To marshal the flag-bearers and marchers, for instance, agreements were forged with area traders and manufacturers to “borrow” groups of laborers for the final rally—a loan that would be repaid not with future repayment in cash but rather with some more-or-less-specified future advocacy of “help”: a contact with the municipal corporation in the event of some infrastructural breakdown, for instance, or a problem with industrial or commercial license renewal—a regular and pressing worry in the legal-institutional vagary that characterizes so much of Mumbai’s productive and commercial economy.

One group of flag-bearers with whom I spoke in the morning of Sayeed’s final rally—while they dressed up in hats and scarves—was composed of around twenty-five teenage boys from the North Indian state of Bihar. I asked them whether they would be paid for their work today. “Maybe our boss gets paid because we’re not working for him today,” one boy surmises, adding: “The candidate has bought our time.” He explains that they work for a monthly wage, including room and board. The rally was on a Sunday, and they generally work a half day on Sundays, ending at 2 p.m. So they would work a little overtime today because the rally would wind up around 5 p.m. But they were happy to “play their role,” they explained to me—not only because it was a beautiful breezy Sunday and they were happy to be outdoors rather than in the tiny workshop, and not only because after the rally they would have a proper biryani feast, but because their livelihoods depend on the success of the factory. Their boss’s business is their business. “Our boss is from our village,” one boy explains. Like them, the owner of the factory where they work is from Bihar—he came to Bombay years ago and found a job manufacturing motorbike parts in a workshop nearby. Then, ten years ago, having learned how to do business in Bombay, he took a small space on rent and started a little factory of his own, manufacturing bags. Then he started recruiting boys from the village to come to Bombay, to live and work in the factory space. These boys have been here a few years, they tell me. “It’s not bad; our boss is nice,” one boy says. And while they don’t make much, because room and board is included they are able to send nearly everything they earn back home. These boys of course wouldn’t be voting in the upcoming Mumbai election (either because they’re Bihar residents or because they’re underage, or both), so clearly this payment is not a cash-for-vote sort of arrangement. And in any case, their labor that day—the labor of rally-going—was being paid for not by the candidate but by their boss, the Bihari bag manufacturer.

I approach a young man who has brought a group of around forty people. He introduces himself as Arvind and explains that he organizes a “friends group” in the nearby “slum area” where they live. I ask him what their group does. He tells me that they intervene to help when there are problems—water problems, drainage problems, things like that. Arvind grew up in the slum, he tells me, but since he’s educated, people approach him for help. He works as a cashier at a local hospital, he tells me, so he’s able to help out sometimes; if people need medical help and no beds are available, sometimes he’s able to “help.” He and his school friends formed this “friends group,” he explains, because being a group makes it easier to get the attention of the corporator or the municipal officers when some work needs to be done. “You’re the main?” I ask, trying out Wasim’s term to see if it resonates; he smiles, “Yes, I’m main.” In other words (and this is the key point), even though—and indeed precisely because—people like the bag laborers or Arvind’s forty friends are somewhat like extras on a film set, this doesn’t mean that the rally-show is perceived, either by participants or audience, as natak in the sense of “fake,” “inauthentic,” or a “trick.” This is because the rally-crowd is not some anonymous mass of interchangeable bodies (a “rent-a-crowd”); rather, it is spectacular ostentatious enactment of dense relational networks, mediated by help, friendship, and livelihood, by kinship networks and future business prospects and collective socioeconomic security—akin to what anthropologist Tarini Bedi’s Gujarati-speaking Mumbai taxi drivers call jaalu: an expansive web of shared relations.53 The “street theatre of the ‘procession’”54 is a public display of the wide and intricate jaalu, rendering sensible (not merely visible) the relational web that is the infrastructure of everyday Mumbai life: small-scale workshop owners and their recognizable, fresh-faced young workers; dependable “mains” like Arvind and his forty friends; trusted teachers and their students; brokers and deal makers and “big men” of all kinds.55 Recall from chapter 1 Mastanbhai’s initial social worker meeting, the bulk of which was spent garlanding the various mains—whose public pronouncement of alliance with Seema’s campaign was thereby performed and acknowledged in a two-way reciprocal bid at promise-making: for the main, openly announcing support for a candidate by assembling one’s public for the rally-show seeks to demonstrate to the candidate the reach and strength of the main’s relational networks; for the campaign, publicly acknowledging a main’s alliance with the candidate seeks to vitiate against a main’s defection (tricky business in a context where “everybody flips”). The rally-show is a real-time, rasa-coated display of this dense, sticky web of emplaced relations and reciprocity.56

Flower Power

The final rally was a celebratory maelstrom—a palpable thickening of the air in Badlapur’s narrow lanes with the “choke”57 and thunder of firecrackers and motorbikes, the forward press of bodies, the torrents of pink-and-white petals, the sweet-acerbic hawa of smoke and sweat, exhaust fumes, and marigold pollen. Amid the sensory assault of Sayeed’s 2017 final campaign rally, I was particularly struck by the flowers—not only by the glut of garlands, but also (and especially) by the scattering of small boys armed with plastic bags who drenched the candidate’s entourage with blossoms as the chariot made its way through particular sections of the neighborhood.

In her discussion of flowers and garlanding in public processions (religious, matrimonial, political) in South Asia, historian Joanne Waghorne argues that the significance of garlanding and raining flowers on a political figure (in her case, a Tamil king) lies in the “power of imagery” equating a garlanded figure with the divine. Waghorne quotes an old Tamil folk song:

Tondaiman! Tondaiman!

king of our country

He is coming and looking toward us!

covered with a sacred umbrella,

He comes seated in a vehicle fit for a god!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It is visible now

the garland on his shoulders!

On his hand, sandal paste and a ring

have come into view.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Festooned with pearl garlands,

accompanied by an army on the best horses,

He is coming in that direction,

going now toward the palace!58

Reflecting on the historical enlisting of religious imagery in political procession, Waghorne notes how, in the poem, “the ring on the raja’s hand is a royal sign but garlands and sandal paste are the proper ornamentation of Gods.” The effect of this poetic convention—of portraying gods and kings in “identical language”—is that “the hearer cannot distinguish whether a poem describes a king coming toward his palace or a God going in procession back into his temple”; similar ubiquity of garlanding can be observed during Hindu wedding processions, Waghorne notes, when “the bride and the groom are honored as deities.”59 Historian Raminder Kaur traces how, in Bombay, beginning in the 1920s, public processions in celebration of religious festivals (particularly the Hindu festival of Ganapati Utsava and the Shia celebration of Moharram) began to provide “an effective grammar for a broader base of political campaigns . . . [with] ritualistic features of iconic displays, bhajan songs, garlands, incense and celebratory processions [making] their mark on political campaigns.”60 Kaur shows how “the visual, performative, and mediated sites of vernacular culture . . . co-constituted political programmes” in a way that deepened political participation by the urban poor and laboring classes.61 The ubiquity of flower garlands and petal showers, in other words, is part of a broadly shared festive grammar of public processions in Mumbai. Even while iconically invoking ritual authority, flower garlanding and showering in the context of the procession appears less as “political deification” in any particular religious tradition than as the creation of mahol and production of hawa that seeks to draw a proximate public into the atmospheric ambit of a procession.62

Some weeks after the final rally, I asked Wasim (Sayeed’s personal assistant) to tell me about how the campaign team had managed to arrange and orchestrate that flood of flowers. He smiled broadly, proudly:

Ah, that was an all-day work! That was our biggest work on the day of the rally. Sayeed Bhai had us go to Dadar flower market at 5 a.m. and we bought an entire truckload of flowers, then we had twenty workers for six hours who sat on the roadside dividing up the flowers. Then we put them into a hundred carry bags and took them to our main person inside each building. Four people had to go to [the wholesale flower market in] Dadar to get them! Then we had a hundred garlands made as well—we gave one to each building main to garland Sayeed Bhai. The flowers, they had to happen the day of the rally itself. Because they’re time sensitive; you can’t buy them the day before!

Wasim explained that, by virtue of the time sensitivity of flowers, such an outpouring creates an atmosphere of spontaneity—the flood of flowers feels spontaneous. Here we have an apparent paradox: an elaborate, obviously premeditated coordination effort creates mahol of spontaneity and authentic outpouring of love and devotion, even while the flower petals and garlands themselves were obviously and explicitly prearranged. (Indeed, no effort appears to have been made to disguise the fact that the flowers—which were of uniform size and color—were orchestrated by the campaign team itself.) To make sense of this seeming paradox, it is helpful to recall the print shop man’s reflection that the rally “is like an advertisement.” William Mazzarella points out how, when it comes to advertising, it is not necessary “to believe in it as long as I believe that someone else believes in it. As such, and like magic, advertising works by itself; it doesn’t require anyone to believe in it directly. Indeed, the condition of its efficacy is my self-determining and autonomous skepticism toward its claims. My supposedly immunizing critical skepticism allows me to resonate in good conscience.”63 Like an advertisement, the rally works on both these levels simultaneously: it explicitly signals its own theatrical character (allowing for a “disavowal of direct belief”),64 thereby allowing for an unspoken understanding that this is natak (unspoken except to an anthropologist presumed to be illiterate in such genre conventions). And at the same time, the theatrical register affords the suspension of disbelief that allows the participant-audience to resonate with the pleasure of the rally-show.

The more orchestrated and staged the rally mahol feels, the more compellingly it demonstrates the orchestrators’ skills in putting on a good show, as well as their access to resources and networks necessary to pull it off. The persuasiveness of a well-executed show is born of the ever-present dangers of a flop: the cavalcade of flag-bearers and motorcyclists might not turn up; the various mains might ultimately (and unpredictably) decide that they do not want to be seen by their neighbors and friends garlanding (and thereby publicly announcing support) with some particular candidate. Since garlanding two different candidates would reflect badly on the garlander’s own trustworthiness (notwithstanding the fact, as we saw in the previous chapter, that everyone knows that “everybody flips”), the final rally is a proclamation by persons of influence of their confidence in one rather than another candidate. The decision of a main to participate in one rather than another final rally is a high-stakes speculation and gamble: publicly announcing a decision to support a candidate works to increase the “size of the public” and thereby “the size of the image”—increasing the hawa of the chosen candidate.

“How Big It Is”

While chatting with a young woman watching the parades from the side of the road out in front of her Badlapur home, I ask her: “Have you decided yet whom you’ll vote for?” She shakes her head: “No, not yet. I don’t know yet.” I ask, “Did you hear any of the campaign speeches?” “No, no,” she says. “I stay at home; we ladies stay at home.” She explains that she’s just stepped out of the house this Sunday afternoon for the rallies in the hope that it may help her decide how to vote. I ask: “But what are you looking for when you watch a rally?” “How big it is,” she responds. “That’s how we know people are convinced by some candidate. If the public is with him, if there is taaqat in the rally, that means he must have done some good work—that the public is convinced by his work. We vote for the person who has convinced people that he does good work. The rally shows this.”

The rally’s size and taaqat is a manifestation of public conviction—where what is on display is not (only) the physically present, theatrical crowd of flag-bearers and flower throwers, but rather the broader web of reciprocal relations made materially manifest in the event of the rally-show. And insofar as the woman herself becomes part of the crowd that is at the same time convincing her, she is—in part—convincing herself.65 Indeed, insofar as a rally’s audience becomes part of the crowd by which it seeks to be “convinced,” the success (bigness) of a rally is an effect not merely of numbers but of taaqat and hawa—energy and wind—that “convinces” busy Mumbaikars to remain standing on the side of the road and thereby become part of the rally-show. Which is to say: the conviction of which the woman speaks is simultaneously informational and “experiential.”66

The woman’s account of how she assesses the rally (“how big it is”) raises comparative questions of the puzzlingly overstated claims to “bigness” that have come to characterize crowd politics in other parts of the world. U.S. president Donald Trump, for instance, has famously overstated the size of his crowds; after a 2018 rally in Houston, Trump tweeted:

The crowds at my Rallies are far bigger than they have ever been before, including the 2016 election. Never an empty seat in these large venues, many thousands of people watching screens outside. Enthusiasm & Spirit is through the roof. SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING—WATCH!67

While Trump claimed to have assembled a fifty-thousand-strong crowd, the Washington Post reported that local police put the number of those gathered closer to three thousand.68 In the American context, such bloated claims have sought to be countered by fact-checking media watchdogs. And what is clear from the American context is that notwithstanding the blatancy (even “absurdity”) of Trump’s wildly overstated crowd estimates, such revelations do little to destabilize his image in the eyes of his followers.69 What might our Mumbai rally-show have to say about this sort of thing? If “the size of the public will be the size of the image,” then perhaps we need to ask about the public whose image is being signaled: perhaps the public on display at Trump’s rally is not simply the crowd of materially present, assembled bodies but rather the broader network of sociomaterial relations, energy, capacity, and taaqat that is being “advertised” by means of the rally-show. Indeed, Trump’s tweets about the bigness of his crowd appear more as arousing “solicitations to participation” than descriptions of physical scope or scale of any discrete happening.70

This discussion of natak began with a discussion of the concept of public—with the Habermasian notion of the “public sphere” as a communicative space characterized by the “use of language oriented towards reaching understanding.” Following our flower-soaked procession as it winds its way through the Mumbai streets, however, leads us away from discourse and toward the image—what Guy Debord famously derided as “mere representation” and the opposite of language-mediated thought (critical or otherwise).71 And yet the rally-show neither leads to Debord’s dystopic “spectacle” society nor beats a hasty retreat to Habermas. People like the print shop men come out on the streets to watch and enjoy and interpret the show, but they do so not by reading “meaning” (matlab) merely from the size of the crowd, but rather by drawing on archived knowledge and embodied memories that yield multiple possible experiences and understandings of the display. The people I spoke to had wildly different readings of the “size of the public” signified by Sayeed’s rally: one man told me that the Samajwadi Party rally was “clearly the biggest,” while his friend disagreed: Congress’s crowd was bigger, but it “had no taaqat.” The “size” in question was not quantifiable but rather inhered in the strength, force, intensity, and feeling of the “public” that the embodied crowd images. The distinction between intellection and sensory embodiment collapses.

Audiences

After the election, I met Wasim again in his home in Gowandi to ask more about the boys throwing flowers, which I couldn’t get out of mind: Who were those boys throwing flowers? There are always flowers during a rally, of course, but I’d never seen anything quite like what I’d experienced when the rally moved through the butcher’s market and boys scampered over awnings and through buildings, drenching the candidate with well-aimed volleys of flowers. Wasim laughed: “See, each area had a responsible person from our campaign team. Everyone wants to make the most dramatic impression on Sayeed Bhai, so that when he passes through some area he gets doused in flowers. Then the candidate will think, ‘Wow, my man really did good work here!’” Wasim tells me that the butcher’s market was the area for which he himself was personally responsible; the boys with the bags were from his own neighborhood in Gowandi. He’d hired them himself that day to run around in the buildings and throw flowers and set off firecrackers: “mahol create karne ke liey”—to create mahol. For Wasim, in other words, the audience of the natak was the candidate himself.72

Wasim’s words demonstrate the sense of possibility that inheres in the dramaturgical space of political life, where the occasion of the rally-show presents a ready-made stage for ambitious local leaders (mains) to produce and shore up their own relations of reciprocity—both with their “publics” and with the candidate (and party).73 They use the rally-show as a stage on which to advertise themselves—to demonstrate to Sayeed their own capacity and taaqat, just as Sayeed is performing his ability to get things done by displaying those same relational networks. Electoral campaigns are moments of possibility and semiotic contingency, providing opportunities for the kind of social and political efficacy (and mobility) whose absence prompted the frustrated Fareed to seek an alternative medium and platform in his NGO.74 The existence of the myriad of audiences means as well a myriad of potentially conflicting messages sought to be communicated. And deciphering this multiplicity is a key dimension of what people are looking for in a rally-show: What relations of material and symbolic authority are being “advertised” in the rally? What material evidence (signs) is on display, linking the assembled crowd to those relational networks and authorities?

The rally-show, to use Schechner’s terms, is both “make-believe” (a performance that overtly signals its own pretense using shared conventions) and “make-belief” (a performance that seeks to “convince” by conjuring into being that which it enacts).75 On the one hand, the rally signals its own pretense through “conventions”: elaborately orchestrated flowers; hordes of hired flag-bearers; a steady stream of garland-wielding known personalities. And at the same time, the rally is a real-time performative enactment of the strength of the reciprocal relationships and networks necessary to pull off a good show. Indeed make-believe and make-belief work together. On the one hand, it is precisely in its explicit forswearing of believability that theater gives its audience permission to indulge in the collective, rasa-soaked enjoyment that might create conviction. And at the same time that it signals its make-believe character, the enactment of the rally-show is fraught with contingencies: the actors could fail to perform as part of the team; they could “flip” and sabotage; the garlanders might choose to participate, or not; the flag-bearers might show up, or not. On the morning of the rally, while the Bihari boys got dressed up, an anxious Sayeed phoned Wasim continuously to ask how many people had turned up; once the rally was underway, Wasim expressed his relief that “the public has come.” Thus, while the rally overtly signals its make-believe character, the orchestration of a good show is a compelling sign of the resources and relational networks comprising actual authority. In this way, make-believe produces real belief.

Matlab

While it is common knowledge in Mumbai that the meaning of an election rally inheres in its character as natak, open acknowledgment of this is rare. On the one hand, such open declaration would be absurd (imagine a theatergoer jumping to his feet, pointing toward the stage, and proclaiming: “That man is not really Henry V. . . . He’s only an actor!”). The theatricality of the political rally is something so widely known and recognized that it goes unspoken, requiring no explicit marking. The permission to disavow literal belief afforded by the theatrical genre is precisely what lends the rally-show its affective force, persuasiveness, enjoyability and appreciation of its necessity: “You have to advertise!” Watching the rally-show as if those really were flag-bearers, and as if we really are a spontaneous outpouring of love and support—the assembled crowd is swept up by the natak, participating in the drama by playing “audience.” The final rally is a temporally and geographically bounded communicative encounter—one that speaks the language of dramaturgy. And yet we see how, even in this spatially and temporally bounded and socially framed performance, the boundaries of the “stage” are porous, constantly shifting, subject to slippage and speculation. Who is acting? Who is playing “audience,” and who might be the actual audience or audiences—intended and otherwise? Any clear boundary separating onstage and offstage dissolves, subject to moralizing evaluations by a myriad of potential and actual audiences. As the men at the print shop demonstrate—standing on the side of the road, watching and commenting on the rally’s size and taaqat, they too are part of the drama, performing their role as audience; they step out of character only briefly, in order to ensure that the foreign-seeming anthropologist understands that “this is only natak,” lest he misunderstand the context and read a literal meaning (matlab) in this performance.

The print shop men’s cautioning against looking for matlab in the rally recalls Andy Rotman’s discussion of North Indian jute-bag vendors who insist that if the anthropologist thinks that he “grasps the meaning” of the text and images printed on a bag, then he has simply missed the point of the graphics. For instance, when Rotman asks a bag vendor about the “matlab” of an image printed on a jute bag (an image depicting an airplane crashing into buildings that resemble the World Trade Center), he is told in no uncertain terms that “It doesn’t have any meaning.” If Rotman read any meaning into the image printed on the bag, he was told, “then you didn’t understand it.” To make sense of this paradoxical situation, Rotman considers Anthony Forge’s account of Abelam painters in Lowland New Guinea, who do not distinguish between “figurative and abstract elements” in their art. Even if a figure in a painting resembles something that exists in the world, the painters deny any referential meaning; Abelam painting is a “closed system . . . having no immediate reference outside itself.” And yet, as Rotman notes, reflecting on his jute-bag vendors, this doesn’t mean that the graphics printed on the bags were “meaningless” to their Indian audiences: “The words and images that they contain were recognizable . . . and they did constitute a system of meaning.” As Rotman explains, the graphics were not “texts to be read or images to be decoded; they were icons that testified to a highly affective awareness.”76 In the case of the jute bag depicting the airplane and World Trade Center, they were icons that testified to an awareness of that which is “foreign” and “exotic.” Similarly, our rally-show image testifies to affective awareness of the bigness and taaqat—of the social relations and networks of authority on display. Indeed, once my print shop men realized I had understood the event’s character as spectacular show, they quickly went back to enjoying the performance, revising their response to my question about the rally’s matlab: “It’s like an advertisement.”