Believe

“Full Physical Arena”

Linguistic anthropologists have long noted the inadequacy of the “classic linguistic model of the communicative act: the isolated sentence tossed (like a football) by an anonymous speaker, whose qualifications for play are specified only as ‘competence,’ to an even more anonymous Hearer who supposedly catches it.”5 As anthropologist Webb Keane notes, “speakers are not unified entities, and their words are not transparent expressions of subjective experience.”6 There is a wide range of “participant roles” that speakers can take up with their words,7 and within any single utterance there can exist multiple “voices” speaking in a variety of “registers”8—a multivocality that Mikhail Bakhtin terms “heteroglossia.”9 Communicative encounters, moreover, are never merely one-directional exchanges between speakers and hearers, but invariably involve another set of heterogeneous “participants” that anthropologist Judith Irvine calls “relevant others”: overhearers, neighbors, passersby, implied or hoped-for audiences. In this context, making sense of the “roles” played by these sorts of unofficial, non-“ratified” participants in speech encounters means attending to what Goffman refers to as the broader “social situation” within which any utterance occurs—“the full physical arena in which persons present are in sight and sound of one another.”10

Reflecting on the difference between the then-recent election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016, for instance, a party worker affiliated with Sayeed’s campaign (someone who was not a fan of the Trump presidency) recalled for me what a senior copartisan had recently said in a karyakarta meeting:

With all the slum redevelopment, how will we do our politics? Campaigning is possible in Mumbai because everyone comes out in the streets. As long as there are slums, people are vigilant/awake/alert [jaagta] and there will be politics. But with all the redevelopment, [I fear that] politics in Mumbai will become like in America.

The ability to make sense of the deluge of campaign communications, in other words, depends on attunement to the sensory affordances of everyday street life; so long as “everyone comes out in the streets,” the public cannot escape awareness, even if it wanted to. The transformation of the built fabric of the city in a way that precludes sensory encounters of “the streets” (his construal of what it is like “in America”) is thus feared to lead to public ignorance by rendering the public imperceptive—unable to decipher the meaning of campaign communications and thus ill-equipped for “politics.” Attending to the staging and emplacement of language-mediated, embodied encounters, this chapter demonstrates how the material fabric of the city is also its communicative infrastructure—a built fabric thick with signs whose meanings are rich with interpretive possibility and peril, open to interpretation as well as semiotic slippage as people work out whom and what to “believe.”

Understanding language-mediated encounters, in other words, requires attending not just to the literal meaning of words (their “denotational” content) but also to their physical form (what Peircean semiotics calls the “sign vehicle”) and to the material infrastructures of their conveyance, what Goffman calls the “full physical arena” of language-mediated encounter.11 Indeed, as anthropologists influenced by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce have pointed out, words are merely one kind of sign and always exist in and among a myriad of other signs in relation to which they take on meaning. Anything can be a sign—a cash note, a dry tap, a flower garland, a sea of empty plastic chairs—if it is interpreted as one.12 And words—whatever their material form—always co-occur with a myriad of these other sensorily perceptible signs, working together to articulate “semiotic registers”: clusters of signs that band together to signify and perform a “category of perceivable personhood.”13 Considering the “full physical arena” therefore requires considering also the role of non-proximate audiences, who may be nonetheless sensorily present through material and technological mediations comprising a broader communicative infrastructure.

In this context—and as Rakesh’s words (“that looks bad”) suggest—making sense of Mastanbhai’s ill-fated sabhaa requires attending to the full communicative landscape within which the “episode of talk”14 was to take place. The fact that the sabhaa was (rather abruptly) canceled before the speaking part of the event could even transpire demonstrates how the referential meanings and denotational content of words are merely one aspect—and not necessarily the most important one—of the episode. However interesting or compelling Mastanbhai’s words might have been (had they actually been spoken), to utter them before either empty chairs or a theatrical crowd would have “looked bad.” Rakesh’s comment thus prompts us to consider, Who is doing this evaluative “looking”?

As the previous chapter demonstrated, the size and strength of publics are subject to critical evaluation and interest by any number of audiences (known and unknown): a bony crowd could signal weak social networks (or lack of oratory skills) of the onstage speakers; a flop show could make a meeting’s organizers “look bad” in the eyes of the party higher-ups—demonstrating to party leaders the poor reputation or organizational “capacity” of area party workers, even perhaps suggesting the strength of rival party workers to “hijack” a show.15 Meanwhile, the omnipresent news media brings into the “physical arena” any number of potential evaluators—publics that may not have been known (or even to have existed) at the time of some event’s planning. This chapter attends to the cacophony of language-mediated encounters over the weeks that preceded (and culminated in) the final campaign rally-show of the previous chapter: the door-to-door campaigns and late-night “mouse meetings”; the formation of WhatsApp groups; the circulation of digital videos and multilingual paper pamphlets; the intimate talk at chowk sabhaas (street-corner meetings) and open oratory at “stage shows.”

The accounts that follow demonstrate how people go about making sense of words by attending to their material infrastructures and sociospatial contexts of conveyance and to the social relations that the “full physical arena” of the communicative encounter indexes. We meet the people who enable (and/or block) access to the spaces, places, and technologies (private homes, building rooftops, welfare society meeting halls, WhatsApp groups) where language encounters transpire—work that is necessary precisely because actual audiences invariably outstrip curatorial efforts. What’s more (as Irvine points out, making a Bakhtinian point), the meaning of any particular utterance is bound up with a myriad of “implicit links to many dialogues, not only the present one, which together inform its significance, influence its form, and contribute to its performative force.”16 With episodes of talk unconstrained by any imperative of copresence, the ethnographic question concerns the relationship between any particular snippet of speech (a text message, a paper pamphlet, a public oration, a cash note) and the broader semiotic landscape within which some communicative act occurs. Any particular episode of talk is always already bound up with a myriad of other utterances and contexts, and therefore participants in any conversation (speakers, hearers, and relevant others) are always necessarily engaged in the fraught and necessary work of “creative contextualization”17—speculating on who might be playing what “role,” assessing the relations of power and authority entailed in a speech situation, and trying to work out what some language-mediated encounter might herald:18 is this “a public performance or a private conversation?” Among those within earshot, who is explicitly or implicitly “drawn into the circle of participation as audience,” and who is “excluded”?19 With the identity and existence of actual and potential parties to language-mediated encounters often unknowable and potentially infinite (and thus subject to much speculation), how is the success or flop of a speech event to be assessed? And to whom or what ought that outcome be credited?

We explored the work of “creative contextualization” already in chapter 1, which focused on communicative work of cash-mediated prachaar within the spatiotemporally broader contextual meanings of money; cash notes were meaningful not merely within the conventional register of commensuration but also and more crucially within an already existing set of relationships among the people among whom cash flows. Making sense of election-season cash meant attending to its material and affective affordances as a medium of communication—pointing to the geographically wider and temporally longitudinal boundaries of any particular exchange: the meaning of cash was shown to be diachronic, its amassing and distribution signifying and alluding to the histories of its accumulation, while also demonstrating to area voters (and other audiences, intended and otherwise) a candidate’s bankable relations with crucial networks of power and authority. By the time the 2017 election rolled around, the media landscape in Mumbai (as worldwide) had been utterly transformed by the ubiquity of social media—especially the communications platform WhatsApp. This chapter thus trains insights from thinking with the material-infrastructural work of money onto the broader landscape of language-mediated encounters—exploring the circulation of words within the broader “mediated sensorium.”20 The accounts show how the meanings of words are bound up with their sensible forms, speech genres, and sociospatial and semiotic contexts, as well as with material infrastructures of conveyance—the written scripts, paper pamphlets, and mobile phone screens; building corridors, neighborhood eateries, and street corners; poetic flourishes, cinematic references, and inside jokes. And what comes into view is a heterogeneous landscape of virtuosi communicators: people whose embodied expertise, perceptual “alertness,” and multimodal communicative fluency is at the heart of the high-stakes (and high-octane) work of political communication and representation in Mumbai.

“Social Workers”

In February 2017, two weeks before the final campaign rally of the previous chapter, I attended a “social worker meeting” at one of the four small, street-facing office spaces that Sayeed had rented out for election-season purposes. Sayeed’s personal assistant, Wasim, had messaged me earlier that morning to tell me about the meeting, but, having reached the specified office to find the little room empty, I had wandered the neighborhood to see whether perhaps the meeting had been shifted to one of the other party offices. The second office I reached, tucked into a narrow lane, yielded fruit: a small, party-flag-bedecked, warehouse-looking space packed with men. Sayeed sat the back of the room—behind the street-facing table—clean-shaven and bare-headed as always, smartly dressed in a woolen Nehru waistcoat. He was flanked on the left by a fellow whose elegant black hat seemed to identify him as a religious figure of some sort (a whispered question identified him as a priest), and on the right by a large, gray-bearded man with kind eyes, dressed all in white, who I later learned was the municipal councilor (belonging to a different party) from two terms prior. Fifteen or so white plastic chairs were occupied by tidy, professional-looking men, mostly dressed in shirtsleeves and neatly pressed trousers. The walls were lined with a scattering of younger, thinner, jeans-clad, clean-shaven, alert-eyed boys in flashy shirts whose scrappier and more contemporary aesthetic called to mind the karyakartas with whom I had become familiar during Seema’s campaign in the popular neighborhoods and “slums” of the eastern suburbs (see chapter 1). When I arrived, a seated man in shirtsleeves was speaking in an educated-sounding (i.e., slang-free) Urdu-inflected Hindi: “We mustn’t let people think that Sayeed Rizwan is some outsider trying to come in here, with some personal [zati] interest. We need to make it clear that it is we who have brought him here; we must make it clear that we have invited him to fight from here—because he speaks up at the BMC meetings, because he openly challenges . . . that he’ll get us underground parking. That he won’t just clean the gutters.” One of the younger boys standing along the wall interjects, perhaps a little defensively: “Even in Gowandi,” he begins (referring to Sayeed’s incumbent district in the eastern suburbs), “Sayeed has done so many things, not just clean gutters like everyone else. He’s given us a road,” the young man continued. “He’s helped with educational things . . . he knows how to do so many things.”

“Cleaning the gutters,” it must be noted, is a widely understood euphemism—a cynical shorthand for low-cost, highly visible work that disingenuous politicians perform simply to show they’re doing something. Because “cleaning gutters” is highly visible (in streets), taking place aboveground and yielding immediate (if short-term) results, it’s often described as a favorite and famed way to demonstrate “doing work” while not actually doing anything to redress the deeper structural, infrastructural, and institutional “clogs” that lead to blocked drains in the first place. The euphemistic valence of “gutters” is so common that it has become a trope in satirical film.21 Back at the social worker meeting, a seated man thus interjects: “Yes! People need to know what’s possible to do here . . . not just clean gutters but open schools, sports grounds . . . if we tell what’s possible, it will be evident that the previous corporator could have done such things but didn’t.” Now Sayeed interjects: “This is why the most important thing is the chowk sabhaas. We need to openly announce [bayan karna] the work [kam] that we have done.”

Sayeed has been speaking in Hindi, but when he notices me standing in the doorway he switches to English: “Hi, Lisa! Come in,” he says, addressing me familiarly, waving me over and proceeding to introduce me: “This is Lisa. She has been writing about my work for many years; she knows each and every water pipe in Gowandi.”22 He turns to me, addressing me directly but speaking at a volume everyone can hear: “Lisa, have you seen how we have resolved the water situation in Gowandi?” Sayeed is aware that I am comfortable in Hindi, but presumably my presence is an opportunity for him to demonstrate his impeccable English to this refined-looking crowd, so I respond in English, saying that I’ve not visited Gowandi since last year but will certainly make a point to visit as soon as possible. He nods and changes the subject: “This is a social worker meeting,” he tells me. “We’re preparing for the chowk sabhaas.” He switches back to Hindi, turning to Wasim with some instructions regarding teams for the planned chowk sabhaas.

I was struck by the term “social worker meeting.” I was familiar with what “social work” meant in neighborhoods like Sayeed’s incumbent district in Gowandi (an area similar to Seema’s, where, as we saw in chapter 1, “social workers” are experts in managing and mediating everyday life in a built environment shot through with sociomaterial and legal-institutional contradictions). But I wondered what “social work” entailed here in South Bombay, where even the poor lived in residential buildings that, while perhaps ancient and crumbling, were generally not treated for policy purposes as “unauthorized” and which seemed relatively well connected (if only by luck of location) to infrastructural grids and municipal services. When the official-seeming part of the meeting wrapped up, I turned to the man sitting next to me and asked in a low voice: “Sayeed called this a social worker meeting, but what does that mean? What do social workers do around here?” He looks puzzled by the question: “Just . . . general social work.” The man introduces himself as Aseem and tells me that he considers himself to be a “social worker.” He tells me that he comes from a “political family”: his father had been elected as a two-term municipal corporator in the 1970s and then again in 1985–92. Since the 1992–93 riots, however, his family has stayed away from politics. He tells me that he himself had never taken an interest in politics “until Sayeed started coming around.” Aseem’s family has a shoe-manufacturing business here in Badlapur, he tells me, but most of their karkhana (factory) workers live in Gowandi: “Badlapur and Gowandi are very connected, because South Bombay is where the wholesale markets are located, whereas all the manufacturing happens in Gowandi.” He tells me that he’d heard from his Gowandi-based karkhana workers about Sayeed’s “good work” there. “We think he could be great,” Aseem says, and that is why he’s volunteering to “help” with Sayeed’s campaign. I ask him what he is doing to “help.” “I’m calling my friends. . . . I’m arranging door-to-door meetings with people in buildings.” Door-to-door meetings? Aseem explains: “I’m known in the business community, and my family is also known—because of my father. So people trust my judgment. And among the building residents, they trust the building leader’s judgment. If I know some important person in some building, I phone that person and tell him about Sayeed, and ask that person to organize a meeting in the building and to accompany Sayeed door-to-door in the building. Because only then will people open their doors to meet the candidate.” That’s what this “social worker” meeting is for: to prepare for these sorts of local meetings.

I mill about for a while chatting with the others present at the meeting—to get a sense of who they are, what their “social work” entails, what is it is that they might be able to do to “help” Sayeed’s campaign, and why they’re interested in supporting his candidacy anyway. I meet Kareem Enginwala—a sharply dressed, heavyset, affluent-seeming, tidy-bearded man who looks to be in his fifties. He is wearing a starched, dazzlingly white kurta-pajama23 and cap that lend him a distinctly pious elegance; his slick iPhone and expensive-looking watch suggest that his marked religiosity goes hand in hand with a business-forward politics. I ask Enginwala about his “social work” activities, and he tells me that he serves on the board of a local educational trust; his “social work” is primarily philanthropic: paying school fees for indigent children and raising money for the trust. His family business is in scrap trading, he tells me, but in recent years he’s been dabbling in real estate—trying his hand as a small-scale developer. This is why he’s supporting Sayeed. “Sayeed will be good for development,” he explains, “and for the area’s business environment.”

The next person I meet is Yakoob. He lives in the nearby middle-class neighborhood of Mazagaon but owns a shirt factory here in Badlapur. He echoes Enginwala and Aseem: Sayeed’s knowledge, vociferousness, and evidenced facility in navigating the ins and outs of the municipal corporation are precisely what Badlapur’s business community needs, given the opacity and often-contradictory character of the legal-institutional environment governing local industry and manufacturing in the city. I ask him: “But do you do social work?” Yes, he says, adding that he does “medical social work.” Meaning? He tells me (in English) that he’s a “philanthropic broker”: while he’s not wealthy himself, he knows many wealthy people in the community, which allows him to “raise money and direct it to pay hospital bills” on behalf of the area’s mostly Muslim poor.

Before I left the social worker meeting that morning, Wasim added me to the campaign-volunteer WhatsApp group so that I could keep up with the daily schedule of campaign events. I had quickly realized that following Sayeed’s campaign would require a different kind of informational infrastructure than my 2012 research with Seema had—not only due to the breakneck speed at which social media (especially WhatsApp) became ubiquitous in Mumbai during those intervening years, but also because of key differences between the material morphologies (which are also the communicative infrastructures) of the two neighborhoods more generally. Seema’s campaign schedule (as we saw in chapter 1) was constantly in formation: her campaign event schedule was revised continuously, and meetings were convened sometimes with only a few minutes’ notice or even on the spot. Rally routes were revised and at times improvisational. And yet the extraordinarily dense built fabric of Seema’s ward had made finding and following her campaign activities relatively straightforward; all I had to do was show up in the morning, stop by any of the forty or so neighborhood party offices to ask where she might be, and then wander around until I found her. (At least during the daytime hours; the late-night meetings were by definition more discreet and harder to locate—which of course was precisely the point). The stark difference in the number of party offices in each of the two districts is telling: whereas Seema had forty campaign offices in her 2012 campaign in Daulat Nagar, Sayeed’s 2017 campaign in South Bombay had merely four. Wasim later explained to me that this was because “in slums . . . everything is out in the open.” It was in this context that Wasim repeated to me the (half-joking) earlier-mentioned comment by a party leader that, “With all the redevelopment, . . . politics in Mumbai will become like in America.” Prachaar is effective in the slums, in other words, because everyone comes out on the streets, whereas in Badlapur (as in “America”) people live in buildings and doors open onto building corridors rather than to common spaces like courtyards and streets; “all the redevelopment” therefore poses infrastructural obstacles to “communicating with the public.” In this context, a crucial component of election-season communication involves locating and enlisting human intermediaries who can bridge these communicative gaps—who can liaise with the prominent people inside particular buildings who can then arrange for events to be held on rooftops, in basements, and in courtyards of private buildings, and who will then accompany candidates through door-to-door campaigns to connect with potential voters who might not have attended the sabhaa—especially women.

The general invisibility of women in South Bombay’s public spaces had struck me immediately when I began frequenting the area for research. In the working-class, also-Muslim-majority popular neighborhoods of the eastern suburbs with which I’d grown familiar, streets are full of women. With employment opportunities for low-income men (as drivers, housing society watchmen, fruit and vegetable hawkers, security guards, janitors, domestic servants, office peons, etc.) generally located in other parts of the city, during daytime hours it is often women who are most visible in the streets—coming going from the market, running small shops, directing NGOs, fetching water, running errands, walking kids to school. In lower-income peripheral areas of Gowandi, I’d grown accustomed to the ubiquity of hijab- and niqab-clad24 women moving freely through street space: waiting at rickshaw stands, squeezing shoulder-to-shoulder with men into shared autorickshaws, chatting on train platforms from which they too traveled to posher areas of the city—where they might work as maids and cooks and nannies, or (and especially for the younger generation) at call centers, or behind counters at malls, or simply to meet friends in the parks, gardens, and open-air spaces outside the stifling slums.

This out-in-the-open omnipresence of working-class Muslim women was reflected in the gendered composition of the campaign activities I’d witnessed five years earlier in Seema’s neighborhood, during the 2012 campaign season. Which is to say, if the visible presence (albeit nothing like predominance) of women in campaign activities in working-class Muslim neighborhoods reflected the gendered character of street space in those neighborhoods more generally, then the same was true in Badlapur: the overwhelmingly male composition of the sabhaa crowds (even those held in “private” spaces on rooftops, courtyards, and basements) that I witnessed in 2017 mirrored the gendering of Badlapur street space. And the reasons for this difference are bound up with neighborhood’s economies: as the composition of Sayeed’s campaign team suggests (a few bag manufacturers, a shoemaker, a tool importer, a scrap dealer turned developer, etc.), Mumbai’s historic market district is largely composed of small, male-headed family firms. Which is to say, the invisibility of a family’s women signals the financial prowess of a family’s business. In more affluent South Bombay Muslim families, women certainly do move about—not only to visit one another in comfortable homes but also (and notably) in order leave the area precisely in order to be out and about in the city: hopping in a taxi to meet friends for a dosa at a South Indian “Udipi” restaurant; shopping for cheap jewelry in the bustling tourist districts; crossing town to join an aerobics class. With women voters’ ears and eyes unreachable, Sayeed’s team had to find a way to communicate with them inside their homes. In this context, it was with the men who might be able facilitate access to domestic spaces (and it was indeed largely men) that Sayeed’s campaign team sought to forge relations in the run-up to polling—relations forged through networks and introductions made by locally known and influential people such as those I’d met at the initial “social worker” meeting.

Sabhaa

I attended Sayeed’s first sabhaa of the season the day after that initial social worker gathering, arriving (per the WhatsApp instructions) in a quiet courtyard behind the Bombay Improvement Trust tenements where Junaid (Urdu scholar and Sayeed’s chief orator) had grown up.25 Indeed, Junaid had organized this particular event (he was “hosting” the sabhaa) because he was well known in the area: he could reach out to important people in nearby buildings, who could then alert their neighbors and friends to come down for the meeting.

I arrived just before 7 p.m. (the sabhaa’s official start time) to find around forty people milling about—all men. Campaign workers have propped a cheap loudspeaker atop a taxi, and the terrible sound quality makes it harder to understand what’s being said than if there were no sound system at all. There’s no stage separating speakers from audience; rather, the divide is marked by a longish table behind which four chairs are arranged. There’s a popcorn guy milling about, who I don’t think is part of the campaign, but who seems to be a bigger attraction than Sayeed’s meeting. People are coming and going, passing through the courtyard from the street to their homes. Aside from the children, everyone in sight is visibly Muslim—men in topis, women in hijabs. Throughout the program, women and children come and go through the courtyard without stopping to listen; they’re mostly going for popcorn. A big rat is dashing about merrily. It scampers over the foot of the person nearby, which causes the fellow to gasp and jump with a start, prompting the man to his left to laugh out loud and clap the startled fellow on the shoulder. I’m nervous that the rat might run over my foot too and that I’ll scream.

I stand at the back, behind the arranged chairs, waiting for the program to begin. I strike up a conversation with the man standing nearby (who has recovered from his encounter with the rat). I ask him whether he lives here in the building. No, he says, he doesn’t live here. He’s a butcher, he tells me, and has a shop nearby. He tells me that he came to the meeting today because he had heard that there had recently been a proposal presented in the BMC to move the municipal slaughterhouse—which is located in the eastern suburb of Deonar, just at the edge of Sayeed’s incumbent district in Gowandi—outside the city. The butcher tells me that he heard it had been Sayeed who had effectively blocked the slaughterhouse-shifting proposal in the municipal corporation, adding that “this was very helpful for us butchers; there are a lot of us around here and we all source our meat from Deonar.” He tells me about how Sayeed had even managed to direct municipal resources to upgrade the existing slaughterhouse facility at Deonar.

Around 7:30 the official part of the meeting begins; the first person to speak from behind the table introduces himself as a retired principal of a nearby Urdu-medium municipal school. He’s dressed all in white—kurta, pajama, topi—as are many of the others (including the butcher). The principal speaks in refined and polite Urdu, poetically equating the municipal corporation to a “trust”: “The BMC is the trust that is with us from birth to death: it is from the BMC that we are given our certificates of birth and of death. The BMC registers our marriages and gives us school-leaving certificates. If we want an English-medium school, the BMC can give us one. All these things can be arranged; see how Sayeed got a digital school even in Gowandi. He has done wonderful things [kamal kar diya]. He can do those things here as well. We are Muslims, and with Sayeed we can have our own knowledge without having to learn Marathi. On the twenty-first [polling day], take God’s name, say a prayer, and vote for Sayeed.”

Next, Junaid takes the stage. The fidgeting crowd falls silent as he begins to speak in a rich, florid Urdu. The audience—whose attention seemed a little half-hearted during the principal’s speech—is rapt.

BIT chawls are like little India—all castes are here, all mixed together. There is no communalism in our party. We are secular. We support all—Khojas, Reddys. . . . Communalism is not what we do. Last election, in this very place, I brought to you a Congress candidate. This one is even better! Many corporators see the BMC as an investment: they seek out the ticket—some buy it even—and then the BMC budget is so big that they earn it back. But Sayeed didn’t seek out this party ticket. He’s from here, he grew up just behind the Arabi Hotel. He’s the best Muslim leader in the BMC. He speaks strongly but he keeps good relations with all. Education [talim] is the most important thing that he’s been working on. It was he who spoke up against the [proposal requiring] that students perform Suriya Namaskar in municipal schools.26 He wants to break the South Bombay political culture—which is full of dalals [brokers]: for each and every little repair, permissions and payments are sought. Sayeed Rizwan’s system is that all of you will have his office number which you can call directly; he will connect you with the appropriate municipal department.

Junaid wraps up his oration by quickly mentioning a string of proposals that Sayeed plans to pursue: a public garden and sports facility (designed by a well-known Muslim architect) and a municipal hospital for poor laborers (there had been plan and proposal for one a decade ago, he explained, but no one followed it up). After he’s finished speaking, Junaid is beckoned over to a long bench where a line of elderly men clad in kurta-pajama suits are sitting in a line. “They’re the senior citizens of the area,” Junaid tells me in a low voice as we approach the bench, adding, “they’re very influential.” Junaid stands in front of the bench and converses with the seated men, whose refined, florid Urdu matches the register with which Junaid has just addressed the crowd. After some pleasantries—the purpose of which strikes me more as an opportunity for a speech-mediated encounter in ornate Urdu than to say anything in particular—one of the old men says to him plainly, and without explanation: “Now we won’t support anyone else.”

What was it that impelled the men on the bench to profess support for Sayeed’s candidacy? There was nothing in the content of Junaid’s speech that was not already common knowledge. Rather, the conversation between Junaid and the “influential senior citizens” suggests that it was not the referential content but rather the form of the talk—an oration in erudite Urdu—that lent this language-mediated encounter its heft. Indeed, it was Junaid the orator rather than Sayeed the candidate who was summoned by the men on the bench after the meeting for a stylized exchange in high Urdu. By speaking in this refined register, Junaid had skillfully performed a certain kind of “personhood”27: genteel and educated, elegantly marrying an explicit avowal of secular principles (and disavowal of cynical identity politics) with a refined and distinctly Islamic sensibility—dignifying Mumbai’s often-vilified community of Urdu speakers with promises of Urdu taleem (education). Indeed, and as mentioned earlier, while in recent decades Urdu has come to be popularly associated almost exclusively with religion (as a language associated with South Asian Islam and by extension with Pakistan), this ignores Urdu’s subcontinental history as a secular lingua franca of transregional trade, as well as of popular theater and especially cinema.28

It’s 8:30 by the time the campaign team (Sayeed, Junaid, and a handful of Sayeed’s closest friends) leaves for another “chowk sabhaa”—this one on an actual street corner. I chat with Junaid as we walk, turning away from the deafening honking of the main road and heading down a patchily paved lane lined with single-story structures that are built into the footpath along one side. Along the other side are some taller buildings (three or four stories)—structures that are visibly newer than the century-old chawls from where we’ve just come and whose residents are visibly poorer. We stop at an intersection where some members of Sayeed’s campaign team are waiting for us, alongside some people I don’t recognize; Junaid identifies them for me as “local people.” People are clustered in groups along the sides of the lane—poking heads out of windows, standing in their doorways. Junaid calls the area a “slum.” And indeed, the built fabric and space of the neighborhood reminds me of Daulat Nagar, where Seema had contested in 2012. Junaid explains that in areas like this the campaign team obtains police permission (sometimes officially, other times not, depending on location, scale, and duration of the event) to construct a temporary stage at a busy intersections and block traffic for a few hours for the sabhaa. The meeting is being held in the street, in other words, because here there are no courtyards. Or perhaps it’s the absence of available courtyards that impels the local police station to grant permission to block the street? Either way, a uniformed police officer approaches us and announces: “You can have an hour.”

Junaid doesn’t speak at this sabhaa. Instead, a young man in jeans mounts the stage and—speaking not in Urdu but in the informal, everyday Hindustani diction common in Bombay’s streets and markets—announces to the gathered crowd that he’s not a Badlapur local but rather a resident of Sayeed’s incumbent district in Gowandi.29 He describes how Sayeed has helped them to get new, legal water connections. Both the speaker and the content of the onstage speech differ dramatically from that of the BIT chawl just a few blocks away, and again we see how the form of the words relates to their content. This combined form and content of words takes on significance in relation to the “full physical arena” within which the communicative encounter occurs: in the BIT chawl, Junaid’s performance communicated the value of education, Urdu literacy, and community dignity to a highly educated but socially marginalized public; in the “slum” neighborhood a few blocks away, the young Gowandi resident’s comportment, clothing, and dialect worked to perform the speaker’s personhood (as a “genuine slum resident”) and thereby a person whose testimony to the power and efficacy of Sayeed’s networks could be trusted.

Relational Chains

The next day, I meet Junaid for tea to fuel up before an afternoon of sabhaas and door-to-door campaigns and to ask some questions about his oration the previous day. (What did he mean by “siaysi [political] culture”? “Oh, that’s when politicians just turn up at weddings rather than actually doing any work.”) I’d been hanging around Fareed’s NGO, Taqaat, that afternoon (see chapter 2), but when the squawking crows began to announce sunset I headed up Mohammed Ali Road toward Sarvi, a well-known Irani café where Junaid and I had arranged to meet up.30 We chat for a while, and after paying the bill (he never lets me pay), Junaid mentions that before the first scheduled event that evening he has to make a quick stop to visit a family that lived in the flat next door to his while he was growing up—a Gujarati-speaking, Shia Bohra family (Junaid himself is an Urdu speaker of Sunni lineage). He invites me to join him, adding that he hasn’t seen them in over a decade—not since his own family moved out of the building.

We cross the road and walk a few blocks toward Junaid’s childhood building, in whose courtyard he’d delivered a beautiful Urdu oration the previous evening. This time, instead of heading around back, we enter the building from the street-facing side and Junaid stops in front of a ground-floor door. He rings the bell. The woman who opens the door is advanced in age but not quite elderly. There’s an awkward moment of silence, and Junaid asks, “Do you recognize me?” The woman pauses a moment, scanning his face, and then breaks into a smile: “Junaid! Please come in.” Then, over her shoulder, she calls to her husband (in Gujarati), “Junaid’s here!” We follow her into the living room and sit down on the sofa. Junaid explains (speaking in polite but unflorid Urdu) that he’s come by today because his “good friend is standing for election.” She nods, without seeming very interested in Junaid’s “good friend”; she wants to hear news about his family: Who’s married? Who has had kids? Where is everyone studying? We spend a half hour talking about weddings and children and university and health—and then Junaid again mentions that Sayeed is standing for election and that “he’s my good friend.” The husband dutifully asks, “Which party?” Farid mentions not the party name but rather the party symbol: “cycle.” The husband asks nothing more about Sayeed—what he’s done, what he might do, why Junaid thinks he might be a good corporator. The husband then changes the subject and begins talking about their building troubles: “It’s been sold, the building, because of the laalach [greed] of the owner.” He explains that now they’re afraid they might have to leave their beloved home because of some kind of “redevelopment nonsense.” He speaks in Urdu but uses the English phrase “redevelopment nonsense.” By way of response, Junaid mentions Sayeed’s work in Gowandi, adding that whatever the problem, Sayeed has demonstrated the “capacity” to help. They aren’t interested in hearing any details of Sayeed’s work in Gowandi; Junaid’s endorsement appears to be enough to convince them. Finally, after all the family news has been shared, Junaid and I get up to go. The Bohra couple seems elated by the visit and sorry to see him leave. They shake his hands warmly, the woman clasping his hand in both of hers. Junaid says: “Please tell the people in the building to vote. Do you remember which party?” “Cycle.” “And remember that if Sayeed wins, then I’m here for you.” They smile contentedly; they seem to already know this is true—that Junaid will indeed be there to liaise with Sayeed in case of any need. Which is to say: they’re not saying they’ll vote for Sayeed and spread the word as a personal favor to their erstwhile neighbor, but rather because, by means of this relational work of taking the time to visit the couple’s home for tea and to engage in patient talk about matters of mutual concern—marriages and health and education of loved ones; the laalach of landlords and fears for the future—the couple’s relations with the would-be representative have just been forged.

This kind of emplaced talk can be understood as an effort to populate the representative relationship—to create a relational chain that reaches from the sitting-room sofa to the municipal corporation. At the initial social worker meeting, Sayeed was praised for “openly challenging” and for “speaking up” regarding matters of common concern. The previous evening, in the courtyard behind the chawl, Junaid performed his personhood as a learned and fluent speaker of high Urdu on behalf of Sayeed, thereby forging a communicative link between Sayeed’s campaign and the group of Urdu-speaking elders. Here at the Bohra couple’s home, Junaid listened diligently to the couple’s concerns, promising to convey their concerns to the corporator in the event Sayeed should win the election, before requesting that the couple please “tell the people in the building” about Sayeed. Much of campaign-season conversation entailed this sort of “talk about talk”31—with candidates evaluated by assessing the scope and strength of social networks comprising the relational infrastructure of communication and representation.

Mains

Junaid and I walk over to the campaign office and catch the rest of the team just as they’re about to head out for the evening’s rounds, the first stop on which is a chawl building at the other end of the neighborhood. Sayeed climbs onto the back of a motorbike; Wasim motions for me to hop on the back of his. In the hustle and bustle of the street I lose sight of Junaid, but presumably he’s on the back of some motorbike. We honk and swerve breezily along Mohammed Ali Road, our caravan stopping in a darkish but bustling narrow street, where a smiling fellow is waiting for us.

I climb off the bike and ask Wasim about the smiling man; Wasim tells me he’s the building’s society chairman. We follow the chairman through an elegant (if crumbling) ornate stone archway into a century-old chawl building, up a florescent-lit wooden stairway. Our team is composed of ten or so people, including an ever-present camera-toting fellow and another lugging armfuls of campaign literature: colorful, image-rich, bullet-pointed “pamphlets” printed in Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, and English. The building is home to people of all sorts of linguistic and religious affiliations: mostly Urdu-speaking Sunni Barelvis, but plenty of English- and Gujarati-speaking Shia Bohras, a scattering of Marathi-speaking Hindus and Konkani Muslims. We stop in front of a door bearing the recognizably Bohra name of the resident family. While our host knocks politely on the Bohra family’s door, Sayeed whips his head toward the pamphlet fellow and says urgently, “English! English!”32 The fellow hands Sayeed an English-language pamphlet just in time for the door to open. Sayeed converses in English with the elderly man who has opened the door, handing him the pamphlet.

We spend an hour or so winding along corridors, up and down the stairs, knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets in the appropriate language. Sayeed and his team demonstrate a social fluency keenly attuned to the building’s mind-boggling diversity—switching among languages or changing modes of greeting in skillful, lightning-fast assessments of what “type of person” might live behind which door and what sort of “voice” (vocal or metaphorical) might therefore be most effective in addressing that sort of person.33 Sayeed hands an Urdu-language pamphlet to an elderly, bearded fellow in a white cap who is later described to me (after I asked a member of the campaign team whether the man’s sectarian or regional identity was readily discernible by his attire) as “probably a common Muslim”—most likely a Barelvi variety of Sunni, which is “common” in Bombay—although it’s impossible to say for sure, I was told, because “such caps are common among Deobandis and others also.” A few doors down, a similarly attired man refuses the Urdu pamphlet that Sayeed hands him, explaining that the candidate doesn’t need to worry about convincing them with words: “Is there any doubt in your mind?,” he asks rhetorically—then gesturing toward the society chairman while still directing his attention toward Sayeed, he adds: “Wo hamara main aadmi”—“He’s our main/trusted man.” There was no need to read whatever words might appear inside the pamphlet—in whatever language. Rather, the information that matters most to him is the judgment of the building society chairman—the person whose proven efficacy and responsiveness in attending and resolving matters at stake in the BMC election: liaising with offices and officers of the municipal corporation when taps run dry; finding a hospital bed for an ailing relative.

A little ways up the corridor, a sturdy wooden door is opened by a sari-clad, bare-headed woman, the cross affixed to the inside of the doorway announcing her household as Christian. The pamphlet man—inferring the woman’s linguistic preference presumably from some combination of her clothing and cross—thumbs wordlessly through the stack and hands over a Marathi-language version. Sayeed speaks to her warmly in his native Marathi (which I don’t speak but follow somewhat). I catch a mention of “digital classrooms,” and the woman bobs her head with a smile, responding in Marathi: “Yes, I’ve heard.”

We proceed door-to-door like this, and at some point Sayeed’s campaign managers receives a message that Sayeed is due at his next meeting. But Sayeed doesn’t alter his pace upon receiving this news; rather, he completes the door-to-door campaign. Having witnessed the confidence inspired by the building society chairman who is hosting the visit, it seems imperative that Sayeed demonstrate, in turn, that he too is reliable. Sayeed is new to area politics, after all, and the credibility of whoever made this introduction for Sayeed to the society chairman—as well as the chairman himself, who is now making the door-by-door introductions and thus presumably commands the trust of building residents—is also at stake. Sayeed takes his time, performing his assiduity as much for the chairman as for the voters.

Back out in the street, Sayeed takes leave of the building chairman and picks up the pace, walking briskly (almost running) toward the wholesale vegetable market, stopping at an open-fronted warehouse space. Above the door hangs a sign announcing “Indian Fruit and Vegetable Suppliers.” Inside the space hangs a smaller sign announcing that this is home to a neighborhood Fruits and Vegetable Merchant Welfare Association, giving the name and telephone number of the association president, who is our host this evening. I count around fifty people milling about outside the warehouse, entirely men, most of them visibly Muslim. I ask Junaid about the association: Who are they? What do they do? He tells me that there are at least twenty-five wholesale vegetable shops in this area, “old shops.” The shop owners have ancestral and kinship ties to the Hindi- and Urdu-speaking regions of Western Uttar Pradesh. The association doesn’t actually do “welfare,” Junaid tells me, but rather “does representation” (representation karta hai) for businesspeople in this area; having a registered NGO is important because it allows them to “represent” to the municipal corporation officers or to political leaders—to issue written petitions on association letterhead, for instance.

Inside the narrow space, some chairs have been arranged, but the ones in the back half of the room are quickly restacked to create space for more people to stand. Our host, the association president, makes some brief opening remarks, introducing the candidate: “Sayeed Rizwan will solve the problems of our community! We don’t even need to tell him what our problems are because he already knows.”

Before Sayeed speaks, Junaid addresses the audience, delivering a few lines in his high-register, poetic Urdu. The speech is short—less than a minute—but appears to have had its desired effect: the room is silent, almost reverential. The soothing sound of the poetic Persian words seems to leave a feeling of genteel respectability hanging in the air by the time Sayeed speaks. Sayeed’s direct, unpoetic diction conveys meaning in a register very different from but no less impactful than that of Junaid. Sayeed articulates his insider knowledge and familiarity with particular details of the traders’ concerns, telling the assembled men that once elected, he will use his office to construct public toilets for the vegetable hawkers who source from the wholesalers assembled here in the room; in the absence of toilets, the smell of urine has become something of an issue.34 “The other parties oppose the fariwalas [hawkers],” Sayeed says, “but we’ll support them because it’s their livelihood and our business.” The use of the distancing “they” in reference to the hawkers is a reference to the fact that most of the hawkers are not local residents (or voters) here in Badlapur; by contrast, Sayeed’s use of the self-inclusive “our business” articulates himself as a member of the community—suggesting that the issue is personal, that he considers the wholesalers’ interests (business) to be of a piece with his own. “No one will take bribes from you because of the fariwalas, and no one will make a living off the toilets either. You can ask in Gowandi, no one makes a living off of toilets. All other parties do bhashanbaazi [merely playing with words], but I have done development.” Having asserted that his identity as “one of them” obviates the need for extensive communication—echoing the chairman’s introductory remark that “We don’t even need to tell him what our problems are, because he already knows”—Sayeed then disparages the “empty talk” of other parties, instead inviting the traders not to be persuaded by mere words, but rather by material signs of his demonstrated accomplishments: “Look at my work, compared with what others have done.”

The meeting is short, to the point; the shopkeepers are mostly residents in nearby chawl buildings, and their elderly parents, their wives, sisters, and children are waiting to receive the candidate in their homes—ready to decorate him with garlands, hand him their babies, and in one case revive him with coconut water and a plate of fried chicken (it’s dinner hour after all)—thereby extending the relational chain into the gendered spaces of kitchens and sitting rooms.

Sayeed’s days are spent parading through buildings and knocking on doors in residential buildings, while the evenings are packed with sabhaas: rooftop meetings and courtyard meetings are often followed by more door-to-door campaigns, where the “main” person in the building who has organized the sabhaa accompanies Sayeed as he knocks on doors—introducing him to women and asking residents to pose questions to the candidate directly. Even though these meetings often featured stages, and even while the apparently one-way direction of speech lent them the ambiance of performance rather than a conversation (which the conversational term “meeting” suggests), sabhaas were distinct from another genre of event (discussed in the next section): the “public meeting” or “stage show.” Sabhaa and chowk sabhaa—as well as the English-origin word meeting—were the terms generally used to describe gatherings that were not accessible (or even known about) by a broader “public.” These meetings—in warehouses and in courtyards and on street corners—were arranged by trusted “mains”: business association leaders or housing society chairmen whose knowledgeability about crucial municipal matters has already been established by their demonstrated efficacy in having residents’ needs attended to over the years. Sabhaas were attended almost exclusively by men and seemed to serve in part as a point of entry and access to post-meeting encounters with women and elders via door-to-door campaigns. Indeed, the exclusivity of a sabhaa (whether, how, and to whom some meeting is known and accessible) was of central significance during any particular event: meeting attendees were addressed not as a general, anonymous “public” but rather as residents of specific buildings, frequenters of particular markets, stakeholders in particular business and local economies. These sociospatial differences were also intersected by (and also overlaid) other communicative registers such as differences in language (the merchant-class vegetable wholesalers were palpably moved by Junaid’s poetic Urdu).

Deciding which registers of speech and comportment might resonate appeared to present less of a challenge to the campaign team in some meetings than in others.35 In the meeting with the vegetable traders, for instance, the association members shared an occupational position as traders and were all Urdu-speaking Muslims with ancestral ties to North India. In this context, deciding upon a lineup of speakers to deliver pertinent content in a resonant register seemed rather straightforward. In other venues, however, staging a sabhaa clearly entailed a more complex choreography. Three days before the final rally, for instance, I trailed the campaign team to a large, leafy, elite-looking housing society composed of five buildings, located on land held in trust by the Khoja Ismaili Shia community. A largish stage has been erected, and two hundred or so chairs have been arranged in a large open space between the buildings. The chairs are already full by the time we arrive, and another hundred or so people are standing at the back, along the wall, where I also stand. A woman to my left, dressed in an elegant but understated kurta, strikes up a conversation. She introduces herself in native-sounding English, asking where I’m from and what brings me here. I introduce myself (speaking in English) and take her friendly overture as an opportunity to learn a bit more about the neighborhood. She describes the area as a “Khoja compound,” but looking around, it seems the people present are a diverse group. I gesture toward a line of sari-clad women standing just off to one side and ask, “Is the neighborhood mixed?”36 She tells me that yes, there are some Christians and Hindus living here, but they’re all renting tenants. The reason she referred to the area as a “Khoja compound” is because the owners are all Khoja. “If someone sells,” she explains, “we sell within the community.”

The society chairman opens the meeting, making a short introduction in polite but informal Hindi, noting that “Sayeed Rizwan is the first candidate who has ever come to address our crowd [hamare crowd ko address karna].” I was struck by the inclusive “our crowd,” which seemed to refer not merely to Khojas but to everyone present—united by shared residence in the compound and (by extension) socioeconomic class. The chairman continued in Hindi, introducing the first speaker—a faculty member at a local management institute—who stepped to the podium and addressed the crowd in polished English: “I have requested this opportunity to address you because you are the most educated and civilized society. And Sayeed Rizwan is the most educated and experienced leader in the municipal corporation.” The professor went on to explain what he means by each of these three terms: leader, educated, and experienced. Sayeed is a leader insofar as he’s “not communal”; for this reason, he can “help the city as a whole to move to the next level.” Sayeed is also educated (fluent in English, Hindi, and Marathi), and is experienced insofar as he has learned how to access and channel municipal resources: “Kam kiya hai, karta hai,” he says, switching to Hindi: “He has done [good] work, and he continues to do so.”

Sayeed takes the stage next, continuing comfortably in flawless English. “You have worms in your water,” Sayeed begins, the example working as a colorful and visceral performance of his keen understanding of the embarrassing and infuriating problems faced by this affluent “crowd.” After a general murmur acknowledges the truth of this apparent water-worm problem (it was the first I’d heard of it), Sayeed proceeds to narrate the cause of the problem—the technical part of the problem as well as the bureaucratic holdup in redressing it—and is greeted by thunderous applause. After the crowd settles down, a short film is shown on a large screen that’s been set up behind the stage. The video is about Sayeed’s educational initiatives in his incumbent, low-income district in Gowandi, and the two-minute clip features a series of images of young, hijab-clad girls working at computers. “You’ve never seen a municipal school,” Sayeed says, surmising that this “crowd” would likely have attended (and sent their own children to) private school, “but see what we’ve done.” He goes on to describe the “digital classrooms” and “community participation” initiatives over which he presided during his tenure as elected corporator. The Khojas are a wealthy and philanthropic community, and this part of his speech appears to be directed at them: Sayeed demonstrates the importance he personally ascribes to service—to helping the poor and to increasing educational opportunities for Muslim girls.

After hailing the Khojas, Sayeed performs his secularism by turning his attention—if briefly—to “our crowd’s” smattering of Christians. “‘Christ Church’ is spelled incorrectly on the school’s street signboard,” he says with an air of hyperbolic exasperation. “Can’t your current corporator even get the BMC to spell ‘Christ’ correctly?” It’s a quick address that hits the mark: the current relations representing the society’s Christians are so utterly nonexistent that there are errors in the very the written inscription of “Christ Church.” The comment earns Sayeed a wave of applause and appreciative laughter.

The last speaker is Abu Asim Asmi—the Samajwadi Party’s Maharashtra president.37 He approaches the microphone and delivers a short, almost brusque-sounding speech in unflorid Hindi: “I’m here for the first time,” he begins. “You people have stayed away from politics” (he uses the word politics), “but please understand that without a political party no work can be done. Big people [bade log] in this city, they say, ‘We’re rich, educated, we don’t need politics.’ But today’s politics are dirty because big people like you stay away.”

The structure of these sabhaas has become familiar: the “host” speaks first, then a few notables, and finally the candidate. But beyond the surface similarity, the various events differed from one another in profound ways: the referential content of what was said, the spoken language (whether Hindi, Urdu, English, Marathi, or some combination), and the affective register of the words varied from sabhaa to sabhaa, and in some cases (e.g., at the Khoja compound) the lineup of speakers was carefully selected in a fraught, speculative effort to choreograph a speech-mediated encounter that might resonate across a wildly diverse crowd. The orations were sometimes poetic and other times didactic; at other times the speeches were humorous, appearing primarily to function as a way to assemble, entertain the crowd—to assemble a public and keep it from dispersing. Sometimes a single event—and even a single speaker—would tack back and forth among a variety of registers in a way that seemed almost improvisational, keeping pace with a responsive public. And these differences in the content, language, and register of these speech events were bound up with the sociospatial contexts and material infrastructures mediating these episodes of talk.

Jazbaat

Five days before the final rally, Sayeed’s campaign organized its first large-scale “public meeting”—scheduled to begin around dusk at the heart of the neighborhood butcher’s market. As noted earlier,38 Sayeed grew up amid Badlapur’s community of butchers—it was the khandani dhanda (family business) of his “adopted” family—so it is a locality he knew well and a community from which he hoped for significant support. Before this public meeting, two smaller chowk sabhaas were planned: the first in a small private parking area behind a worn-looking building, home to an elite, English-speaking crowd; the second in a chawl that is home to a mixed-religious crowd of Konkani origin.

We arrive at the first venue, where chairs have been arranged in concentric circles in a way that is designed to yield two-way dialogue. The circular arrangements lends this encounter a more conversational, “meeting”-like feel than others I’ve attended. The society chairman is speaking. “This is our ward,” he says in English; then switches to Hindi: “This time let’s give leadership to educated people rather than letting jazbaat [passions; rage] decide.39 If you want educated people to have a chance to lead, then you have to vote.” Then Sayeed takes the microphone, quickly running through his accomplishments in Gowandi (digital schools; water taps) before getting to the point: “Our problems here are different”—he says this in English—the “our” registering an insider positionality. “Parking is a big problem because the fire brigade can’t get in. The BMC is the development planning body.” He explains his proposal for a designer sports facility with underground parking. “We need attention to dengue,” he says, adding that the mosquito-borne disease is more prevalent in elite areas than in his incumbent ward in the Gowandi slums “because there are more trees here.” Toward the end of his remarks, Sayeed pulls out his mobile phone, dials a number and then turns on the speaker function while holding it up to the microphone so that everyone can hear an automated voice telling the caller to “dial one” for water problems. He terminates the call and explains: “Your calls are directed to my office, where we can attend to your problems directly.” One of the two society leaders interjects: “A few years ago I went to BMC to get a birth certificate, and I had to run pillar-to-post.” As with other meetings, the talking was about talking—the emphasis on Sayeed’s potential role as an efficacious link (shortcut even) in a chain of communication. The meeting ends, and Sayeed takes leave of the more prominent-looking men among the all-male crowd. One man clasps Sayeed’s hand and says: “We’ve never gone to the corporator for anything before. But this time we’ll go early to vote; we’ll get up at seven or eight.”

The second meeting is at a road intersection, where the crowd is visibly diverse: equal numbers of women in saris and hijabs; some men in shirtsleeves and trousers, others in Islamic caps and kurtas. The society leader speaks first. His speech is different from others I’ve heard insofar as he seems to be speaking directly to Sayeed, rather than (as was usually the case) selling Sayeed to his constituency. “We don’t need any money,” he pleads with the candidate, “we need repairs to our building!” Then Sayeed takes the microphone, and as he begins to speak, someone turns on the sound system’s echo effect. Sayeed’s voice, audibly irritated, echoes through the speakers: “Turn off the echo!”—the words reverberating in the air for a few seconds before he turns his attention back to the crowd: “You’re Konkan people!,” he begins. “You remind me of my Nani, who’s also from the Konkan region. I’m happy that politics here is changing. Now politics is about development rather than being carried out jazbaat ke nam pe.” I ask Junaid what Sayeed means by “jazbaat ke nam pe,” and he answers “communal basis”—an all-India euphemism for the age-old trick of stirring up political passions through appeals to identity. This is striking, since Sayeed has just begun his remarks by identifying the crowd—which visibly appears mixed in religion but shares a regional identity as “Konkan people.” I wonder: what’s the difference between religion-based “jazbaati” politics and identifying a public as “Konkan people”? Sayeed continues: “In Gowandi, I’ve supported Buddha viharas and [Hindu] mandirs [temples]; I’ve helped all communities and religions. We need justice for all, not divisiveness.” For Sayeed, the inclusivity of “Konkan people” is counterposed with the divisiveness of religion-based “jazbaati” politics of passion and rage; while both acknowledge identity-based differences, only the latter is accused of intentionally distracting from more pressing work of “justice for all” and “development” of the city as a whole—notwithstanding differences of religion or community identity. Sayeed closes the meeting, telling the crowd: “Please come to the public meeting in the butcher’s market this evening and see our strength [taaqat]!”

We reach the butcher’s market for Sayeed’s “public meeting” at dusk. It’s quite impressive: the intersection is blocked off and filled with chairs—hundreds of chairs—and lights and a great big stage. Eight people are onstage, including one woman (who ultimately doesn’t speak at all). While there are no women seated in the chairs, there are plenty of women coming and going through the market; the meeting is in the middle of the market’s main thoroughfare at prime market hour—just before dinner. It was evident from the outset that this “public meeting” was something quite different from the run-of-the-mill sabhaas, whose form and functioning had by now become familiar. Uncharacteristically, Sayeed was the first to take the microphone and begin speaking . . . and to continue speaking, animatedly and almost without interruption—for a full hour—telling story after attention-grabbing story: “People say that no BMC money is spent in Muslim areas—but that’s not true! Look what I’ve done in Gowandi!” He relates some of the water-related infrastructure projects he has presided over as elected councilor. “Don’t listen to people who use this as an excuse for why they aren’t doing development in your area. If I can do this in Gowandi then you need to ask them: why haven’t you done anything in Badlapur? You’ve been fooled [dhokha hooa]! I do honest work. Vote for work. Just in the past three months, you can see what work I’ve done here in Badlapur.” He talks about the renovated health dispensary that he has recently inaugurated: “I asked the commissioner, why has the dispensary been closed since 2013? I asked the commissioner for specially sanctioned funds to do work. The funds were approved in the Standing Committee, and now the dispensary is open again. In just three months! Why didn’t your corporator do that in the past five years? If I’m elected I can get you not just a dispensary but a hospital.” He moves on to talk about schools—“Who says Muslims aren’t educated?! I’m fighting for more Urdu schools!”—and about support for religious festivals—“They wanted to close the Deonar slaughterhouse because of the Jain holiday,40 and the Congress41 was going along with it. But this is our daily bread! I went to the house and I said, ‘If you’re going to close the slaughterhouse, then fine, close the fish market as well.’ And they all said, ‘No, no! How will our Koli people [Marathi-speaking fishing communities] have their daily bread?’ I agreed, yes, they shouldn’t have that deprived, and neither should our people. So like that the Kolis supported us.” The crowd cheers and laughs—they love this story. Sayeed continues on the same theme: “I have no objection to any religion. They should all be supported.” He talks about municipal support for events related to Hindu and Christian holidays, adding, “Why not our Bakra Eid?”42 He recounts how he had presided over the initiative to have exit fees from Deonar slaughterhouse excused on Bakra Eid. “Others are getting support!”

The themes are repetitive but the stories are engaging, and as he’s speaking, people continue to gather, stopping, sitting, listening. Kids are running around and trying to get on the stage. Motorbikes buzz past. The team has staged this meeting in a brilliant location, right smack in the middle of the meat market, at the precise moment that people are doing their evening shopping and snacking on keema (spiced minced meat). Over the course of the hour the whole area fills to capacity, and it’s the lively, humorous stories and scenarios that people stay to hear, watch, and participate in. By the end of the hour the square is packed—people crowding in, shushing each other, clamoring to see. Kids push one another aside; women crane necks out of windows.

Sayeed invites five teenage-looking boys onstage and garlands them one by one, in a ceremony that recalls the public meeting in Seema’s district on the eve of the 2012 election (see chapter 1). I ask a man sitting near me in the audience, “Who are they?” “They’re local boys.” “But . . . there are thousands of people here, why are they garlanded?” “Because they’re main.” “Main?” “Meaning, they’re the ones who gathered all these people. Behind each of them is a hundred people sitting here.”

Junaid steps to the microphone, but instead of his usual Urdu oration he recites a pithy, poignant Urdu couplet, which is greeted by a roar of laughing approval and thunderous applause:

Congress teri haton mei woh lakeer nahi hai;

Badlapur tere baap ki jaagir nahi hai!

Congress Party isn’t written into the lines of your hand like destiny

Badlapur isn’t your daddy’s property!

Junaid tells me later—over WhatsApp—that he had written the couplet the previous night; he writes poetry sometimes. I ask him whether there are particular poets whose work inspires him also to write, and he responds without hesitation: Rahat Indori, a renowned contemporary Urdu poet, well known also for his work as a Bollywood lyricist. Junaid WhatsApps me a couplet:

Sabhi ka khoon hai shaamil yahan ki mitti mein

Kisi ke baap ka Hindustan thodi hai

Everyone’s blood is mixed together in this soil

Hindustan doesn’t belong to anyone’s daddy

I was not familiar at the time with Indori’s now-famous couplet—penned three decades earlier but which became wildly popular during the winter of 2019–20 among protesters against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens (the subject of the next two chapters). As an avid fan of Bombay cinema, I was more familiar with Indori’s work in Bollywood, where he is well known for lyrics penned in the Bambaiya dialect of Hindi common to Bombay’s street life—songs like “M Bole Toh,” the theme song of the gangster-comedy film Munna Bhai M.B.B.S., in which Sanjay Dutt plays a gold-hearted Bombay gangster seeking societal respectability. Indeed, as Bambaiya scholar and documentarian Gautam Pemmaraju writes, “Bambaiya . . . is inextricably linked to the language of cinema. The Hindi film screen in turn draws liberally from the sounds of Bombay street life.”43 The couplet of Indori’s that Junaid forwarded to me as an example of the work that inspires Junaid’s own creative imagination is immediately recognizable for its striking combination and juxtaposition of voices: the first line in a more formal style of Urdu poetics, the second registering the playfully rough-and-tumble sounds of the Bombay streets. Junaid explains that his poem is similar—and not only in the playfully threatening tone in which some rival party’s pretentions to authority are called into question—insofar as each line speaks in “a different voice” and addresses “a different audience.” The first line of his couplet addresses the present crowd, while the second ventriloquizes the voice of the crowd itself, addressing itself in a muscle-flexing tone to Badlapur’s Congress Party leadership.

The words emanating from the stage at the butcher’s market “public meeting” worked quite differently from how I’d come to understand the meaning and effect of spoken language in the context of sabhaas. Whereas in the latter, selected speakers comported themselves and spoke in registers meant to resonate with particular audiences, to communicate information about the candidate, and thereby to produce and shore up relations of trust. In this “public meeting,” by contrast, the repetitive and humorous character of the oratory was suggestive of an idiom of performance—natak—meant to assemble and energize an appreciative crowd on the eve of the election, in one of the most densely trafficked commercial junctions of the neighborhood.

This Mumbai use of the term “public meeting” thus recalls Barnard Bate’s rich ethnographic account of Tamil political oratory in South India, in which he notes that “the ‘public meeting’ . . . occurs more as an appropriation of public space than as an instantiation of a concept of a ‘public’ space, ‘free and open to all.’” Indeed in stark contrast with a liberal, Western inclusive connotations of “public,” the “festival”-like events that are the subject of Bate’s study amount to a partisan takeover (“appropriation”) of urban space by the political party in an “attempt to put a single ‘spin,’ at least temporarily, onto the cityscape, to ritually construct and impose a single meaning or set of meanings onto a space that is normally multivalenced and polysemic.”44 Sayeed’s public meeting at the butcher’s market communicates as Bate describes—at the level of aesthetics—a bid at semiotic dominance in which organizers aim to “saturate a particular space with signs of their presence, of their occupation of that space.”45 In this context, the role of oratory at the meeting was the generation of mahol—to create atmosphere—by filling the streets with laughter and stimulating a range of pleasurable feelings: righteousness, humor, optimism.46 The production of mahol through this onstage drama anticipated the theatrical rally that a few days later would wind its way through this very same junction—accompanied by deafening firecrackers, volleys of flowers, and an intoxicating decibel of enthusiasm. It is through this process of “sensory ‘saturation’” that an ordinarily multivalent space such as a street or market is “declared” to properly “belong” to one particular organization.47 In this context, “public” takes on particularly poignancy; what is ordinarily a space of nonpartisan exchange and encounter (such as the market) is aesthetically resignified as the space of a particular “public.”

“The New Door-to-Door”

The day before the final campaign rally, the Hindustan Times ran an article in its “Mumbai City” section with a title that caught my attention: “Mumbai Civic Polls: Social Media Is the New Door-to-Door”: “WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,” the article begins, “it has never been easier to reach out to voters.”48 Having spent the previous weeks out and about, day and night, in streets and on rooftops, in warehouses and corridors, the notion that it has “never been easier to reach out to voters” struck me as somewhat overstated. Undoubtedly, social media, and digital technology more generally, were a crucial part of the communicative infrastructure of Sayeed’s campaign over the previous weeks, but the notion that social media was “the new door-to-door”—suggesting the obviating of face-to-face encounters by tiny-screen interfaces—was a far cry from what I’d experienced over the previous weeks. Over the course of the campaign season I’d paid keen attention to the messages circulating on the two WhatsApp groups to which I’d been added by Sayeed’s campaign team: the one for campaign volunteers kept me apprised of constantly the changing event schedule; another, much-larger group for general party supporters featured videos—both positive videos and images of Sayeed’s campaign—as well as some negative content featuring rival candidates. And yet I’d paid somewhat less attention to the section of Sayeed’s campaign team on the production side of the social media campaign: those busy updating the Facebook pages, Twitter account, and most importantly, producing and circulating content to be shared on WhatsApp groups. Having realized this oversight only after the election, I contacted Junaid on a subsequent visit to Mumbai, asking whether he might be able to put me in touch with anyone who had been involved with Sayeed’s social media campaign. “No problem,” Junaid responded. Sayeed’s social media campaign manager was a close friend of Junaid’s own college-age son. WhatsApp introductions were made, and within a few days I was sitting at a Café Coffee Day with a smartly dressed young man named Hasan who looked to be in his twenties. Hasan (like Sayeed) is a Konkani Muslim and a native Marathi-speaker, but he’s also fluent in Hindi and speaks native-sounding English. Speaking in English, he tells me (echoing Junaid) that he had met Sayeed through Junaid’s son. Hasan is in marketing, and while he’s not much interested in politics he likes “to help friends”; it was for this reason he took an interest in Sayeed’s campaign. And besides, it was a great opportunity for the young marketing professional to gain publicity for his own work.

I ask: so, what did you actually do during the campaign season? He responds: the key to social media is to “attract the right sentiments.” Hasan tells me that there are different “sectors” in the neighborhood, which are “attracted” by different “sentiments.” The first “sector” is made up of Muslim elites, he explains: “They’re not attracted by sentimental issues; they want to know that he’s smart and capable. So, for them, we have to explain the future goals and the mission. These people don’t use social media very much,” he explains—no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram—“for them, we make brochures.” I ask how he knows this, and he regards me blankly: “I live here. I’m talking about my parents and their friends. I know this sector.” He continues: “Elites only read a WhatsApp message if it’s been sent by a friend.” I ask why this is the case and he pauses, then answers with a shrug, “Maybe they’re just busy; they don’t have time.” I point out that in my experience, poor people are also quite busy; perhaps more so. He shrugs again, suggesting that for his purposes, the reason doesn’t really matter: “Anyway, they’ll rarely forward anything onward.” For this reason, he explains, the important thing when it comes to marketing a candidate to elites is to carefully curate a WhatsApp group—one with the “right people.” Right people? “Known people, only friends and from same area. It has to be people that are known to one another,” he explains, “otherwise it becomes a spam group and gets silenced or deleted.” He adds: “And all the content has to be in English.” He explains that in this area, a significant proportion of the elite sector is made up of Ismailis (with a scattering of Bohras and Konkani Muslims like his own family, as well as a smattering of Christians), “but mostly these people are not religious. They’re just professionals, friends.”

He explains that the “elite sector” of Mumbai Muslims does not “relate” to Urdu. His own generation studied in English-medium schools where Urdu wasn’t part of the curriculum; and while many of his parents’ generation learned the Nastaliq script49 and read the classical ghazals (devotional poetry) of Ghalib in their own school days, today—for everyday chitchat and newspaper reading—Urdu has fallen out of fashion among elites. The language has come to be associated with a less-educated, non-English-speaking, poorer, and more religious demographic, associated with “Arabized” forms of Islamic piety practiced by Muslim migrants with ties to North India. Indeed, Mumbai’s Muslim elites sometime treat Urdu as a language almost foreign to the city—a bizarrely ahistorical idea given that Urdu (and the more colloquial Hindustani) has long been the lingua franca of Bombay. Urdu was the language of Parsi theater in the late nineteenth century, notwithstanding the fact that the Parsi community itself was Gujarati-speaking; Urdu was the language in which secular, humanist intellectuals like Sadaat Hasaan Manto and Ismat Chughtai penned scathing portrayals of “genteel” pieties of the middle classes and unblinking explorations of female sexuality; and of course Urdu is ubiquitous in contemporary Bombay “Bollywood” cinema: while much screenplay is written in the “Urdu lite” dialect of Hindustani, the songs for which the genre is world famous are often written in a high-register Urdu that explicitly references the poetic tradition.

Hasan explains that it is both this long-standing association of Urdu with learned society, with poetry and knowledge, as well as the language’s more recent association with the authority of local religious leaders (priests and maulanas), that lends Urdu a particular esteem and credibility in the chawls and working-class areas of Badlapur. “They respect Urdu,” Hasan explains; “for that demographic, content must be in Urdu.” He himself neither reads nor writes Urdu, but since he knows Hindi (and is conversant in the everyday Hindustani of South Bombay streets and markets; he grew up there after all), he explains, he just writes social media content in the Hindi (Nagari) script and then uses a script-changer app. He pulls out his phone to demonstrate. “I never use Google Translate,” he explains, “just the script translator.” That way he can curate the social media content with particular words and phrasing that are specific and have resonance with this particular “sector” in this particular neighborhood—Badlapur—linguistic peculiarities that Google Translate would not have taken into consideration. “If it’s in familiar, local Urdu,” he explains, “then people feel that the message is being given by ‘one of ours.’”

Hasan tells me that “hundreds” of WhatsApp groups were created during the campaign season. After the various meetings, “we’d collect people’s numbers and form groups; the WhatsApp groups were all initiated by these in-person gatherings.” He gives me an example from a more recent campaign that he had managed in the area (the 2019 Maharashtra State Assembly elections had just taken place, so they were fresher in his mind)—a campaign effort that began a full six months prior to polling. He recalls: “We gathered the good crowd [meaning elites] for a good dinner and a proper presentation in English. Maybe seventy people attended that first meeting, and we did a nice talk and presentation.” He continues: “I always made sure to give the presentations myself,” he explains, because “it must be presented well. Meaning, I have to read the current emotion.” He takes out his phone again and pulls up a video that demonstrates with words and images how the candidate had “gotten work done.” After these video presentations, Hasan tells me, he would circulate through the room and collect names and phone numbers to create a WhatsApp group: “Internally, the groups need to know one another,” he explains; “otherwise it’s spam. Maybe sixty or seventy people in a group, max.” He recalls how “after a few months, our dinners were overflowing” and the WhatsApp groups were proliferating.

I could recall one such meeting during Sayeed’s 2017 campaign which, down with a fever, I had been sorely disappointed to miss. A morning-after WhatsApp recounting of the event had been written in all-caps English:

AN EXCLUSIVE GATHERING OF RESPECTABLE AND PROMINENT PERSONALITES WAS ORGANISED BY MR. KARIM ENGINWALA AND MR. JUNAID KHAN IN SUPPORT OF OUR YOUNG AND DYNAMIC CANDIDATE MR. SAYEED RIZWAN OF WARD NO. —, WHERE AN APPEAL WAS MADE TO AND THROUGH ALL THE PRESENTERS TO EDUCATE THE PEOPLE OF NAGPADA AND BADLAPUR TO CHOSE MR. SAYEED RIZWAN, WHO IS AN EDUCATED, HONEST, SINCERE AND HARDWORKING CANDIDATE.

It went on to mention the names and positions of seventeen prominent people—businesspeople, religious leaders of various sects and subsects, university professors and schoolteachers, philanthropists and a few NGO leaders (including Fareed, whose NGO, Taaqat—discussed in the previous chapter—is geographically situated beyond the borders of the electoral district in which Sayeed was contesting). I learned from Junaid that I had missed “one of the best meetings ever.” He had expected only two hundred people, but more than three hundred had turned up. Most of the people who came were “in the education field,” he tells me—some doctors and professors. Junaid tells me proudly that “three ladies had addressed the gathering: a professor of Urdu language and literature, a poet, and a housewife.” While he didn’t mention any forming of WhatsApp groups (it hadn’t occurred to me to ask him at the time), it seems reasonable to presume that “internally known” chat groups (as Hasan called them) would have been formed following the evening’s presentations, speeches, and supper to which this post-event invitation would have been posted for onward circulation.

Back at Café Coffee Day in 2019, I asked Hasan about the actual content of the WhatsApp posts that he crafts to send to the various groups, recalling for him an incident that had transpired in Badlapur a week or so before the 2017 polls. At the height of campaign season, in the heady days of stage shows and chowk sabhaas and door-to-door campaigns and late-night chooa (mouse) meetings, a little video popped up on all three of the WhatsApp groups affiliated with Sayeed’s campaign to which I’d managed to get myself invited. In the three-minute clip, an anonymous speaker narrates a series of photos taken earlier that year depicting Sayeed—flanked by various local social workers comprising his campaign team—at an “inauguration ceremony” for the repair of a local municipal health dispensary which had taken place a few months prior. Discussion of Sayeed’s role in the repair and impending reopening of the local dispensary (which had been closed since 2013) had been a staple of Sayeed’s recent sabhaa and stage show speeches. The anonymous “negative video” circulating over WhatsApp just before polling accused Sayeed of falsely claiming credit for the reopening of the long-neglected but much-needed area health dispensary (the one he’d spoken about during the earlier-described public meeting)—holding an inauguration ceremony and publicizing it in print and social media.

The video begins with a faceless Urdu voice narrating a series of images—of Sayeed and his team holding a ceremony outside the dispensary:

The municipal davakhana [health dispensary] has been closed for the past few years, but as soon as the election bell rings, the siyasi dangal [political wrestling arena] has begun. Everyone is trying to attach themself to it. Look how the Samajwadi Party candidate, with his saatis [followers] . . . on 29 December 2016 [i.e., two months before the municipal election] got together and put on an act of inauguration of the repairing [repairing shuru karvane ka dhong racha], and through newspaper publicity and via social media, tried to mislead people [logon ko gumrah karne ki koshish ki]. But through an RTI [Right to Information request] from the BMC, what information did we get?

The video then pans in on images of what appears to be an English-language RTI response on BMC letterhead, and the Urdu-speaking voice explains that the proposal for the work had been approved a few years earlier (in 2013), while it was simply sanction for the earlier-approved tender had been given that past fall—a few months before the Sayeed’s inauguration function publicized in the newspapers and on social media. “He is trying to take credit,” the voice explains (using the English word credit), “when the proposal had already passed and the fund had already passed.” But “lies are just lies [jhoot to jhoot hi hote hai],” the voice scolds, and “needed to be unveiled [benaqab hona hi tha].” “He should be ashamed for misleading the people [awam ko gumrah kar ke].”

According to Sayeed’s version of this story (often recounted in speeches), the crumbling dispensary facility had been languishing without repairs for years—notwithstanding BMC approval for the renovation project. Sayeed characterized this sad state of affairs as evidence that the incumbent party was not predisposed to (or perhaps even capable of) “doing work.” In his campaign speeches, Sayeed would emphasize how (by contrast) he had managed to set in motion the wheels of the municipal corporation for this project even while representing a district in the far-off eastern suburbs—writing a letter to the municipal commissioner, seeing the budgetary approvals through, and keeping the pressure on the contractors and engineers until the actual work set in motion.

The “negative video” had caught my attention because the information presented in the video—while professing to be a “public unmasking” (not unlike Khanna’s revelatory routine in “Yeh Jo Public Hai” from the previous chapter)—was, on closer consideration, entirely compatible with Sayeed’s own account of the function. Which is to say, there was nothing in the video that suggested jhooth or gumrah—lies or intentional misleading—at all. For instance, the would-be-whistleblowing RTI displayed in the video demonstrated that, notwithstanding approval for the proposed repairs in 2013, the proposal received budgetary approval only in 2016—a few months before the publicized function. Sayeed was, at that point, already an elected councilor (and leader of his party in the corporation) and may very well have been instrumental in moving the project forward by putting pressure on various officers to approve the budget and begin work. Likely his doing so would have been with an eye toward contesting the upcoming election from Badlapur, the approved-but-languishing repair project seen as an opportunity to demonstrate his capacity and willingness to “get work done.”

The situation is one with which I was familiar; in my earlier Mumbai research on municipal water I had frequently encountered these sorts of speculations about where credit was due for this or that municipal work.50 For instance, the video about the health dispensary recalled an incident in 2014 when, following up on a rumor of a similar genre—that is, that a politician (on this particular occasion, the politician in question happened to be Sayeed himself) had claimed credit for a project that I happened to know (since I had been researching and writing about water infrastructure in the neighborhood) had been in the works for many years and had been conceived by the water supply planning engineers themselves. I had therefore asked a senior water engineer about the role that Sayeed had or hadn’t played in shepherding the project (the replacement of a section of belowground network of water mains) through to completion. To my surprise (because engineers often had little praise for elected officials), the engineer had dismissed the rumor—not as false but rather as beside the point. Even if some work has already been approved, he explained, “unless there is someone who follows up” (who raises the matter with the corporation, presents a proposal for budget approval, pesters harried and overworked engineers to prioritize the work) then even approved projects can stall indefinitely. In that particular case, while Sayeed was clearly not responsible for conceiving the project, he was credited by the engineer for seeing it through to completion. The “truth” of such matters, in other words, isn’t something that can be adjudicated simply by documentary “proof”—documents that, in this case, could easily be said to support either version of the story—that is, either that Sayeed was or wasn’t responsible for the repairs. It was with this earlier episode in mind that I interpreted the following 2017 campaign office exchange between a Badlapur social worker and one of Sayeed’s campaign team leaders: “What should we do about negative rumors?” the social worker asked, to which the campaign team leader had responded: “Don’t dignify rumors with a direct response.” And yet the negative video was clearly on the minds of Sayeed’s campaign team; a response was necessary, even if not a “direct” one.

Hasan nodded when I recalled for him the 2017 negative video incident; he couldn’t recall that particular video but explained that much of the social media content that he produces is actually in response to these sorts of “negative campaigns” by (generally anonymous) others. He explains: “If we’re getting attacked, we don’t deny it; rather we address the issue by showing the actual problem and the candidate’s actual work.” He explains that “the real question is: why isn’t there water? Or why isn’t the dispensary getting repaired? Even if some work had been approved, someone needs to make it happen. So we emphasize that the candidate knows how to actually get it done, whereas work was held up before.”

He explains that this sort of “addressing the issue” is always done over WhatsApp: “WhatsApp is where you touch hearts,” he tells me. “It’s for clearing images.” I ask him to say more: What’s the difference between, say, WhatsApp and Facebook? He explains: On the official Facebook page you can’t put “emotional” things. Facebook content has to be “straight up”—because it is available to unknowable, anonymous audiences. But when addressing and countering something specific—“if someone somewhere said something—then we address it through WhatsApp because that’s where you can affect people’s emotions.” Thinking back to the sabhaas, this made perfect sense: while the material affordances of social media platforms might allow for the anonymous spreading of messages, Hasan’s account of how the careful curating of WhatsApp groups during these meetings—something that at the time seemed so banal that I hadn’t paid much attention—points to the overlaying and coarticulation of media technologies and infrastructural networks. “No medium is introduced onto an empty stage,” writes media anthropologist Ilana Gershon. “Each new medium is instantly enmeshed in a web of media ideologies—old media determine how new media will be perceived. At the same time, every new medium alters how the already existing media are understood to shape communication.”51 Newer digital communicative infrastructures like WhatsApp are “layered” over the face-to-face, “old media” encounters of the sabhaa: the carefully curated conversations mediated by trusted mains, with assembled audiences addressed in resonant registers.52

I ask Hasan for an example of how WhatsApp was used during the campaign to speak to “people’s emotions.” He recalls for me an incident that happened more recently, in the run-up to the 2019 Maharashtra State Assembly Elections. At a “public meeting,” Sayeed got angry and uttered some strong words about the sitting MLA—a member of the Hyderabad-based Muslim identitarian party, All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen (AIMIM, or MIM). “There was some flooding in the neighborhood, and the party of the MLA [i.e., AIMIM] set up a relief camp; the MLA was standing on a corner shaking a bucket to collect money—to draw attention. And Sayeed said, ‘Don’t do this drama on the street; you’re the MLA! Use your government power to fix the problem!’” Sayeed made a video-recorded speech (in Hindi), and the WhatsApp clip was excerpted from that speech. It was a thirty-minute speech, but the bit that was circulated was a thirty-second section in which Sayeed used threatening words. Hasan finds the video on his phone:

Those people who are roaming around with a bucket, those people think that Badlapur is their personal property, that they’re landlords here. But the moment it strikes my fancy [i.e., if I let my instincts take hold], Sayeed Rizwan will drag them to [a well-known public junction in the heart of Badlapur, here identified by the name of a recognized local eating establishment] and thrash them thoroughly.53

“This clip was circulated by people saying that Sayeed was threatening people!” Hasan laughs, shaking his head, and explains that “the clip was taken totally out of context; that’s not what his speech was about at all. But anyway, the thirty-second clip with those strong words went viral around the neighborhood. It was spread by a ‘fake public.’” “Fake public?” He clarifies that it was spread by “party people masquerading as the public, spreading propaganda while pretending to be the public. Because see, on WhatsApp you can spread propaganda and extremism anonymously. Through WhatsApp, a campaign can have people say things that the campaign itself can’t say directly on its Facebook page.” He explains that this is a strategy commonly deployed by the party in power in the central government—Narendra Modi’s BJP. “They do most activities below the belt,” Hasan explains; “they use WhatsApp to spread anti-Muslim propaganda—to spread all these photos, images of cap-wearing Muslims and blood. . . . That’s all, just caps and blood. Completely unattached to anything. That sort of thing goes around. But people who are awake, they know it’s all bullshit, that it’s circulated by a fake public.”

Fake public. Here it is helpful to recall the previous chapter’s account of the Mumbai meaning of “public”—where public refers to a collective subject (at once discursively and affectively assembled) as well as to the public’s own mediated/dramatized image. In characterizing the WhatsApp-mediated spread of emotionally charged, decontextualized (“unattached”) images and videos as conjuring a “fake public,” Hasan asserts that the party workers circulating “propaganda” are mobilizing the affective affordances of imagery (“caps and blood”) to intentionally stir up emotion-laden collective attention and strategically deploy it to partisan ends54—all the while pretending to be a spontaneous (non-choreographed and certainly non-paid) public.55 Indeed, when I asked Hasan how he knew that particular video had been circulated by a “fake public,” he recounted how those who had forwarded the clip to him did so while saying dismissively, “Look at this natak!”56 Some people were trying to make an issue out of it, Hasan reflected, “but no one believed it.”

I was struck by Hasan’s use of the word “believe,” which did not refer to whether or not the video was real or fake (indeed, Hasan made no mention of any suspicion that the video was doctored). Junaid later confirmed for me—with a hearty laugh—that yes, Sayeed had said those things. Thinking back to the “negative video” from the 2017 campaign, I realized that Wasim had not questioned the veracity of that video’s content either: the documents acquired through RTI were not described to have been doctored; the fact of Sayeed’s having claimed credit for the dispensary repairs never called into question. As in that instance, the “belief” to which Hasan here referred was not whether some statement had or hadn’t been made; rather, “no one believed” that Sayeed’s threat was literal, or that the video somehow revealed Sayeed to be nothing more than a violence-prone goonda (gangster). And this was because the clip was circulated “unattached to anything”—the utterance lifted out of its sociospatial and historical “context” (both the particular situation and setting of Sayeed’s full speech that day as well as the long political career characterized by nonviolence). Junaid explained to me afterward, laughing aloud when I recounted Sayeed’s strong words, that it was more likely that the clip had bolstered Sayeed’s popularity by performing his social fluency—demonstrating his insider knowledge of the neighborhood by naming the precise location of a particularly good site for public humiliation; speaking and comporting himself in a resonant register. “No one took it literally,” Junaid told me, because “Sayeed is hardly someone who goes around beating people.” It was the interpretation of the words (i.e., as a literal threat) rather than the fact of their utterance, in other words, that was not “believed.”

Back at Café Coffee Day, Hasan concluded our conversation with a discussion of the particular fluency with which Bombay city dwellers navigate this terrain of belief: people on the outskirts of the city might be different, but here in Bombay “everyone knows that [the MLA] is just an actor.” He pauses, adding pensively, “People here in Bombay don’t just believe. Bombay appreciates a good show,” he tells me, “but people know what’s a show and what’s a lie.”

“Believe”

Back in 2017, a few days after the “negative video” incident (the one calling into question Sayeed’s credit-claiming for the repaired health dispensary), I arrived at Sayeed’s central campaign office to find Wasim on the way out the door, accompanied by a half-dozen hijab-clad women as well as a few young men toting video equipment. “They’re from Gowandi,” Wasim responded when I asked him where he was off to. Presumably seeing my still-puzzled expression, he explained that yet another “negative video” had circulated. In this one, opposition party leaders are shown interviewing women in Gowandi who say that Sayeed hasn’t “done any work” there. “So I had an idea,” he tells me. “I invited fifteen ladies from Gowandi to come to Lotus Lane [a lower-income area of Badlapur], where they have family, to go door-to-door to visit their cousins and in-laws and to directly describe to them everything that Sayeed has done in Gowandi. We’ll make a video of them talking to their families and circulate it over WhatsApp.” He tells me that he’s not really so worried about the negative videos because “most people won’t be influenced.” But he adds that “maybe some might be—people who don’t know much, people who sit in some small shop all day and are bored and watch these videos—those people might be influenced.” So this way, he explained, “people can hear directly from their rishtedar [relatives].”

We walk in a parade over to Lotus Lane—the women first, Wasim and I trailing behind. The film crew arrives a few minutes after us, on motorbikes loaded with camera equipment. They set up the cameras and sound system in a narrow, bustling lane, blocking half of the road directly in front of the entrance to a cluster of chawl buildings. Passersby gather, stopping to watch and listen—they lean in to hear; they pause on their motorbikes; they peek out of windows to see what’s going on. One of the women jokes to me that people are gathering to watch not them but rather me: “You’re Sayeed Bhai’s star campaigner!” I laugh and point out that she’s wrong; all eyes are on the “ladies” and the camera crew. She nods, seemingly pleased.

Once the camera boys are ready, one woman speaks—hijab clad but face uncovered, recognizable to the eyes of any relatives. She begins: “Sayeed Rizwan has helped us so much—whether Hindu or Muslim, he helps us all.” After an hour or so—during which they interview four or five women surrounded by a crowd with a constantly changing composition—they head inside to do more shooting. We stop at a small flat on the top floor, home to a round-faced thirty-something man who has been trailing us, keen for the camera crew to make an appearance in his home. Wasim seems to know the man personally, which is confirmed when the man’s mother comes out and greets Wasim familiarly; presumably they know one another through some rishtedar in Gowandi, where Wasim also lives. She’s laughing a little embarrassedly, but also seems eager to participate in this entertaining diversion. The camera boys pin the mic to her scarf and asks her to say “This time only Sayeed Rizwan,” but instead she keeps saying “This time again Sayeed Rizwan [ab ki bar phir Sayeed Rizwan].” So they have to take the video over and over again; finally she gets it right and then asks through her laughter: “Is that enough?” The chubby man’s daughter gets the mic next: she’s in the eighth grade and is very eager. Wasim says to her: “Speak from your heart.” She recites in a way that suggests she’d been thinking about what to say, has carefully planned her little speech: “Here everyone is with Sayeed Rizwan—kids, elders, youth,” and then she ends with “This time, only Sayeed Rizwan” and gives a thumbs-up. We move on to the flat next door, where a group of schoolkids are studying with a private tutor; they pour out into the hall and recite in unison “This time only Sayeed Rizwan!” giving two thumbs up. The whole scene strikes me as a little, well, disingenuous . . . it feels staged. But then I look around and see neighbors peering curiously, amusedly out of doorways and realize that this is precisely the point: to stage an entertaining and festive spectacle that attracts a curious little crowd.

The next day, I ring up Wasim to ask him to forward me the video they made of our adventures in Lotus Lane the day before. He laughs at my question: “Haven’t you learned anything at all?” He explains that there’s no video; it wasn’t necessary to actually make a video. “We had a cameraman there; you saw how the crowd gathered to see what we were doing, to hear the women speak. They came to listen to what the women said because we said we were making a video.” In other words, the idea of the “WhatsApp video” that conjures the specter of unknown and anonymous social media publics was a pretext for gathering an on-the-street, embodied public. But what about the negative video circulating over WhatsApp to which this little drama of “making a video” was staged in response? I ask Wasim: “Was there actually a video?” I’d been asking around about the video, about which everyone seems to know but no one seems to have actually seen. Wasim tells me that even he hadn’t actually seen the rumored video. “Maybe there was one, maybe not,” he says. But he doesn’t seem concerned with figuring out whether the rumored video existed or not; the important thing is that people might have believed that there was a video in which Gowandi women claimed that Sayeed hadn’t done any work. It was this possibility of belief that inspired Sayeed’s team to assemble a group of women from Gowandi to speak “directly to their rishtedar” in Badlapur and to have a performance of a “video shoot” of the speech-mediated encounter attract the attentions of passersby. It was unclear to me—and probably also to Wasim—whether the possibility of actually making a video was ever entertained at all. My sense is that they hadn’t given it much thought: the assembling of the video crew was an end in its own right, and they may or may not have decided afterward to use that footage to create something to circulate. The pace and constantly shifting focus of the campaign lent it an improvisational character, and ultimately making an actual video was not a priority (if it ever was).

The breakneck speed and scale at which digital technologies and social media platforms have become ubiquitous in the media landscape (in Mumbai as globally) has led to widespread discussion and speculation about the implications of social media’s ubiquity for democracy. On the one hand, the rising availability of cheap smartphones and affordable data plans facilitates access to information and democratizes its production, creating possibilities for increased participation in public life. This is particularly pronounced in low-literacy contexts, since social media allows for communication via images, memes, and video clips rather than only (or primarily) through reading and writing; in a 2019 global ranking of hours spent on video-streaming apps, India rated near the top.57 And yet in lowering barriers to participation, digital technologies allow for the dissemination of information that has not been subject to the fact-checking protocols of traditional news media, thereby facilitating spread of disinformation as well; across India, more than thirty people were killed in 2017 and 2018 in mob attacks following rumors of child kidnapping that were spread over WhatsApp.58 The ubiquity of social media means that politicians (elected or aspiring) now communicate with prospective constituencies immediately and with a seeming “directness”—bypassing institutionalized procedures and public debate. French philosopher and digital naysayer Bernard Stiegler identifies in the spread of digital technology the dismantling of democracy’s foundation. The functioning of a “social body” as a “democratic society,” he writes, requires “pooling” of individual desires and “delegating” them to “representatives” who can act on them through social and political institutions. This “delegation of competence” properly functions within “the time-delayed mode” of the debate proper to the liberal public sphere, Stiegler argues, and it is precisely this “this time-delayed mode” that is “destroyed by the ‘real time’ of live communications and by the ‘just-in-time’ adjustment of politics to public opinion.” In this context, Stiegler writes, the public has only “become an audience.”59

Such handwringing about the democracy-destroying powers of digital media, as anthropologist Francis Cody points out, are thus based on the presumption of a “hegemonic space of disembodied liberal debate.”60 Indeed, as this chapter and the previous one have demonstrated, the distinction between a discursively constituted “public” and a passively consuming “audience” is an ideological one that bears little resemblance to how collectivity and mass political subjectivity are constituted and enacted in Mumbai. This chapter has shown how digitally mediated communications—whether text or image, video or audio—are rendered believable (or not) through “alertness” and “awareness” born of sensory attunement to the sign-saturated city (what Goffman characterizes as the “full physical arena”). This is not to say that there is no difference between an embodied crowd and its digitally circulated image. Or that there is no difference between, say, a paper pamphlet handed out by a candidate who comes to your front door and a ‎WhatsApped image of that same text . . . or for that matter, a WhatsApped image of the candidate handing out the paper pamphlet during a door-to-door campaign. Discussing the emergence of new religious infrastructures (in her case, giant concrete statues) in relation to older technologies (smaller roadside temples and icons), anthropologist Kajri Jain points out that “technologies do not necessarily replace one another in linear succession.” Her account demonstrates instead how “new configurations exist in parallel to, link with, reactivate, and remediate existing ones.”61

The accounts in this chapter have demonstrated how digital technologies are enlisted within already existing networks of relations, layered onto “analogue” emplaced within urban landscapes. How Mumbaikars navigate the constantly changing “configurations” of communications technologies—how they go about making sense (and belief) through this changing material-technological landscape—is not a theoretical question but an ethnographic one. WhatsApp groups are formed among those who are already known to one another, with the digital layered onto the analogue; scripts and diction index on-the-ground geographies and local meanings. The potential dangers of digital technologies (anonymity and decontextualization) are managed and mitigated through everyday practices of “alertness”: the embodied encounters by means of which people adeptly evaluate who and what to “believe.”