Political Communication Beyond “Truth and Lies”. Material Mediations, Public Assembly, and the Theatrical Idiom of Political Speech in Mumbai

This research project studies the theatrical register of political communication and representation in contemporary India, focusing specifically on the material production and enactment of mass-political assembly in the city of Mumbai. The project builds on a decade of ethnographic research in Mumbai that has studied political assembly – especially crowds that gather for public protests, sit-ins, processions, electoral rallies – as instances of political speech and representation. The research is motivated by the idea that taking theatricality and performance seriously as an idiom of political communication might chart a path through some of the theoretical impasses of the global political present, where political speech tends to be evaluated according to a simple binary – as either truth or deception. By contrast, ethnographic research into Mumbai’s vibrant, vigorous, and affectively charged material-political landscape reveals that attending to the theatrical register of political communication, mediation, and representation brings a richer array of ideas and evaluative frameworks into view.

My current goal of pursuing an anthropology of political assembly, mediation, and representation builds on my earlier published work on the everyday politics of infrastructural provisioning and access in Mumbai. For this project, I have carried out three phases of ethnographic research in Mumbai between 2012 and 2020. The first phase studied the role of election-season cash gifting and exchange in producing and reconfiguring socio-political networks of power and authority in the city. In contrast to popular and scholarly discourses on urban politics, bureaucratic “corruption” and political “clientelism”, the research instead found that election-season exchange animates intricate, contingent, highly speculative relational and informational networks by means of which democratic representation is actually produced and instantiated – and political contestations and substantive citizenship claims articulated. The second phase of research probed questions of “representation” by studying the explicitly theatrical register of contemporary Mumbai’s political life through its real-time material enactments. Rather than counterposing “theatricality” with “authenticity”, I instead analysed how theatricality works as an idiom of political communication, an instance of publicity, and a performative enactment of representation. The third, current, phase focuses on moralizing discourses about mass politics and public assembly: in Mumbai some mass gatherings are expected to be theatrical (that is, mediated) while others are expected not to be mediated but rather spontaneous. This project studies the fraught relationships between the moralizing talk about material mediations of theatrical crowds on the one hand, and the “irreducible materiality” (Keane 2007: 274) of communicative and signifying practices on the other.

Ethnographic attention to the materiality of mediation and representation raises crucial questions about the interrelationships among embodied and virtual crowds; this research thus attends to the recursivity in Mumbai between real-time instances of political speech, and the virtual “publics” that are assembled and circulated through social media on mobile phones. Indeed, despite the ubiquity of social media in political life (not only in Mumbai but globally), social science scholarship has little to say about the precise relationship between the technological mediations of platforms such as WhatsApp – the immediacy and intimacy of which counterintuitively produce an effect of direct, unmediated communication – and the real-time, overtly materialized modes of political mediation and utterance that are the staple of Mumbai’s political vocabulary (both explicitly theatrical mediations like rallies as well as public gatherings that profess to be unmediated). This research thus attends explicitly to this relationship between so-called embodied and virtual publics. Furthermore, training attention on the embodied, materialized, real-time character of those forms of mass-political assembly (that is, the gathering of bodies into dense proximity) that are presumed to be unmediated raises key questions about the material mediations and sensory affordances of digital platforms. The intellectual ambition of this project is thus to conceptualize crowd theory beyond affect.