Book review: Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury,Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh

In her remarkable book, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury asks: What kind of a political collective is a crowd? She begins from crowds on her way to understand politics. Without studying crowds, how would one understand the energy, agency and indeterminacy of mass politics? She persuasively argues that crowds are a paradox or, still better, a pharmakon, for they can be ‘both a solution and a scapegoat’ and are ‘at once a force to exploit and an entity to denigrate’ (p. 11 and p. 9). Some people can dismiss crowds as irrational and volatile, and yet the appearance of a crowd in the public space of the street can send a powerful political statement. In the history of Bangladesh, crowds have been part of revolutionary and nationalist movements.

Crowds are a difficult collective to study because they might seem homogenous, but they can be very heterogenous. They unfold on the street with great verve but then dissipate quickly as well, and they are an excess whose political import can never quite be understood or captured. To put it in Chowdhury’s own words:

It is in the crowds that one locates a similar kind of energy and excess that is the necessary pre-condition of imperceptible politics. That is why crowds remain subversive figures of political agency whose actions are never fully recoverable but still only available through political representation. (p. 26)

It is this contingent and imperceptible nature of crowd politics that Chowdhury seeks to analyse in chapter after chapter of the book.

Not all kinds of crowds have the same political edge, and Chowdhury’s careful parsing of colloquial Bangla words for different kind of crowds is a delight to read: The mundane ‘Bhir’ is what one encounters in the streets of Dhaka caught in a traffic jam while the word for the crowd with political potential is ‘Janata’. Another word ‘jonogon’ is reserved more for the state to address its populace. Then there is the crowd of a michhil, a meeting or a procession. When political leaders and celebrities address populations through speeches and letters, it becomes critical to notice the language of such an address. In the first chapter, Chowdhury deftly analyses a letter by Mohammad Yunus, the Grameen Bank chief, who during Bangladesh’s emergency period wrote public letters explaining his decision to join politics and then withdraw from it. In these letters, Yunus addresses his readers as a reading public of nagoriks (citizens) who can responsibly exercise their rights and duties and thereby differentiates them from members of an unruly crowd.

The book contains some evocative interviews and Chowdhury’s insightful interpretations of such interviews. In the second chapter, one such interview is Chowdhury asking Majeda (pseudonym) to recollect her encounter of being in a crowd of Phulbari agitators facing the adversary (Asia Energy officials). A large group of peasants were unhappy with open pit mining conducted by Asia Energy in Phulbari, and in 2006, the corporation along with the state had deployed border patrol guards to quell an agitation leading to the death of three men. Majeda had then come to the streets and protested these brutal killings. She was part of a crowd that vandalised the property of Asia Energy officials and reminisced to Chowdhury how she had burned down a chunk of cash notes that an official had hidden in a turmeric stack. At one level, the actions of this pillaging crowd could be viewed as a way for them to avenge the violence committed by the state and corporation. At another level, Chowdhury notes a feeling of thrill and satisfaction about seeing the money/cash burn for Majeda. The act of burning cash, Chowdhury argues, had an element of excess which could not be understood within the coordinates of planned or organised resistance. The crowd saw the Asia Energy official as having betrayed them by keeping one kind of value (cash/money) in another kind of value (food grains), which were grown by the peasant protesters. Chowdhury brilliantly encapsulates this in a phrase – ‘seeing like a crowd’. Furthermore, Chowdhury draws some fascinating connections between the energy of coal which is burnt to produce electricity for populations of Bangladesh and the energy of crowds which are protesting the mining of coal in the country.

Crowds are marked by contingencies, by the accidental, which is the theme of the book’s third chapter. People of Phulbari recall accidents that happened in the mines as well as those that happened during protests. One particular incident that Chowdhury discusses in detail is that of a young man Tarikul who had no interest in joining the procession protesting against the mining company. He was a bystander who had just come to watch the gathering. His cell phone fell from his pocket and as he was bending down to pick it up, he was shot. In the various retellings about the accident that Chowdhury heard, people speculated that most likely the guards who shot Tarikul must have thought that he was bending down to pick and throw stones. The unexpectedness of the accidental leads to interpretive possibilities. Even though Tarikul was only accidentally there at the protest site that day and had not espoused the political ideology of the political movement, his tragic death (due to its accidental nature) became included in the core script of the movement. Chowdhury explores this “accidental politics” with affect theory to understand the role that accidental encounters can play in shaping societal life. If accidents lead to speculations, anxieties, and unease, so does the figure of the collaborator.

Life as it unfolded in Phulbari amid agitations against Asia Energy’s mining activities was marked by distrust and suspicions about certain people in ones’ locality who were collaborating with Asia Energy against their own community’s interests. Some of these collaborators (dalals) were well known and labelled ‘chinnito dalal’ (marked collaborators), but discerning other kinds of collaborators was not always that easy. In the fourth chapter, based on her fieldwork in Phulbari, Chowdhury explains that one had to over time decipher from people’s way of talking as to where their sympathies lay (or whether they had been bribed by Asia Energy). The figure of the ‘collaborator’ in Bangladesh has a history: During the Bangladesh Liberation War of the early 1970s, people who had sided/connived with West Pakistan were often called dalals. Some of these collaborators were known to have moved to Phulbari in 1973.

Alongside the figure of collaborator, two other figures, that of the secular blogger and the militant nationalist, became central and novel in the 2013 post-Emergency agitations in Shahbag, Dhaka. These two figures became part of urban crowds, and TV channels and social media carried out surveillance exercises in discerning their conduct through CCTV footage and cell phone videos. Chowdhury analyses in the fifth chapter (titled ‘The Body of the Crowd’) how these figures of the blogger and religious radical took centre stage in multiple articulations of justice with respect to their differing positions on the work of the International Crimes Tribunal set up in 2009 to investigate the genocide committed in 1971. Chowdhury reiterates why it is important to study politics not just through the liberal public sphere model but also through the illiberal perspective of the crowd: ‘What happens, one might ask, when we start with the crowd—and the possibilities of politics that it opens or forecloses—as constitutive of South Asian political modernity and not an aberration from it’ (p. 197).

Students interested in theories of public sphere, crowd behaviour and cultures of politics will find reading this book to be rewarding. Extending and critiquing earlier work on social psychology of crowd behaviour by Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud, Chowdhury signals the need for studying the crowd in relation to political action, mass publicity and democracy. She engages in a sustained conversation with contemporary scholarship on public culture and political life, most notably by political theorist Bonnie Honig (on ‘public things’) and anthropologist Francis Cody (about rethinking the public sphere from an illiberal perspective). Questions about the (il)legibility of voices in crowds and/or considerations of individual subjectivities (including religious and gendered ones) within heterogenous crowds are important to be asked about contemporary populisms. While exploring such questions, this book is in dialogue with important anthropological work in South Asia and Southeast Asia about protest performances and political subjectivities by Laura Kunreuther and Rosalind Morris.

Chowdhury analyses a wide variety of mediations of crowds with great sophistication: from novels by Mahmudul Haque to paintings by Saiful Islam, from film posters to graffiti and billboards, from CCTV footage to cartoons. This is an essential book to understand crowd politics not just in South Asia but beyond, especially as generative connections can be drawn with Arab Spring and Occupy movements, and with various protest cultures inflected by varied environmentalisms across the world.