The Ostentatious Crowd: Public protest as mass-political street theatre in Mumbai 1

Crowd politics

In a recent article, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) describes the continuities between contemporary forms of mass politics in Indian public life and the popular political articulations that characterized nationalist struggles for Indian Independence. The distinctive register of mass politics in contemporary India, Chakrabarty suggests, borrows from the earlier political idiom of peasant insurgency – “looting, destroying, burning” – that Ranajit Guha (1983) outlines in his Subaltern Studies classic, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. ⁴ Colonial-era mass mobilization, by Guha’s account, inhabited an “autonomous domain” in which “vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people” found political expression (Guha, 1995: 4). Where elite-level politics is characterized as instrumentalist and confined by the rationality of the colonial state, the inspiration for subaltern mobilizations is held to originate from the outside, in “the primordial relations of a rural community” (Guha, 1983: 40). ⁵ Recurrent peasant uprisings in colonial India, Chakrabarty (2007) argues, evidences the highly unstable nature of British rule, suggesting that the source of colonial authority was not based in a Hobbesian sort of sovereignty, but rather operated by sheer force of domination. In this context, Chakrabarty suggests, the mass mobilizations characterizing the Indian independence movement were “like tactics in a war, the war to end colonial domination” (2007: 56).

In contemporary India, Chakrabarty maintains, this “everyday language of politics for the people” (the recurrent rebellions that Guha reads as a sign of incomplete colonial sovereignty and the illegitimacy of British rule) continues to be the primary and most-legitimate means by which of everyday popular politics is articulated. ⁶ This is much to the dismay of those whom Chakrabarty styles as Nehruvian liberals, who are described as imagining that in the post-Independence period popular, affective political energies would be supplanted by reasoned debate and the peaceful channeling of conflicting political preferences through the formal institutions of electoral democracy. Instead, riven by myriad “internal wars,” Chakrabarty writes, postcolonial Indian society remains, in Foucault’s words, “perpetually traversed by relations of war” (Chakrabarty, 2007: 56). Indeed, “crowd action” is described by Chakrabarty as war-like in form, with the lawlessness and disorder of popular protest said to challenge the very sovereignty and legitimacy of the postcolonial state through the “ritual of humiliating its officials” (2007: 53).

Critically engaging Chakrabarty’s characterization, Lisa Mitchell’s (2012) ethnography of railway blockages (rail roko) in North India points out that far from contesting the sovereignty of the state, public protest and mass demonstrations support “the state’s authority in their explicit recognition of the state’s ability to intervene, adjudicate, and hear complaints.” The purpose of mass demonstration, Mitchell shows, is “not to humiliate state officials but to gain an audience with them” (2012: 10). Indeed, Mitchell’s account theorizes road and rail stoppage not as war-like challenges to a liberal-but-exclusionary state, but rather as (Habermasian) communicative acts: nationally administered interstate railways are targeted as a means to voice grievances directed at the central government, Mitchell shows, while road traffic (busses) are the medium for airing state-level issues. The blocking of road and rail traffic, Mitchell suggests, is a strategy employed by marginalized people to “broadcast” concerns into the public sphere, thereby producing “spaces of discursive contestation where interests can be raised and recognized enough to even be brought into public discussion” (2011: 491). Expanding the scope of what might count as a “public sphere” to include mass political practice, Mitchell’s account insists that we “recognize ways in which other mediums of communication – like the movement and blockage of people and vehicles themselves – have been used to broadcast political messages and alter spatial relations of power.” ⁷ Mitchell thus shows that particular demands articulated through law-breaking mass action can be understood as the very stuff of democratic politics.

At the core of these debates over how to interpret contemporary forms of mass politics are long-standing social-theoretical deliberations over the ontology of the “crowd.” As Mazzarella (2010) reminds us, the era of “mass politics” in 19th-century European and American cities (characterized by the expansion of the franchise and advent of mass media) was disdainfully narrated by liberal “crowd theorists” who posited “crowd energy” as hostile to social order and public reason. The classic formulation of French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1895; cited in Mazzarella, 2009: 297), for instance, characterizes crowd politics as a “collective hallucination [which] invades the understanding and paralyzes all critical faculty” (Mazzarella, 2009: 297). Indeed, as Mazzarella notes, there is a parallel between classic crowd theory and Durkheim’s (1965) theorization of “collective effervescence” as the “sacred power of the social” in Elementary Forms of Religious Life. But where Durkheim characterizes collective effervescence as the source of the social (not only in small-scale societies but in modern polities as well), ⁸ for 19th-century crowd theorists, crowd action was conceptualized as a dire threat to modern social order, posing a challenge to the sovereign state’s monopoly of violence (Mazzarella, 2009: 296). Mass politics, crowd theorists feared, heralded the triumph of the embodied passions of impressionable, heteronomous crowd over the reasoned arbitrations of a public sphere comprised of rational, individual, autonomous subjects.

That 19th-century crowd theory was echoed in British discourses on mass politics in colonial India – and in imperial approaches to managing crowds of native subjects with force – is unsurprising; as historian Chandravarkar (1998) writes, “it was an essential characteristic of the Indian crowd in colonial discourse that unless it was quickly dispersed it would rapidly get out of control” (1998: 228–229; see also Pandey, 2006). Yet even in contemporary scholarship, “crowds” are not infrequently counterposed (either positively or negatively) with modern “publics,” with the “embodied passions” of the former juxtaposed with the reasoned (or rationalizing) discursive politics taking place in the bourgeois public sphere (Cody, 2011). Indeed, as Cody points out, the modern notion of “publicity” is generally defined against residual concepts such as “private” and “crowd.” While a generation of critical scholarship (particularly feminist scholarship) has highlighted the gendered and exclusionary character of the public sphere as formulated by Habermas – calling for the pluralization of the concept of publicity through attention to various “counterpublics” (Fraser, 1990; Hirschkin, 2006; Warner, 2002) – crowd theory nonetheless continues to be characterized uncritically as an emergent, unmediated phenomenon borne of collective affect. ⁹

Chakrabarty’s discussion of mass action in post-colonial India, in theorizing the power of the crowd as emanating from outside the mediating structures and bureaucratic reason of state authority, thus echoes the ontological presumptions of classical crowd theory while reversing its morality and normativity. ¹⁰ The political potential of Chakrabarty’s mutinous multitude emanates – crowd-like – from the authentic, unmediated character of such activity, presenting a critique (if only a ritual critique) from outside the sovereign and rationalizing institutions of the modern Indian state. ¹¹ People do not block roads for any reason, Chakrabarty’s formulation thus suggests; rather, roads are blocked by spontaneous, emotionally animated masses whose emergent, unmediated energies are expended with the ceremonial defeat of the state. Mitchell’s account challenges this forumulation by suggesting that that mass politics has a deeper and more powerful democratizing impetus than the simple “pleasure […] of seeing the government lose face” (2007: 53); the significance of rasta rokos and other law-breaking mass action, she argues, inheres in the extent to which such action articulates a particular goal. Crowds of people do not block roads and stop trains, Mitchell demonstrates, in a spontaneous expression of communal passion, but rather as a medium of communication, employed strategically and instrumentally by marginalized citizens. In the context of Mitchell’s characterization of crowd action as instrumental mass political communication, the Mumbai road blocks that animate this essay are striking – and puzzling – for the absence of any direct or coherent demands. If the crowds did not request any particular concessions of from state actors, then what drew people into the streets? Whose attention were the crowds trying to attract? What, and to whom, were the participants trying to communicate by blocking the road?

A Road Block Without Demands

Before the assembled crowd headed out on a march to the traffic intersection on the nearby highway, I spoke with a local leader from the Samajwadi Party (the political party organizing the protest) in their Shivajinagar office, asking him to explain me the goals of the impending road block – what particular demands were they making?

Me: You mentioned that this rasta roko was inspired by the water department’s raids of last week – the confiscation of individual suction pumps on water taps and the cutting of illegal connections. The water department says that by cutting illegal connections and taking motors, they are trying to improve water pressures in the neighborhood. Is your party asking the water department to keep on cutting the connections and confiscating motors in order to improve water pressures? Or are you just asking the department to leave the neighborhood alone?

Party leader: We want water, that’s all!

A few hundred residents – mostly women, toting empty water pots for emphasis – showed up for the march, which proceeded eastward along the main road at the southern end of Shivajinagar toward the intersection with the highway near the taxi stand, where we were greeted by throng of a hundred or so police officers in riot gear (see Figure 1). The Samajwadi Party leaders directed the crowd of women into the middle of the highway, stopping traffic and seating the women in a tight cluster in the middle of the intersection, from where they continued to bang on their empty pots and yell “Pani do! Pani do!”– give us water give us water! The wall of police soon advanced toward the seated women, and after some minor scuffling, the Samajwadi Party District Chief – perhaps realizing that the police intended to cut short their show – cried out over the megaphone: “lets go to the pumping station!” – a request that might be loosely interpreted as “lets get out of the road so that at least we can make some noise before we get arrested.” OPEN IN VIEWER

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Congress’s on-script road block. Photo by Lisa Björkman.

The women, however, ignored the party leadership’s instruction to move and instead remained seated; 10 min or so passed until the party leaders were able to corral the women to the side of the road, near the gate of the pumping station, where they stood in a tight cluster on the shoulder of the highway while party leaders and local elected representatives took turns with the megaphone:

District Chief: We don’t want violence, but if the police don’t cooperate then we are not responsible for any violence that results. Instead of interfering with our peaceful protest, why don’t you [police] call the [municipal corporation’s water] engineers?

The event was clearly choreographed to try and produce a desired outcome: the police would call the municipal water engineers and request them to make an appearance, or at least a verbal promise or two over the phone, which the police would then communicate this to the audience so that the crowd would disperse; indeed, this had been the trajectory of what was area residents had described to me as “successful” roadblock in a nearby neighborhood a few months earlier. ¹⁵ Indeed, the woman’s comment that “we’re wasting our time; I have to go home and cook lunch” indicates that the participants themselves had a particular narrative of the event in mind – a sense of what kind of action might produce an expected outcome (the appearance of an engineer). By the same token, her friend’s response – “you go, I’ll tell you what happens” – gestures toward the character of the event as a performance – as something that is watched, something that has a particular and anticipated narrative structure, but whose final outcome is not yet certain. The crowd blocking the road was thus not only the subject of this mass political performance but also its audience. ¹⁶

Performance and performativity

The theatrical and performative dimensions of social and political life have long attracted the attention of anthropologists and sociologists, with classic works emphasizing the symbolic and representational dimensions of political spectacle (e.g. Geertz, 1980), as well the regime-legitimizing and (re)integrative work of ritual and performance – what (Turner, 1985: 181) theorized as “social drama.” ¹⁷ More recently, scholarship building on the theoretical insights and interventions of poststructuralism has sought to attend to the performative and citational (Derrida, (1988[1977])) dimensions of political life. ¹⁸ Theater theorist Richard Schechner (1985) for instance, draws on a Derridian notion of citationality in his discussion of how meaning-laden “strips of behavior” are building blocks of performance – which he thus defines as “restored behavior”:

Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence. […] The original “truth” or “source” of the behavior may be lost, ignored, or contradicted – even while this truth or source is apparently being honored and observed. (Schechner, 1985: 36)

In line with this characterization of performance as “twice-behaved behavior,” Hansen’s (2004) ethnography of political spectacle in Mumbai, for instance, describes “public rituals” (protests, rallies, road blocks) as “citational practices, drawing on a vast reservoir of popularized national history and religious myths and imagery” (Hansen, 2004: 25). Public performance, Hansen suggests, is the semiotic grammar through which political authority in Mumbai is articulated: “to be someone, to enjoy respect and authority is not a given fact,” Hansen writes, “but needs to be reproduced through reiterative performances of various kinds” (2004: 22). ¹⁹ Yet at the same time, accounting for the citational syntax and performative character of political spectacle does not explain when and how an instance of citational iteration might become intelligible in ways that actuate the authority it sets out to produce. To account for this requires attention to how symbolic displays are received, and to the enactment of a performance ²⁰ ; as Charles Morriss puts it, making a Peircian point, “something is a sign only because it is interpreted as a sign of something by some interpreter” (cited in Eco, 1977: 112). Performativity in other words – understood in Butler’s (1993) terms as the “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (1993: 2) – is not the same thing as performance. As Goffman (1956) pointed out long ago, performance must also consider the question of audience (1956: 10–22). ²¹

Back in Mumbai, the Samajwadi Party’s public performance unfolded in ways that clearly departed from the narrative frame (Goffman, 1974) ²² that the event’s organizers – as well as the participant-audience – seem to have had in mind. For 20 min or so, elected councilors and party leaders took turns on the megaphone, alternately challenging the police to arrest them and beseeching the police to phone the water department. Then suddenly, without any apparent provocation or change in circumstances, the police charged the crowd, striking out with wooden clubs (lathis) as they seized politicians and protestors, herding them into police vans while the crowd vanished. In the commotion, someone hurled a rock through the windshield of a public bus. A few days after the incident, I spoke to one of the elected councilors – a man named Naviq – who had been arrested and held for two days before his family managed to secure his release after posting a large bail payment. ²³ “It was awful,” Naviq told me, “they booked us under so many offenses – destroying public property because of the bus, then everything from rioting, to inciting violence, unlawful assembly … everything.” While the possibility (and perhaps intention) of getting arrested is of course implicit in an act of mass civil disobedience, Naviq’s account suggests that the event’s organizers had hoped that their drama would be matched by an equally theatrical police response … and prompt release from custody.

While it seems that perhaps the police action was a little too “real” for comfort, Naviq’s explanation for why the event went awry suggests that incident yielded a somewhat different interpretation of the relationship between the theatrical and the real:

It was because of our MLA ²⁴ – he represents the same people I do, but he doesn’t want to work together; he wanted to sabotage our protest. He’s very powerful, and he’s getting ready for elections. […] He has known the [zonal] Assistant Commissioner of police for a long time [because] was a councilor for five terms; he knows everyone. […] so he had directed the police to arrest us and book us under everything – to make us look bad, to make us look ineffective.

The Samajwadi Party’s rasta roko – with its citational narrative structure and its dramaturgical form – in some ways conforms to Hansen’s account of political spectacle as performance, along the lines of Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior.” Yet the deviation from the script (Schechner’s “strip of behavior”) anticipated by members of the crowd (“they should lead us over to the ward office!”; “when we sat down they told us to move!”) – who were scuttled out of the intersection, confronted with police aggression and disappointed by the non-appearance of any engineer – invites further analysis. The arrests and the nonappearance of the engineer were interpreted not only – in Naviq’s and Korelekar’s words – as a “sabotage” of the Samajwadi Party’s show, but as an effective hijacking: conversations with participant-observers in the aftermath of the event reveals the Samajwadi Party’s humiliation was overwhelmingly attributed to the Congress Party’s Legislative Assembly incumbent, whose own authority was thus bolstered.

On-Script Road Block

Indeed, apparently to hammer home this point – to leave little doubt as to who was responsible for the Samajwadi Party event’s failure – the Congress Party staged their own rasta roko a few weeks later, cordoning off the entire block in front of the Municipal Corporation’s ward-level office, where they assembled at least a thousand people (mostly women) to chant slogans and hold signs. The event was carefully choreographed, following a seamless script that was pulled off without a hitch: high-quality, professionally printed signs displayed slogans such as “Shame on the BMC!” ²⁶ ; “If the Municipal Commissioner won’t give water then he should vacate his seat!”; and “One two one two throw out the chief engineer!” ²⁷ – slogans that accused the Municipal Corporation of intentionally withholding water from the people of the Shivajinagar. A scattering of police constables – notably absent their riot gear – stood by calmly while Congress Party leaders circulated through the sea of signs, passing out quarter-liter containers of water to the throngs of seated women.

After Congress Party workers handed out the water containers, a truck pulled up producing a few hundred lunchboxes that were passed through the crowds. Shortly after lunch, not simply the ward-level engineers, but a Deputy Hydraulic Engineer himself made an appearance, stepping up onto a podium, which, having until that point remained unused, seems to have been prearranged for this purpose. The MLA projected his voice over the crowd, proclaiming that the present allocation for the local reservoir should be increased from 107 to 135 million liters per day (mld). The deputy engineer responded (somewhat flatly) that the department would give 115. The MLA shouted that “this is not enough!” – raising his fist in punctuation, while elected councilors and party workers rallied around him. After some moments, the police (who had until then been standing by calmly in front of ready-waiting police vans) stepped forward to nudge the politicians into the waiting police vehicles. The MLA again shook his fist (or was he waving?) out of the rear end of the police jeep. A brass band played exit music as the police jeeps drove off. As a whole, the event seemed to have gone without a hitch. The only apparent divergence from the script was the appearance of an ill-fated donkey, which Congress-party escorts had tried to direct onto the scene. The police (who later explained to me that the donkey’s appearance was simply going too far in disrespecting the Municipal Corporation) ushered the confused animal into a police van and sped him off. While the donkey’s fate in police custody remained unclear, the politicians fared well enough: when I asked one councilor a few days later how long they had been kept at the station, he responded with a laugh: “two hours.”

Two similar mass acts of “civil disobedience” thus met with dramatically different responses; indeed, some of the same individual participants may well have been present in each of the two crowds, which drew their constituents from the same neighborhood of Shivajinagar. How can we account for the divergent trajectories of these two events that seem so similar? In the first case, the narrative structure of the event was subverted by the action of the police, who met the protestors prepared for confrontation (as indicated by the riot gear), treated political leaders harshly in custody, loaded them with criminal charges (many of which were still pending as of 2013), and released them only after they made substantial bail payments. The event, we can safely conclude, did not go quite as hoped. In the second incident, the law-violating roadblock was presided over by a relatively small and docile police force – this despite the fact that the Congress Party’s rasta roko was significantly better attended as well as more egregious in its violation of traffic laws (recall that the Samajwadi Party’s event was violently broken up while the crowd was gathered on the highway shoulder). By contrast, at the climax of the Congress Party’s rasta roko, the Congress MLA managed to produce for the audience a senior water engineer himself. This Deputy Engineer’s office, notably, sits an hour’s commute from the site of the road block, indicating that the engineer had made prior arrangements to attend the staged event at a preset time: just after lunch. The engineer made a token hydraulic concession, agreeing to increase the water allocation to the local reservoir to 115 mld. Yet significantly, as I would later learn, an increased water allocation to the level of 115 mld had already been implemented by water supply planners a few months prior, when additional supplies had finally become available from a source-augmentation and network-extension project that had been many years in the making. That the engineer would credit this routine supply increase post hoc to the MLA’s road block, thus suggests the engineer’s willing (if not necessarily heartfelt) participation in the performance.

Since we can safely presume that the MLA (if not the audience) already knew about already implemented 115 mld water allocation to the local reservoir, why, we might ask, did he not simply make that number the target of his request? Asking for 115 mld would have allowed him to simultaneously make a successful demand of the water department as well, presumably, as avoid arrest altogether. The MLA’s patently untenable 135 mld demand suggests a two-part explanation: on the one hand, the volatility and opacity of the city’s water distribution system renders it exceedingly difficult for engineers themselves to convince the pipes to produce water in places and at pressures that they might wish. If the MLA had made a demand to which the engineer could actually have agreed, them the MLA would implicitly also be accepting responsibility for any continued low pressures in area taps. Thus, by asking for 135 mld knowing he would receive a “promise” of 115 mld, the MLA performed his ability to mobilize the apparatus of the state (by making the engineer appear in the first place and then having the engineer agree to an incremental increase of 8 mld – additional water that could actually be proven, should anyone care to check … ), while simultaneously distancing himself from continued water stress in the neighborhood. Moreover, by making an unreasonable request, the MLA was able to “reject” the engineer’s offer and thereby court arrest. Indeed, that the MLA’s arrest was preplanned is attested to by the triumphal band that serenaded the MLA’s police-escorted exit-stage-left with lively, almost circus-like music. Thus, while the MLA made apparatus of the state dance to his tune for a time, the finale of the drama restored narrative order – and the “sovereignty of the state” – through the “enforcing of the law.”

Participant-audience

This discussion of road block as political spectacle and performance suggests that the intended audience for these road blocks was not only (or even primarily) government officials, but rather the crowd itself. ²⁸ Notably, neither road block was particularly well covered by the news media – an absence that might be accounted for with a two-part explanation. Firstly, print media in Mumbai is responsive (at least in part) to the dictates of the consumer market; it is likely that these road blocks in an out-of-the-way suburb were simply not interesting enough to warrant serious attention. Nonetheless, as my research suggests that it would not have been terribly difficult to arrange for coverage had it been so desired by the organizers, the dearth of media coverage thus suggests that the targeted audience was largely the one present: the Shivajinagar crowd itself. While the narrative logic (the script) of these events might on the surface point to the municipal authorities as the primary target (“we won’t leave until you call the BMC!”) the clearly prearranged arrival on the scene of the engineer (in the case of the Congress event) as well as the reality that the stated demands of both spectacles were, in the end, not really demands, suggests that water was less a goal of the event than a pretext of performance.

Yet if the crowds gathered not to press water demands on the authorities, but rather as an audience for their own crowd-induced spectacle, then what had impelled the crowds to turn up at all? What was it that people had turned up to watch? The participation of the crowd in these events suggests a twofold explanation. Firstly, crowd participants may have been attracted by material incentive: participants were fed lunch (in the case of the Congress event) and according to area social workers, many of the participants in both events were paid in cash to come. Indeed, in contemporary Mumbai, crowds are generally paid – with food, cash or both – to amass. ²⁹ One social worker offered the following account of how cash distributions work: the party leadership distributes money to area party workers and prominent local residents for rallies and protests: “On each block there will be one or two important people (har galli me ek-do main hai). The party gives the money to those people and then its up to the main to figure out how to get the public.” While some residents might ask for money (or be offered money) in exchange for participation, he explained, others might simply come on the invitation of a trusted neighborhood leader – or as discussed below, out of curiosity to see “what happens.” I asked another long-time political party worker named Rakesh to explain to me the political significance of such cash-induced crowds: “If everyone here knows that everyone else is paid,” I asked, “then what’s the purpose of the crowd? Everyone knows it’s all just a lot of acting!” Rakesh explained: “People need to see a crowd; they need to see how much public you have.” ³⁰ I pressed, “but everyone knows you’re paying the public!” Rakesh shrugged,

People don’t mind that the crowd is paid. The public will come for money also, there’s no shame in this. Anyway, why will the public come if you aren’t going to pay them? You look powerful if you can manage such a huge public! You show you’re wealthy and strong by showing you can get the public.

If the hordes are hired, then is the size of a crowd simply a proxy for the wealth of its organizers? Rakesh demurred: “money alone cannot produce a crowd.” Rather, he went on, “to get the public, people have to believe that you can get work done.” ³² And indeed (and secondly) it seems people joined the rasta rokos largely out of curiosity; out of a desire – in the words of the woman who excused her friend to go home and cook lunch – to see “what happens.” ³³ That is, while the only direct accomplishment of the MLA’s roadblock was political performance itself, the significance of the performance must be understood in relation to the MLA’s demonstrated capacity to “get work done” – an accomplishment that speaks to broader hydro-political landscapes through which neighborhood residents access water on an everyday basis. In contemporary Mumbai, production and maintenance of the city’s built forms and infrastructures, as well all manner of business activity generally require mediation by someone with the knowledge and authority to successfully navigate the physical, legal, and economic opacities of the city. Everyday activities – accessing municipal water; applying for or renewing identity documents (passports, drivers licenses, ration cards, voter identification cards); securing permission from the municipal authorities to carry out home renovations; getting a child registered for school; applying for a school-fee waiver; registering a birth, marriage, or death in the family; starting a business; disposing of garbage; unblocking gutters; taking out a low interest loan – generally involve facilitation by someone who can not only provide needed information and technical assistance, but who can mobilize the various institutions of the state to any particular end. ³⁴ In Shivajinagar, for instance, mediation is particularly sought after when some work requires residency proof (a water new connection, for instance, or the transfer of an existing water connection to a better-pressurized location on the distribution network). ³⁵ In such cases, official applications have a better chance of being processed if directed through the office of a well-connected person (i.e. someone who “can get work done”) verifying the address of the applicant. Local plumbers and business people therefore maintain relations with networks of elected officials and government administrators through whose offices various kinds of “work” are carried out. Navigating the legal, political, and material opacities that characterize everyday life in the city (and perhaps especially for residents of the city’s popular neighborhoods) involves negotiating dense (and equally opaque) networks of mediation. Thus, when some “work gets done,” it suggests that someone has effectively penetrated – or perhaps even sidestepped – the thicket. ³⁶

Political mediation and ostentatious display

Italian Semiotician Umberto Eco recalls a thought experiment posed by Charles Peirce: “what kind of sign could have been defined by a drunkard exposed in a public place by the Salvation Army in order to advertise the advantages of temperance” (Eco, 1977: 109). While Peirce himself declined to answer the puzzle, Eco’s own formulation is powerfully suggestive:

As soon as he has been put on the platform and shown to the audience the drunken man has lost his original nature of “real” body among real bodies. He is no more a world object among world objects – he has become a semiotic device; he is now a sign […]. He stands for the category he belongs to [i.e., a drunk]. There is no difference, in principle between our intoxicated character and the word “drunk.” (Eco, 1977: 110)

Eco’s notion of ostention provides a powerful conceptual tool for making sense of the theatrical dimensions of rasta roko that I have been describing. Like Peirce’s drunkard, the absent/present engineer and the violent/restrained police are made to stand in for an “entire class” of activity – that of political mediation itself. Building on Eco’s formulation, I will characterize this kind of performance as ostentatious display. Indeed, given the opacities that comprise everyday life in Mumbai, ostentatious display indexes access and adeptness in mediating the city’s dense networks of power, knowledge, and authority. The signifying work is actualized in evidenced ability (and thus future potential) to mobilize and move the apparatus of the state (in this case the water bureaucracy and the police) for unspecified ends – ends which are open to speculation and interpretation. A well-timed, well-executed performance indexes the organizers’ ability to mediate (or to immediate) ³⁷ a demonstration in real time of practicable material authority. The MLA’s rasta roko quite viscerally demonstrated his power to orchestrate a spectacle (with the bottled water, the lunchboxes, the podium, the docile police, the band, etc.) while simultaneously demonstrating a capacity to derail the would be spectacles of others. ³⁸ This authority thus asserted itself as more “real” or authentic than that of the party whose event does not go as planned. The woman’s disdainful comment that “we’re wasting our time” when the Samajwadi Party road block met with resistance from the traffic police gestures toward this assessment. Indeed, as another astute observer commented after the Samajwadi Party’s disastrous event, “that was a fake ³⁹ morcha.”

How then might we characterize the power and authority that underpins ostentatious display? At first blush, the divergent trajectories of the two rasta rokos seem like a relatively straightforward case of party favoritism: with Congress in control of the Government of Maharashtra in 2009, ⁴⁰ it is not a far stretch to imagine the state-level Home Minister instructing the Chief of Police to “cooperate” with a Congress-led demonstration. ⁴¹ Yet my research reveals a more subtle dynamic at play. As a Samajwadi Party leader named Aslam explained, if it were so straightforward – if it were simply the case that the police crackdown on their rasta roko was predetermined by the shared political affiliation of the MLA and the Home Minister – then the party leadership would not have attempted the road block in the first place. According to Aslam, this kind of police-mediated sabotage of their spectacle would not have gone “as far up” as the Home Minister – who presumably has enough to do at the state level without concerning himself with a road block on an out-of-the-way street in a far-flung corner of Mumbai. Rather, Aslam explained, the MLA’s hijacking of the SP roadblock was possible because, as he put it, the MLA “has known the [zonal] Assistant Commissioner of police for a long time [because] was a councilor for five terms.” By this assessment, it was the MLA’s personal networks of contacts – “he knows everyone,” as the councilor put is – forged over more than two decades in public office that facilitated the hijacking. “Knowing everyone,” in other words, facilitates ostentatious display. The MLA’s ability to orchestrate the cooperation of the local police, of course, had limits – as the donkey drama suggests: Congress Party workers efforts to shame the Municipal Corporation with the presence of a donkey was effectively overruled by the police, suggesting that even the Congress Party’s largely to-script spectacle was infused by moments of contingency and decision. The police and the engineers seem to have gone along with performance only insofar as aligning with the Congress party MLA shored up (or at least did not compromise) their own authority. ⁴²

Conclusion

“There is nothing more illusory in performance than the illusion of the unmediated”

–Blau (1987)

Partha Chatterjee (2012) has recently called for a “paradigmatic shift” on the part of scholars of “mass politics” in India. The political rationality of the colonial-era mass political subject, Chatterjee writes, stemmed from “the location of the state and ruling authorities outside the bounds of the peasant community.” Mass politics was thus found to depart in crucial ways from the normative ideals of citizenship. Today, with the governmental apparatus penetrating “deep into the everyday lives” not only of the urban but even the rural poor, there is, Chatterjee suggests, no longer an “outside” to the state and its governmental apparatus (Chatterjee, 2012: 47). This means that contemporary forms of mass politics are less concerned with challenging the sovereignty of the Indian state from outside, but rather, with making “claims on governmental authorities over services and benefits” (Chatterjee, 2012: 47):

If one looks at the common techniques of mass agitation in India today – road blocks, disruption of train services, destruction of property, setting fire to vehicles, attacking government officials or the police – one would surely find genealogical links to older practices resorted to by rebellious peasants. But I believe it would be a mistake to try to understand these activities of contemporary mass politics within the theoretical paradigm of peasant insurgency. Just as the relation between rulers and subject has changed, so has the formation of the political mass. (Chatterjee, 2012)

Yet the accounts presented in this essay have also demonstrated how, in contemporary Mumbai, mass political crowd action works through a semiotic register of ostentatious display. By participating in the rasta rokos, voters communicate to party leaders – through the mechanism of cash for crowd – a potential willingness to support a bid for office. The crowd in turn becomes its own audience, watching eagerly to see how a drama will unfold – to see “what happens” when party leaders seek to perform (and thereby actualize) material authority over the roads, pipes, and police. Attention to the multiple directionality of political spectatorship in the context of mass political performance, Chatterjee’s insight that “just as relation between rulers and subject has changed, so has the formation of the political mass” thus needs some elaboration and qualification. These relations have indeed changed. While perhaps borrowing from the grammar of historical narratives (either real or imagined), the crowd today comprises a discerning audience of voters to whom political worth is displayed through virtuosic performances of power to mediate. At once an effort to produce, perform, and display public authority and powers of mediation, rasta roko is revealed as a deeply modern political practice – ostentatious, mass political street theater – dressed up in the clothes of peasant insurgency.