Emotions, mobilisations and South Asian politics 9781138282261, 113828226X

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and acronyms
1 Contentious emotions: An introduction
PART I Bringing emotions back into South Asian political mobilisations
2 The processes and contexts of emotional involvement
3 Participatory and adversarial politics: Representing speech action, collective action and emotion
4 Remembering and accessing the 'emotions of things': A methodological journey with a jihadist militant in Pakistan
PART II Major historical shifts in the public expression of emotions
5 Anger, hurt and enthusiasm: Mobilising for violence, 1870-1920
6 From court to public sphere: How Urdu poetry's language of romance shaped the language of protest
PART III Subverting and cementing power relations with emotions
7 Emotions as fuel: The passage of anti-sexual harassment legislation in Pakistan
8 It's effective because it's affective: The dynamics and significance of emotions in a Delhi Jan Sunwai
9 The deployment of resentment in counterinsurgency: The case of Chhattisgarh
PART IV Directing affects across the elusive boundaries of the political
10 Mobilising anger in Andhra Pradesh: The emotional politics of the angry young man and popular Telugu cinema
11 Hope and nostalgia in Bengal: The longing for Netaji in a contemporary millennial movement
12 Dialectics of (De)mobilisation: Humour in Islamic sermons of contemporary Bangladesh
PART V The emotional dynamics of public controversies
13 Hurt and censorship in India today: On communities of sentiments, competing vulnerabilities and cultural wars
14 Death, despair and democracy in Bangladesh
Glossary
Index

Citation preview

‘This remarkable volume brings together the best recent developments in the humanistic social sciences on affect, embodiment and politics. In addition, its authors provide brilliant ethnographies of a wide range of movements which exemplify the centrality of the emotions to mobilisation of every type in South Asia.’ Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, USA ‘This collection of essays offers a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the role of emotion in South Asian politics and its methodological ramifications. Case studies and theoretical chapters explain the power of emotions in the making of collective action as well as individual trajectories on the basis of psychological and sociological considerations, which are neither culturalist, nor divorced from culture. This is one of the finest attempts at understanding one of the most complex objects of social sciences.’ Christophe Jaffrelot, CNRS Senior Researcher, CERI-Sciences Po, Paris, France ‘What moves social movements? When and how do movements move us? In offering us a beautifully curated set of reflections on emotion in South Asian public life, Blom and Tawa Lama-Rewal at the same time enrich our understanding of democracy as a global project.’ William Mazzarella, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, University of Chicago, USA

EMOTIONS, MOBILISATIONS AND SOUTH ASIAN POLITICS

This book highlights the role of emotions in the contentious politics of modern South Asia. It brings new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights to the mutual constitution of emotions and mobilisations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As such, it addresses three distinct but related questions: what do emotions do to mobilisations? What do mobilisations do to emotions? Further, what does studying emotions in mobilisations reveal about the political culture of protest in South Asia? The chapters in this volume emphasise that emotions are significant in politics because they have the power to mobilise. They explore a variety of emotions including anger, resentment, humiliation, hurt, despair, and nostalgia, and also enchantment, humour, pleasure, hope, and enthusiasm. The interdisciplinary research presented here shows that integrating emotions improves our understanding of South Asian politics while, conversely, focusing on South Asia helps retool current thinking on the emotional dynamics of political mobilisations. The book offers contextual analyses of how emotions are publicly represented, expressed and felt, thus shedding light on the complex nature of protests, power relations, identity politics, and the political culture of South Asia. This cutting-edge research volume intersects South Asian studies, emotion studies and social movement studies, and will greatly interest scholars and students of political science, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural studies, and the informed general reader interested in South Asian politics. Amélie Blom is part of Adjunct Faculty in Political Science at Sciences Po, Paris, and at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), Paris, France. Her research addresses the politicisation of Islam in Pakistan, particularly in Punjab. Her publications include The Enigma of Islamist Violence (2007, co-edited with L. Bucaille and L. Martinez) and ‘Emotions and the Micro-foundations of Religious Activism: The Bitter-Sweet Experiences of “Born-Again” Muslims in Pakistan’ in Indian Economic and Social History Review (2017). Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal is a National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Research Fellow at the Center for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), Paris, France. She studies political representation, local democracy and urban governance in India. Her publications include Democratization in Progress: Women and Local Politics in Urban India (with Archana Ghosh, 2005) and Governing India’s Metropolises (co-edited with Joël Ruet, 2009).

EXPLORING THE POLITICAL IN SOUTH ASIA Series Editor: Mukulika Banerjee, Director, South Asia Centre and Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science Exploring the Political in South Asia is devoted to the publication of research on the political cultures of the region. The books in this Series present qualitative and quantitative analyses grounded in field research, and explore the cultures of democracies in their everyday local settings, specifically the workings of modern political institutions, practices of political mobilisation, manoeuvres of high politics, structures of popular beliefs, content of political ideologies and styles of political leadership, amongst others. Through fine-grained descriptions of particular settings in South Asia, the studies presented in this Series inform, and have implications for, general discussions of democracy and politics elsewhere in the world. DALITS IN NEOLIBERAL INDIA Mobility or Marginalisation? Edited by Clarinda Still WHY INDIA VOTES? Mukulika Banerjee Criminal Capital VIOLENCE, CORRUPTION AND CLASS IN INDUSTRIAL INDIA Andrew Sanchez THE POLITICS OF CASTE IN WEST BENGAL Edited by Uday Chandra, Geir Heierstad, Kenneth Bo Nielsen POLITICS, LANDLORDS AND ISLAM IN PAKISTAN Nicolas Martin EMOTIONS, MOBILISATIONS AND SOUTH ASIAN POLITICS Edited by Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/ Exploring-the-Political-in-South-Asia/book-series/EPSA

EMOTIONS, MOBILISATIONS AND SOUTH ASIAN POLITICS

Edited by Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this book are solely those of the authors and do not reflect those of the publisher. The representations and analyses based on research material are intended here to serve general educational and informational purposes and not obligatory upon any party. The authors and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information presented in the book was correct at the time of press, but do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability with respect to the accuracy, completeness, reliability, suitability, selection and inclusion of the contents of this book and any implied warranties or guarantees. The authors and publisher make no representations or warranties of any kind to any person or entity for any loss, including, but not limited to special, incidental or consequential damage, or disruption – physical, psychological, emotional, legal, or otherwise – alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by omissions or any other related cause. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-28226-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28870-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of illustrationsx List of contributorsxi Acknowledgementsxiii Abbreviations and acronymsxv   1 Contentious emotions: An introduction

1

AMÉLIE BLOM AND STÉPHANIE TAWA LAMA-REWAL

PART I

Bringing emotions back into South Asian political mobilisations

35

  2 The processes and contexts of emotional involvement

37

CHRISTOPHE TRAÏNI

  3 Participatory and adversarial politics: Representing speech action, collective action and emotion

46

LISA MITCHELL

  4 Remembering and accessing the ‘emotions of things’: A methodological journey with a jihadist militant in Pakistan

68

AMÉLIE BLOM

PART II

Major historical shifts in the public expression of emotions

93

  5 Anger, hurt and enthusiasm: Mobilising for violence, 1870–192095 MARGRIT PERNAU

vii

C ontents

  6 From court to public sphere: How Urdu poetry’s language of romance shaped the language of protest

113

CARLA PETIEVICH

PART III

Subverting and cementing power relations with emotions

133

  7 Emotions as fuel: The passage of anti-sexual harassment legislation in Pakistan

135

SADAF AHMAD

  8 It’s effective because it’s affective: The dynamics and significance of emotions in a Delhi Jan Sunwai151 STÉPHANIE TAWA LAMA-REWAL

  9 The deployment of resentment in counterinsurgency: The case of Chhattisgarh

168

NANDINI SUNDAR

PART IV

Directing affects across the elusive boundaries of the political

185

10 Mobilising anger in Andhra Pradesh: The emotional politics of the angry young man and popular Telugu cinema

187

IMKE RAJAMANI

11 Hope and nostalgia in Bengal: The longing for Netaji in a contemporary millennial movement

205

RAPHAËL VOIX

12 Dialectics of (De)mobilisation: Humour in Islamic sermons of contemporary Bangladesh MAX STILLE

viii

222

C ontents

PART V

The emotional dynamics of public controversies

241

13 Hurt and censorship in India today: On communities of sentiments, competing vulnerabilities and cultural wars

243

LAETITIA ZECCHINI

14 Death, despair and democracy in Bangladesh

264

NUSRAT SABINA CHOWDHURY

Glossary281 Index287

ix

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 11.1 A VSD public meeting in Kolkata: the stage backdrop shows Balak Brahmacārī (left) looking directly at Subhas Chandra Bose (right) 11.2 A chromo popular among VSD members, showing Netaji (left) in the role of Arjuna and Brahmacārī (right) in the role of Krishna

210 215

Table   4.1 Modular ways of accessing activists’ emotions through interview-based narratives

x

81

CONTRIBUTORS

Sadaf Ahmad is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. Amélie Blom is part of Adjunct Faculty in Political Science at Sciences Po, Paris, and at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), Paris, France. Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury is Assistant Professor in anthropology at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA. Lisa Mitchell is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Margrit Pernau is Senior Researcher at the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Carla Petievich is Visiting Professor at the South Asia Institute of the University of Texas at Austin and Professor Emerita of History and Women’s Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, USA. Imke Rajamani is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Max Stille is a researcher at the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, India. Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal is a National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Research Fellow at the Center for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), Paris, France.

xi

C ontributors

Christophe Traïni is Professor of Political Science at the Institute of Political Science in Aix-en-Provence, France. Raphaël Voix is a Research Fellow in social anthropology at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS) in Paris, France. Laetitia Zecchini is a Research Fellow in literature and cultural studies at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France.

xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the outcome of an intensely collective research project called EMOPOLIS (Emotions and Political Mobilisations in the Indian Subcontinent) that benefited from the funding of the City of Paris’s ‘Emergence(s)’ programme – to which we express our deep thanks. Other institutions provided valuable support along the four years of the project. First of all, the Centre for South Asian Studies (CNRS-EHESS), whose material, intellectual – and emotional! – support was immensely appreciated. We want to thank especially Naziha Attia, the Centre’s general secretary, for her unfailing commitment to the smoothest possible administrative management of this project. This volume greatly benefited from the ongoing dialogue and collaboration with our colleagues, and contributors, from the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin), notably its India Focus Group. In this regard, our deepest gratitude goes to Margrit Pernau, who was a source of inspiration, unfailing support and stimulation. Finally, the Centre de Sciences Humaines (Delhi) was generous enough to welcome our midterm conference – we thank its director and staff. Indeed, the project was implemented through a series of workshops and conferences held in Paris, Berlin and Delhi, which brought us a wealth of incisive comments, difficult questions and powerful ideas from a large group of colleagues based on three continents. We wish to thank in particular Martin Aranguren for the exciting conversations in the sociology of emotions. This book owes a lot as well to the contributions of Debaditya Bhattacharya, Mira Hashmi, Lotte Hoek, Peter D. McDonald, William Mazzarella, Sandhya Devesan Nambiar, and Rina Ramdev during a conference organised by EMOPOLIS in Paris in May 2014 on ‘When Book and Art Hurt: Censorship, Emotions, and Cultural Regulation in South Asia’. Our deepest gratitude also goes to the following scholars who discussed the work presented here at different stages of its progression: Yasmeen Arif, Amita Baviskar, Jayani Bonnerjee, Philippe Braud (a pioneer in the political study of emotion in France), Joel Cabalion, Vanessa Caru, Minati Dash,

xiii

A cknowledgements

Jean-Hugues Déchaux, Mahmood Faruqi, Laurent Gayer, Nicolas Jaoul, Christophe Jaffrelot, Nida Kirmani, Malvika Maheshwari, Denis Matringe, Salil Misra, Mujibur Rehman, Srirupa Roy, Aurélie Varrel, Claude Markovits, Denis-Constant Martin, Dirk Moses, Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Tanika Sarkar, Rukmini Sen, Dilip Simeon, Tulasi Srinivas, Amrit Srinivasan, Tarangini Sriraman, Némésis Srour, and Ravi Vasudevan. The engagement in the project of some colleagues was temporary yet very valuable as well: Aminah Mohammad-Arif, Véronique Bénéï and Fabiene Gama. Throughout the course of this challenging exploration into the life of political emotions in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors to this volume proved to be extremely precious academic friends: Christophe, Lisa, Margrit, Carla, Sadaf, Nandini, Imke, Raphaël, Max, Laetitia, and Nusrat, we feel so fortunate to have had the chance to work with you. Our intellectual exchanges through the successive workshops but also through reading and commenting on each other’s work have been an incredibly rich learning process. Thank you all as well for bearing with the multiple rewritings involved in this publication. Finally, this book would have never existed without Mukulika Banerjee’s enthusiasm about this project and without Maheen Pracha’s wonderful copy-editing. We also thank the Routledge team for their unfailing competence, reactivity and patience.

xiv

ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

AASHA ACF ASA BJP BNP CPI-M CRPF CSO ICT INA IPC JOSH LT LTTE MKSS NA NAC NCPCR RTE

Alliance Against Sexual Harassment Anti-Corruption Force Ambedkar Students’ Association Bharatiya Janata Party Bangladesh Nationalist Party Communist Party of India (Maoist) Central Reserve Police Force civil society organisation International Crimes Tribunal Indian National Army Indian Penal Code Joint Operation for Social Help Lashkar-e Taiba Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan National Assembly (of Pakistan) National Advisory Council National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights Right to Education Act (Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009) SAHMAT Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust Scheduled Caste SC Special Police Officer SPO Scheduled Tribe ST Telugu Desam Party TDP United Nations Development Programme UNDP Uttar Pradesh UP Vaidik Santan Dal VSD

xv

1 CONTENTIOUS EMOTIONS An introduction Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal

‘Ashamed to be an Indian’, read the placard held by a young man during a protest in New Delhi in December 2012, shortly after a female student was gruesomely gang-raped and died of her injuries. ‘We love cricket. We love Sri Lanka’: two demonstrators wrote this on a poster they put up at the crossroad where the Sri Lankan cricket team had been attacked by a sectarian Islamist group in Lahore in March 2009. Heads bowed and eyes filled with tears, thousands of people marched through Dhaka in April 2015, holding up pictures of their relatives – garment workers killed during the collapse of the Rana Plaza building two years earlier. Emotions matter a great deal in politics in South Asia as elsewhere because, among other things, they have the power to mobilise. Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh alluded to such power when, trying to put a label to the wave of protests triggered by the New Delhi gang-rape, he said: ‘It would be a true homage to [the victim’s] memory if we [were] able to channel these emotions and energies into a constructive course of action’ (BBC 2012). Indeed, policymakers are very aware of the importance of emotions in politics and know that getting people to share in the concerns of others, to take an interest in a problem, a crisis, or issue that is not part of their intimate lives, depends on making a specific connection between the observed grievance and one’s emotional response. (Marcus 2002: 86) They spend a great deal of time, therefore, in trying to manage people’s emotions (and their own) to inspire trust and enthusiasm or fear and obedience, depending on the context. Emotional control is such a crucial site of the exercise of power that some scholars suggest redefining politics as the ‘process of determining who must repress as illegitimate, who must foreground 1

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as valuable, the feelings and desires that come up . . . in given contexts and relationships’ (Reddy 1997: 335). Even if this redefinition of politics is not acceptable to all, there is consensus that, truly, a range of emotions is attached to power relations – vanity, pride, anger, and humiliation, among others. Such relations also shape the public expression of emotions; not everyone has the same right to express public anger, for instance, as is demonstrated amply in this volume. A growing number of scholarly works show that emotions, both negative (such as fear, anger, hatred, disgust, grief, sadness, indignation, shame, guilt, and resentment) and positive (such as trust, compassion, love, pride, pleasure, and joy) are not only pervasive in political life but also have explanatory power. They shed a new light on classic questions related to political regimes, governance, participation, mobilisation, and violence (see, among others, Ahmed 2013; Barbalet 2006; Braud 1996; Clarke, Hoggett and Thompson 2006; Flam and King 2005; Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2001b; Gould 2009; Marcus 2002; Thompson and Hoggett 2012; Traïni 2009). After all, what is voting if not the expression of an aspiration or a disillusion? Could clientelism function without displays of trust and gratitude? Isn’t the aim of terrorist attacks to instigate ‘terror’ in people’s hearts? And what about the new kinds of social movements formed in the name of public outrage, such as the Spanish Los Indignados? Taking stock of these important scientific developments, this book proposes to explore politics in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh through the specific prism of emotions. It focuses on the role of emotions in mobilisations – an important but underexplored topic. The everyday politics of South Asia are made up of an impressive number and variety of collective actions in public spaces. Some employ peaceful means, be they conventional – street demonstrations, dharnas [collective sit-ins], rallies, strikes, hunger strikes, petitions, and public hearings – or informal, such as art, literature and music. Others use violent means such as riots or armed militancy. They can be progressive or conservative, secular or religious, local or national. The interdisciplinary team of contributors to this volume – political scientists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and specialists in cultural studies – bring to attention both the vibrancy and the diversity of collective action in South Asia in terms of form, object and ideology. They address historical topics: communal riots in late 19th-century North India (Pernau), participatory protests in South India (Mitchell) and dissident Urdu poetry in Pakistan (Petievich). They also look at contemporary India, at public hearings in Delhi (Tawa Lama-Rewal), the civil war in Chhattisgarh (Sundar), a film star’s electoral campaign in Andhra Pradesh (Rajamani), a millennial Hindu sect in contemporary Bengal (Voix), and artists campaigning against censorship (Zecchini). Mobilisation in Pakistan is approached from both sides of the spectrum, so to speak: jihadist militancy in the late 1990s (Blom) and Islamabad-based feminist advocacy groups (Ahmad). The 2013 2

C ontentious emotions

‘Shahbag movement’ (Chowdhury) and religious gatherings of the wa’z mahfil genre (Stille) reflect the variety of mobilisations in contemporary Bangladesh. The book aims to demonstrate the specific value of South Asia for cross-cultural comparisons of the relationship between emotions and mobilisation – a relationship encapsulated here in the notion of ‘contentious emotions’. A great variety of such emotions are explored: anger, resentment, humiliation, hurt, despair, and nostalgia, as well as enchantment, humour, hope, and enthusiasm, among others. The explanatory status of emotion varies too. Some contributors take emotion as the explanans – what explains the mobilisation; others address it as the explanandum or what needs to be explained. But all share the conviction that integrating emotions will improve our understanding of South Asian politics while, conversely, focusing on South Asia might help retool current thinking on the emotional dynamics of political mobilisation.

Bringing emotions back in Once at the centre of the study of politics, emotions receded into the shadows when rationalist, structural and institutional models began to dominate academic analysis in the 1960s and after.1 The ‘affective turn’ taken by the social sciences since the 1990s has brought back emotions as a legitimate entry point to understanding society and politics. This was made possible by the recognition that emotions are ‘not non-rational’ (Calhoun and Solomon 1984: 31). The appraisal theory – the most widely shared in the sociology of emotions so far – reminds us that emotions, by definition, suppose an object (event or situation) that is immediately evaluated or ‘appraised as harmful or beneficial’ (Aranguren 2013). As such, emotions are intertwined with reason. They support rationality, providing it with salience and goals (Elster 1999), as neuroscience has proven.2 The renewed interest in the role of emotions in social and political life also came with the acknowledgment that they cannot be confined to psychology alone. They are intrinsically social. They are embedded in – and some would say ‘constructed by’ – social interactions and, in turn, sustain such interactions through their communicative function (Déchaux 2015). Logically, the study of social movements has benefited from these inputs. No collective mobilisation would be possible, in the first place, without people being initially moved by the issue at stake. Emotions cannot be ignored any longer. While a social movement can be defined as ‘any collective action oriented by a concern for promoting a public good or for repealing a public evil, that gives itself adversaries to fight against, so as to make the process of participation, redistribution and recognition possible’ (Cefaï 2007: 15), the concept of ‘mobilisation’ refers to the process of getting or, more precisely, moving people to share such concerns and act collectively. Mobilisation is, 3

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therefore, strongly connected to emotions almost by definition, as the common etymology of these two words indicates. Mobilisation, ‘to render movable’ (initially used in a military sense), comes from the Latin ‘movere’ (‘to move’), while the word ‘emotion’ comes from the Latin ‘emovere’, to ‘move out’ (Ahmed 2013: 11). However, the entanglement of affects and protests cannot be resolved in terms of definitions alone. It is far more complex. Indeed, emotions operate in social protests from the microlevel processes by which bystanders become participants, to the emotional repertoires that activists draw upon when pitching their case in different settings, to the organizational mechanisms through which particular emotions are managed, to the macrostructural shifts responsible for making certain emotions legitimate motivations for protest as argued forcefully by three pioneers in the exploration of emotions in social movements, Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2004: 414). The role of emotions has become one of the liveliest subfields in the study of social movements over the last decade or so. In the study of social movements, the ‘affective turn’ came initially in reaction to the narrow focus on interests and resources that characterised the field – itself a reaction against the psychological explanation of crowd behaviour that prevailed from the 19th century until the 1950s.3 Second, it was a reaction against the (too) broad structuralist focus on political opportunity that had dominated mobilisation studies since the 1970s. Bringing emotions back in thus helped analysts to ‘reanimate the sometime robotic image of humans’ (Lutz and White 1986: 431) that theories of collective action had purveyed so far. It is important to note, however, that the new approach does not aim to replace ‘old’ explanatory factors with a ubiquitous ‘emotional variable’. It sees emotions – and we share this view – as an explanatory factor of political mobilisations, not just in addition to more classical factors but also in relation to them. Indeed, ‘the factors that social movement scholars deem important for mobilization – e.g., political opportunities, organization, frames – have force precisely because of the feelings that they elicit, stir up, amplify or dampen’ (Gould 2014: 639). The affective turn in social movement studies produced a set of innovative and sophisticated conceptual tools. At the micro-sociological level, the concepts of ‘moral shock’ (Jasper 1997) and ‘moral battery’ (Jasper 2011) helped make sense of the individual motivation to join a collective action. The concepts of ‘emotion work’, ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1979) and ‘sensitising devices’ (Traïni 2010) proved extremely useful in explaining the meso-level of protests, i.e., the group and organisational strategies used to mobilise people. At the macro-level, that of the state and institutions, 4

C ontentious emotions

concepts such as the ‘emotional-institutional context’ (Flam 2005) and the ‘emotional politics of the state’ (Blom 2008) also proved heuristic. All these conceptual tools have found their way into the present volume. Nonetheless, this exciting new literature suffers, we argue, from three important weaknesses. First, it deals almost exclusively with Western politics and societies – a problematic ethnocentric bias in the conceptualisation both of emotions and their political role. Second, the theoretical and methodological difficulties involved in defining, observing and analysing emotions are not adequately addressed. Third, only rarely does this literature build on empirical, inductive and contextual observation of the political role of emotions to test the validity of dominant generalisations regarding the causality link between emotion and action. Let us detail these three research gaps, which are what stimulated the research project that engendered this book.4

Emotions in South Asian politics: nowhere, everywhere The role of emotions in South Asian protests has long been neglected both by specialists of social movements and by South Asianists. The region is indeed the parent pauvre of comparative studies on emotions and contentious politics.5 As a consequence, our general understanding of how emotions and protests intersect is almost exclusively informed by Western-based empirical studies of mainly progressive collectives (mobilising for humanitarian and environmental causes and for the rights of minorities, women, peasants, LGBTQI+, and so on). Conversely, if the study of social movements underwent a sudden shift in the 1970s in India, reflecting the multiplicity of mobilisations that characterised political life in the country (Oommen 1990), it failed to take emotions into consideration. Beside a large number of monographs focusing on one particular movement (by and for women, Dalits, tribals, peasants. . .), a series of works offering an overview of this literature testify that, although the field witnessed important theoretical and methodological changes, emotions were not considered a valid entry point to understanding such mobilisations (see Omvedt 1993; Rao 2000; Ray and Katzenstein 2005; Shah 2004). Subaltern studies from the 1980s onwards and the rich body of work it produced – focusing on that mother of all mobilisations, the anti-colonial movement – took a new interest in the affective dimension of popular protests and in ‘affective histories’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 18). But if emotions were noticed (often in connection with the religious dimension of the ‘subaltern consciousness’), commented on and occasionally analysed, their significance was limited to a series of remarks in passing. This may be explained by the historiography of the subject, by a rejection of the colonial reading of political emotions. Indeed, ‘the ascription of emotions, of the right and the wrong ones, played an important role in the colonial discourse on civilisation’, 5

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especially to argue that the colony was not ready for self-government, as Pernau astutely notes (forthcoming). How emotions participated in this disciplinary project, which incidentally survived well into the postcolonial state in other forms, is discussed later. Research on that other mother of all (violent) mobilisations, the communal riots of Partition, also left an unambiguous legacy insofar as emotions were concerned – they were either ubiquitous or entirely absent. The famous debate between Paul Brass and Francis Robinson on the origin of the Pakistan movement, which was very much, even if implicitly so, about the causal role of emotions, illustrates this point.6 Brass attributed the rise of the Pakistan movement to the quest for political leverage among ashrāf [noble-born, of Syed descent] Muslims in the United Provinces through the manipulation of symbols, myths and emotions. Robinson rejected this ‘instrumentalist’ view and argued that the emotional attachment to a distinct religio-political identity among Muslims was the impetus. The academic debate over communal violence became locked in sterile opposition between genuine and manipulated emotions. By and large, Brass’s thesis won the battle: emotions were generally understood as a ‘mask’ behind which political interests, the ‘real’ motivation, were hidden (Brass 1997). Similarly, Tambiah’s comparative work on communal riots, for instance, dismisses the emotional impact of ‘triggering actions’ (challenges, slights, insults, and desecrations inviting reprisal): these are epiphenomenal as against ‘a number of other interests and differences, whose contention and resolution are at the heart of the matter’ (1996: 233–4). The instrumentalist reading proves problematic for several reasons, as will become clear in the following pages.7 This false dichotomy between fake and real emotions was nevertheless challenged successfully by relocating subjectivities and affects in their interactional context (Hansen 1996; Pandey 1990).8 The tendency to overlook emotions is even more surprising when one considers that they assume particularly lively forms of display in South Asian public spaces: party activists expressing their joy after an electoral victory will often dance in the streets9 and toss coloured powder on one another. A regular pattern of street politics in South Asia is that ‘emotions, valorised as pure and authentic expressions from the body, are pitted against regular politics, stigmatised as the impure realm of politicking, deals and compromises’ (Blom and Jaoul 2008). The expression of anger or despair, for instance, after the death of a political leader can be particularly dramatic and go as far as suicide in South India (see Venkatesan 2002). Such deaths also transform elections into a medium of expressing emotions. This was the case after Benazir Bhutto’s murder before the 2008 elections in Pakistan: many voters used the electoral channel to express their grief. In India as well, the elections that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination were marked by a sudden increase in the rate of voting participation and by a record number of elected women. 6

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Emotions are largely ignored in studies on South Asian politics, but they are widely studied in non-political (or less obviously political) fields. Love, desire and compassion, for instance, are the subjects of important historical research (Orsini 2006; Pernau 2017b). Religious anthropology is suffused with descriptions and analyses of the feelings associated with faith, devotion and worship. There is even a significant collective anthropological work that provides a systematic inquiry into the emotional life of South Asian societies and very rich discussions on such emotions as anxiety, joy and humour (see Lynch 1990a). Indeed, anthropologists of South Asia have offered subtle analyses of particular emotions, Appadurai being a key point of reference with his writings on gratitude (Appadurai 1985) and praise (Appadurai 1990). For a similar focus on a certain emotion in the political field, one had to wait until the 2000s for Michelutti’s (2004) analysis of the role of caste pride in the electoral mobilisation of the Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh, and for Guru’s (2011) collective volume on humiliation, which shed light on political phenomena such as caste-based discrimination in India. Fortunately, there has been a renewed interest in the role of emotions in South Asia’s political life. This has come from historians explaining, for instance, the prevalence of the language of civility in late 19th-century India as the result of a convergence between its legitimising function for the colonial ruler’s ‘civilising mission’ and the reformists’ need to disqualify the public expression of ‘excessive’ religious emotions, believed to distract individuals from their political duty (Pernau et al. 2015). The role of emotions in middle class formation, especially through gender ideologies, has also been explored in the colonial period by Sinha (1995) and postindependence by Ciotti (2012). Important works on emotions towards the nation, towards specific communities and towards language have emerged as well. Benei’s (2008) study of schooling in Maharashtra, for instance, explores how nationalism is translated into a visceral emotion through specific bodily performances (such as flag raising and songs) and semantic practices (linking different figures of the ‘mother’). Very recently, the Indian Economic and Social History Review (see Pernau 2017a) published a special issue that takes an emotion-centric approach to explaining community formation in South Asia10 and shows how communities are ‘imagined’ through shared feelings.11 Some researchers on collective action in South Asia have also become more interested in emotions. Few as they are, their work is, fortunately, most inspiring. Some are pioneers, such as Freitag’s (1989) seminal work on the role of ‘popular devotionalism’ in providing ‘a shared language in which to argue’ and express community feelings in 19th-century North India’s public arenas. Another historian (and a contributor to this volume), Mitchell, provides an emotion-based analysis of the linguistic movements that shook South India in the 1950s and 1960s – a result of new forms of ‘emotional commitments’ towards the ‘mother tongue’ (Mitchell 2009). 7

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Finally, a 2008 special issue of the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal develops the thesis that South Asia demonstrates an acute sense of outrage in collective actions, to the point that ‘outraged communities’ constitute a specific repertoire of action (Blom and Jaoul 2008). This intuition is developed further by Ramdev, Nambiar and Bhattacharya (2016) in their highly original book on the rising incidence of ‘hurt’ that is used to justify more stringent censorship in India. Recent studies of specific political mobilisations in South Asia have displayed a new willingness to engage with an analysis centred on emotions: works focusing on women as participants and/or objects of mobilisation, for instance, about female combatants in militant wars (Parashar 2015; Roy 2011) or the ‘anti-rape protests’ that shook Delhi in 2012 (Ahmed, Jaidka and Cho 2017). The Dalit movement also figures prominently in this new interest in the affectual dimension of protest in India (see Dutta 2016; Jaoul 2008). Recent studies on political violence have also adopted an emotion-centred approach. In his ‘geography of anger’, Appadurai (2006) explores the fear that majority population feel about minority groups who challenge the fantasy of national completeness attached to the modern nation-state, leading to rage, and a desire to purify the land of the minority. If this thesis echoes Sudhir Kakar (1996)’s work on ‘the subjective experience of religious hatred’ in ‘Hindu-Muslim violence’ in India, the psychoanalytical perspective on a ‘Hindu’ and a ‘Muslim psyche’ is here wisely replaced by a sociologically grounded discussion on the minority/majority political dialectics. Another anthropologist, Oskar Verkaaik (2004), deeply enriches our comprehension of the role of fun in political violence through his study of the Pakistanbased Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) – highlighting the pleasure of transgression and of reversing socially ascribed roles in the process. More recently, a study of the 2006 anti-Danish cartoons protest in Lahore stresses the need for an integrated research map that connects the various levels at which emotions operate during a riot (Blom 2008).12 Finally, another contributor to this volume investigated the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat through the prism of ‘affective stigmatizations’ (Sundar 2004). Clearly, the ‘emotion turn’ is slowly finding its way into analyses of South Asian politics. Yet we still lack systematic study and comparative work in this field. This is what the book aims to provide by fostering a dialogue between South Asian studies, the sociology of social movements and emotion studies. As such, its nature is more exploratory than explanatory. Indeed, on the one hand, several conceptual tools from social movement theory and emotion studies are tested in a South Asian context, such as the notions of ‘moral shock’ and ‘emotional benefits’ to account for mobilising emotions (Blom) or the role of ‘sensitising devices’ (Ahmad, Tawa Lama-Rewal and Voix), for instance. On the other, South Asia is far from being understood as

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just a field of application: it is also a field of inquiry that engenders valuable analytical contributions on how emotions and mobilisations interact.

Defining, accessing and documenting emotions The growth of a rich and inspiring literature on the affectual dimension of social movements in the West, as well as increasingly in South Asia, is good news for anyone convinced that people, being ‘inherently social [are] connected to each other and larger collectivities by innumerable feelings’ (Flam 2015: 1). Yet such works have paid little attention to the theoretical and methodological challenge of accessing and documenting most of the emotions to which they refer. On the contrary, this is something our contributors were asked to self-reflect on systematically, and Blom’s chapter in particular is dedicated to this methodological problem. What is it that we call emotions? This ontological question of the nature of emotions occupies much of the literature in the history, anthropology and sociology of emotions and, consequently, in the works on contentious emotions inspired by this literature. The question is linked intrinsically to a (passionate) debate about the respective roles of nature and culture, our genes and our socialisation, in what we feel and how we express these feelings. This opposition between supporters of a naturalist versus a constructionist view of emotions is old, rich and important. In the debate on emotions, Ahmed (2013) summarises this juxtaposition as being either located ‘inside’ and moving outside (the psychologistic approach) or being ‘outside’ and moving ‘inside’ (the sociologistic account, which focuses on internalised feeling rules). In a nutshell, these debates are organised along a series of binaries: nature/culture, body/mind, sensation/cognition, individual/society, occurrence/disposition. ‘Emotion’ is certainly a wide and heterogeneous category and its many definitions depend both on epistemological preferences and disciplinary ones. Indeed, even sociologists differ among themselves on how ‘emotions’ differ from ‘feelings’. An emotion is said to be a ‘bodily cooperation with an image, a thought, a memory – a cooperation of which the individual is aware’; it denotes ‘a state of being overcome that “feeling” does not’ (Hochschild 1979: 551). For others, the distinction is that ‘feeling’ relates to vague impressions and non-reflexive perceptions, while ‘emotion’ describes ‘the activity, undertaken by a reflective conscience, of selecting and transforming the information received from feelings’ (Traïni 2010). Emotions would, therefore, imply a minimum of reflexivity and intersubjective comprehension. Unlike feelings, they are inseparable from cognitive valuations as well as learnt and internalised social rules. However, ‘feeling’ defined in this way is what another sociologist calls ‘affect’. Drawing on Brian Massumi’s research, Gould (2009: 19–21) juxtaposes ‘affect’ as an

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‘unspecified and unstructured bodily sensation’ with ‘emotions’, defined as ‘the expression of affects in gesture and language’. Finally, others claim that the relevant distinction is between ‘bodily urges’, ‘reflex emotions’, ‘moral emotions’, and ‘moods’ (Jasper 2006).13 The fact that several typologies coexist and that none of them seems to evoke any (even terminological) consensus among scholars suggests that their usefulness is relative. This is also why ‘feeling’, ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ are used interchangeably in this volume. Perhaps the present state of our (still limited) knowledge of how emotions, cognition and behaviour interact should caution us against any rigid definitions. Accordingly, we chose, as a team, to remain agnostic on the nature of emotion: we left our contributors free to use whichever description and theory of emotions worked best for them. However, since readers might find it difficult to navigate these chapters without a working definition of emotion, as editors we have opted for one that allows scientific flexibility as well as rigor. Emotions are, therefore, understood at minima as ‘experiential, physiological, and behavioural responses to personally meaningful stimuli’ (Mauss and Robinson 2009: 209). Definitions such as this, which are inspired by the appraisal theory and a psychological model known as the ‘component process’ or ‘componential model’, seem to enjoy the widest acceptance in the sociology of emotions today.14 As mentioned earlier, proponents of the appraisal theory converge on considering that an emotion, or more precisely an ‘emotion episode’, begins with an appraisal of the personal significance of an object, event or situation – a split-second and non-conscious appraisal – which, in turn, gives rise to an emotional response. An emotion is indeed a temporal episode: ‘an episode of massive synchronous recruitment of mental and somatic resources to adapt to, or cope with, a stimulus event that is subjectively appraised as being highly pertinent to the needs, goals and values of the individual’ (Scherer 2005a: 312). The response to this stimulus involves, in turn, subjective experience, physiological or body states, and action tendencies. As Scherer (2009) puts it, all these elements compose the ‘dynamic architecture of emotion’, and there are so many complex feedback loops and interactions among them that it is almost impossible, or at least very difficult, to isolate any one component. The definitional problem is not the only reason why accounting for the role of emotions in South Asian politics is, theoretically and methodologically, a daunting task. Anyone embarking on this journey is confronted by the uneasy tension between an ethnocentric bias and a culturalist one. On the one hand, the available theorisations of emotions are based solely on experiments located in the West – an unsatisfactory state of affairs. On the other, any theory that holds that emotion (the term and the experience) is a fact of culture – such as the constructionist approach to emotions – is criticised

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heavily for its extreme relativism. We will return to this when addressing the role of the cultural context in the public expression of emotions. It is, nevertheless, important to stress at this stage the differences between a Western theory of emotions and the one prevailing in India that centres on the concept of rasa [juice or quintessence].15 According to this theory of (aesthetic) emotions, permanent emotions – inherent in all human beings – differ from transitory emotions.16 Therefore, ‘aesthetic forms ought to activate an emotion already present in participating members of the audience who must cultivate their own aesthetic sensibility’. In other words, ‘the major purpose of dance, drama, ritual, and poetry is not mimetic, cathartic or didactic; rather it is catalytic’ (Lynch 1990b: 17–18). Moreover, the Indian concept of the mind-body relationship also differs, at least as developed in traditional medicine or Ayurveda. It implies that ‘emotions are not separate from, nor lower than reason’, rather they are generally understood as ‘moral appraisals’ (Lynch 1990b: 19). This explains why, until the end of the 19th century, there was no Urdu or Persian word for ‘emotion’ understood as the ‘movements of the soul we recognise as emotions’ in the West (Pernau, this volume). Finally, the terminological distinction between ‘feelings’, ‘affects’ and ‘emotions’ identified earlier does not have any strict equivalent in vernacular languages. In Urdu, for instance, the terms ehsās (usually translated as ‘feeling’) and jazba (usually translated as ‘emotion’) do not convey the difference between what is sensed and what is objectified. The nuance lies more in degrees of intensity: being jazbātī evokes an excess of emotions that are hard to control. Looking at the growing body of literature on emotions and mobilisations, another issue struck us. The theoretical debate on what emotions are tends to leave in the dark another fundamental, more methodological question: how do we access people’s emotions? What constitutes ‘evidence’ when we examine emotions from a social sciences perspective? The ontological question in our research was displaced, therefore, by a methodological concern that aimed at going beyond the intuitive approach found too often in the literature. Indeed, ‘from an intuitive layperson perspective, it should be easy to determine whether someone is experiencing a particular emotion. However, scientific evidence suggests that measuring a person’s emotional state is one of the most vexing problems in affective science’ as Mauss and Robinson (2009: 209) note. This is why all the contributors to this volume take as a prerequisite the need to specify the emotion-exploring instruments they have used. The intricacies of accessing emotion are best understood when one breaks down the process into two distinct, but interrelated, methodological issues. First, what type of emotion data is it possible to collect? There are many ways of pursuing emotion.17 Our chapters echo this diversity. The data analysed in this book come from a large variety of sources: historical documents

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and administrative archives, oral interviews, direct observation of political meetings or religious sermons, audio and video records, filmic visuals, press articles, activist literature, poems, films, and books. These data can be classified broadly as (i) emotional discourses and (ii) emotional practices – or, to use Zecchini’s more elegant formulation, ‘the language and performance of emotions’ (this volume). The first category includes many types of discourse, including media, administrative, activist, religious, artistic, and poetic discourses. Yet, language and performance, discourse and practice are not always easily distinguishable, as shown by Petievich’s discussion of the mushā’ira [forum for poetry recitation], by Rajamani’s film analysis or even by Ahmad’s study of lobbying strategies. This brings us to a second, and much debated, problem. Researchers on emotions in social and political life agree that both discourse and practice inform us about emotions, but they differ on which aspect of an emotion this applies to. An analytically indispensable distinction in this regard is that between the representation of emotion (how people’s emotions are represented by others), the expression of emotion (by verbal and non-verbal markers) and the experience of emotion (the emotion felt). Most chapters in this volume are concerned with the expression of emotions – in protests, in sermons, in activist literature; some study the representation of emotions – in the press, in poetry, in films; a few investigate the experience of emotions – in interview situations, in activism, in rituals. As will soon become clear, getting at this experience, or what Flam calls ‘catch[ing] emotions in flagrante’ (2015: 17), is the hardest task. The relationship between the expression and representation of emotion on the one hand and the experienced emotion on the other is the subject of fierce debate in emotion studies. After all, many combinations are possible. A representation of people’s emotion can differ from what they actually feel, as when the apparent passivity of photographed people is mistaken for indifference (see Blom, this volume). A person can also, ‘for example, hide an experience by faking the expression (poker face); express an experience incorrectly (by unintelligible signals); or fake a non-experience by faking the expression (politeness)’ (Czarniawska 2015: 69). People can even work on their feelings to bring both their emotional expression and experience into line with what a situation requires (Hochschild 1979). The first difficulty lies in determining whether experienced emotion is accessible, or even important, to social scientists – not to mention the problem of determining whether what we qualify as a specific emotion (sadness, shame, anger, etc.) is indeed this to the people we are studying. To access emotion, psychologists have used brain states, behavioural features and selfreported measures. Social scientists use only the last two, but these are not easy to work with either. Tears do not necessarily imply a state of sadness (one might cry in rage, frustration or even tiredness). And someone might declare being ‘sad’ as a means of manipulation, for instance. 12

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Some argue that autobiographical narrative interviews would help us get to ‘real feelings’ or ‘taboo emotions’ (Flam 2015: 12–13). Such an instrument may reveal ‘taboo emotions’ through Freudian slips, self-contradictions, speech and story disruptions, and metaphors – all signs that the researcher can record. First-person narrative is an extremely useful instrument for exploring the expression of emotions (see Blom, this volume). Yet assuming they can take us to ‘taboo emotions’ runs the risk of interviewers mutating into lay-psychoanalysts. Unsurprisingly, the most convincing attempts in this regard bring to the surface the suppressed emotions not of the interviewee, but of the interviewer (Gammerl 2015; Gould 2015). The opposite view holds that the ‘authentic emotion’ is either a non-issue or impossible to pin down. From a ‘hard’ constructivist view, it is a non-issue because there is nothing to emotion beyond the local discursive structures through which it is configured and practiced. There is no difference between ‘authentic’ subjective feelings and the prescribed emotion internalised and thus felt (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990, for instance). As conceptual historians of emotion show, however, this runs the risk of reducing the experience of emotion to language alone because such an approach fails to capture the meanings that can be derived from emotional expressions in other media such as film, painting, music, or even food (Pernau and Rajamani 2016) or what Rajamani (2012) calls ‘multimedial semantic nets’ (see also Rajamani, this volume). Finally, scholars such as Czarniawska see pinning down felt emotions as an elusive goal because only what has been socialised into people is accessible: While I would agree that the separation of the expression of an emotion and the experience of an emotion makes a great deal of sense, I do not see how the relationship between the two can be examined by anything other than speculative means. (Czarniawska 2015: 69) In this case, contrary to the constructivist view, the expression of emotion and the experience of emotion are recognised as possibly different, but the point is that only the former is accessible. This is what Scherer thinks as well: ‘there is no access other than to ask the individual to report on the nature of the experience’ (2005b: 712). People’s accounts of emotions – how they speak about their own and others’ emotions in different times, cultures and circumstances – is all there is to know and all that needs to be known. Hence, this approach is also called the ‘rhetoric of emotions’. But again, focusing on people’s accounts of emotions alone deprives us of the chance to examine the disjuncture between what people feel and what they say or show they feel – either because such feelings are prescribed by the situation or because they have a specific strategic and/or communicative purpose. This is precisely what matters in the ‘dramaturgical’ or ‘emotion 13

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management’ perspective that has proved so useful to many contributors to this volume. For its most illustrious proponent, Arlie Hochschild, people do not just perform emotions, but they also try to align their feelings with the emotional expression a given situation might demand. This involves ‘emotion management’ or ‘emotion work’, both concepts defined as ‘the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling’ through ‘deep acting’ (Hochschild 1979: 561).18 Thus, people are capable of distinguishing between what they feel and what they think they should feel to conform to the dominant ‘feeling rules’ – Hochschild’s term for the ‘guidelines’ used to assess the ‘fits and misfits between feeling and situation’ (1979: 566). Moreover, this discrepancy is accessible to social scientists. It should even be a priority for those interested in how emotions and power relationships intersect. Indeed, it is because this search for conformity can become unbearable that, as Flam (2015) notes, people resort to what James Scott (1990) calls the ‘hidden transcript’ as modes of resistance. While we deem it important to present to the reader the terms of this (ongoing) debate, we do not intend to defend any one approach against the other. Each has its own epistemological value. The effort to access ‘taboo emotions’ calls for analytical sensitivity to the emotional interaction between social scientists and their object of study. Social constructivism helps take into consideration local discursive structures and feeling rules. The ‘rhetoric of emotions’ perspective demonstrates a refreshing scientific humility. The ‘management of emotions’ approach has the courage to interrogate the distance between the expression of emotions and their experience. This is why the present volume has opted for theoretical eclecticism in accommodating contributors’ preferences. Several chapters rely on the ‘management’ approach (Ahmad, Tawa Lama-Rewal, Traïni, Voix) while others share a more constructivist stance (Chowdhury, Pernau, Sundar). A third group, interested in prioritising the language and performance of emotions, put aside (carefully) the problem of participants’ feelings (Mitchell, Petievich, Rajamani, Stille).

Contextualising contentious emotions The challenge is no longer to convince one’s peers that emotions are a legitimate object, but to offer an account of the exact role and function of emotions in real-life situations (Aranguren and Arquembourg 2015). This is why the volume adopts a case-study approach. Employing dense and wide-ranging empirical data, its contributors have developed a thick contextual analysis of how contentious emotions are publicly represented, expressed and felt in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They collectively demonstrate the usefulness of thinking ‘more deeply about the place of contexts in explanatory theories of mobilisations’ (Traïni, this volume). This 14

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is important because ‘feelings are context-bound, meaning their sources, objects, and effects are contingent, unpredetermined, and variable’ (Gould 2015: 169). The contexts that figure prominently in this regard are the scientific, historical, cultural, and political environments in which emotions are accessed, represented, expressed and, at times, experienced. The first context that shapes the public expression of emotions – and one that is often underestimated – is that of inquiry. We have already referred to how important it can be (in the previous section) because different modes of data collection have distinct analytical implications. A critical introspection of the conditions of research thus improves our knowledge of the role of emotions in protest. This route is taken by Blom, whose chapter focuses on the impact of methodological choices on our understanding of jihadist militancy in Pakistan. She asks how a specific emotion-exploring instrument, the autobiographical narrative in oral interview, can encompass different ways of documenting the emotions of militants. This methodological focus is also useful if one is to ‘defamiliarize one’s common sense’ about the key emotion at play in a protest movement – to use Gould’s (2009) expression in her self-critical account of attributing ACT UP’s origins to anger alone. Blom thus calls into question the idea that frustration and humiliation are the key emotions that drive jihadists. In addition, and as Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2001a: 13) state: Moral outrage over feared practices, the shame of spoiled collective identities or the pride of refurbished ones, the indignation of perceived encroachment on traditional rights, the joy of imagining a new and better society and participating in a movement towards that end – none of these are automatic responses. They are related to moral intuitions, felt obligations and rights, and information about expected effects, all of which are culturally and historically variable. Let us consider the historical context first. Emotions have a history. Given the impressive developments in the history of emotions over the last two decades, this is now becoming a truism.19 Several concepts coined by historians of emotions have made important inroads into the study of past and present societies such as ‘emotional regimes’ (Reddy 2001) and ‘emotional communities’ (Rosenwein 2006), for instance.20 History matters a great deal to anyone interested in the affectual dimension of political protests in South Asia. The following questions must be asked: How have the political, social and moral rules and norms governing the public expression of religious emotions evolved over time? How have sensibilities changed? What relationship was there between people’s representations and expressions of emotions on the one hand, and their knowledge of them on the other? Margrit Pernau and her colleagues from 15

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the India Focus group at the Centre for the History of Emotions (in Berlin) as well as other historians mentioned earlier (see, among others, Mitchell 2009; Orsini 2006; Ramaswamy 1997) are pioneers in this field of South Asian study. The contribution of historians is invaluable in our present exploration of emotions in South Asian political mobilisations, first, because they point to the need for a different chronology and understanding of the repertoire of collective action than the one we have inherited from Europe-based studies. This is Mitchell’s argument in this volume: ‘modular, state-directed forms of contentious collective assembly . . . emerged much earlier in South Asia than in Europe, at least as early as the 1660s’. Second, the imprint of the colonial predicament on modular forms of protest needs to be taken into account. This predicament can take the form of a cultural misunderstanding, as in the British interpretation of Hyderabadi assemblies analysed by Mitchell (this volume). Third, historians demonstrate that contentious emotions are anything but fixed and static. Pernau’s chapter highlights historical shifts in the social representation and political performance of a major emotion at play in a series of violent incidents in North India between 1870 and 1919 – namely, josh or enthusiasm (for defending one’s religion). Moreover, what activists say about their emotions depends on what they know about them and what they can say publicly about them. Within a more limited time-frame, Rajamani analyses evolutions in the conceptualisation of anger, in a series of Telugu ‘mass films’ centring on ‘Megastar’ Chiranjeevi in the 1980s and 1990s, and then on ‘Power star’ Pawan Kalyan 30 years later. She argues that popular cinema has, over these four decades, played a key role in ‘conceptualising, teaching and mobilising’ anger as ‘a virtue of political leadership’. Fourth, historians help us identify intriguing continuities. Petievich’s chapter demonstrates the enduring meaning and strength of an ancient repertoire of protest. Her detailed, subtle analysis of the works of two poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib, allows us to understand how the ‘language of romance’, central to Urdu poetry, has ‘shaped the language of protest’ in Pakistan. As ‘the authorised voice of aspiration’, she shows, Urdu poetry has become a channel of expression for political dissent in a context marked by strong censorship both before and after independence. Mitchell, too, pinpoints the continuities in the use of emotion tags, so to speak, to deny the political dimension of some forms of collective action. She shows how the Indian English press of today – just like British officials in colonial India – describes demonstrations carried out by the dominated as mere expressions of anger, thereby reducing communicative acts to displays of ‘excess’. If the contours of how historical contexts affect the public expression of contentious emotions do not stir controversy, this is not the case with the cultural context. Emotions are learnt in ‘local moral orders’ (Harré 1986: 6) – this is one of the main contributions of the social constructionist/ 16

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constructivist approach. This is why, writes Mauss ([1921] 1969: 277), ‘many sorts of oral expressions of feelings . . . are essentially, not exclusively psychological phenomena, but social phenomena, marked by the sign of non-spontaneity and of the most perfect obligation’. The diversity of human emotional expressions (if not experiences) derives from the diversity of the ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1979) that emanate from such moral orders. Indeed, several chapters in this volume investigate how such orders operate in situ: in poetic gatherings (Petievich), in films (Rajamani), in religious sermons (Stille), and in art (Zecchini). Yet one needs to be cautious with the ‘cultural variable’. The first pitfall to be avoided is ignoring human plasticity when confronted with ‘rules’ and ‘orders’. Researchers on South Asia have demonstrated how an emotion as strongly socially constraining and codified as gratitude, for instance, is never simply a matter of following established rules and recipes: gratitude is not devoid ‘of a sense of uncertainty, of strategy, of risk’ (Appadurai 1985: 240). The second pitfall is that of reducing emotions to ‘mere reports’ (Reddy 1997) while their sources might well be independent of social contexts, whether neurological or psychological. Hence, to argue that ‘local moral orders’ determine not just how emotions can be expressed publicly but also how they are felt – as per the strong constructionist stance – is, for Reddy, not only wrong, but even verges dangerously on anti-universalism.21 We can accept, at minima, that ‘the language of emotions does not determine the emotions; rather, it creates, delimits and structures a field for possible feelings’ (Pernau, this volume). Thus, if we want to avoid imposing our own knowledge on the historical actors we are investigating, we need to look at the cultural construction of emotions at the conceptual level. This is even more important given that many of our contributors deal with specifically South Asian emotion terms that do not have a direct translation. This is the case with josh in Pernau’s study of the expression of zeal in 19thcentury riots in North India, with ghairat in Ahmad’s exploration of the role and embodiment of honour in a Pakistani feminist campaign against sexual harassment, with āvēdana [anger; suffering] and vīramū [heroism] in Rajamani’s analysis of the politics of emotion in South India. These authors are well aware that ‘finding [the place of a social emotion] in the emotional economy of another culture is a problem not simply of translation but of discovery and of interpretation’ (Appadurai 1985: 236). Finally, there is no way of understanding how emotions affect mobilisations without taking into account the political context. This includes what Flam and King call the ‘emotional-institutional context’ of political life, i.e., how some institutions work to cement, sanction or subvert the public expression of emotion (2005: 19). Mobilisations necessarily bear the imprint of an institutional-emotional context, and especially that of state institutions, if only because ‘a leading function of the political state is to legitimate some emotions and differentially encourage, contain and dissuade others’ 17

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(Barbalet 2006: 32). Moreover, the legal-institutional context is often crucial for emotions to enter politics through the law (Ahmed 2013; Zecchini, this volume). Truly, it is impossible to understand the violent protests against blasphemy in Pakistan, for instance, without considering how the state legitimates the public display of certain emotions (people are supposed to and expected by the law to feel anger and react angrily if the Prophet is ‘insulted’), but disqualifies others (interfaith tolerance). Such ‘emotional politics of the state’ (Blom 2008) are particularly important to observers of contentious politics in South Asia because the colonial legacy of emotionalising political subjects has survived through the postcolonial state (see the following section). Bringing the context back in through its various dimensions – methodological, historical, cultural, political – helps complicate the relationship between emotions and mobilisations. Indeed, and as we demonstrate amply in the next section, the link between emotions and protest is far from unequivocal.

What do emotions do to mobilisations? Our case studies collectively demonstrate that taking emotions seriously helps to better understand how political mobilisations work in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is achieved by unpacking several questions that are often subsumed under the usual phrase ‘paying attention to emotions’ (or ‘emotions matter’) and making explicit the different dimensions of the emotions concerned. As we will see, the chapters illustrate two distinct, but related, ways in which emotions and mobilisations nurture one another: (i) what emotions do to mobilisations and (ii) what mobilisations do to emotions. What do emotions do to mobilisations? This question is the most pervasive in social movement studies and focuses on the affectual dimension of mobilisations. Yet it is often addressed in an ambiguous manner that fails to distinguish between the strategic role of emotions in politics and their causal effect on political attitudes and behaviours.22 The dialectical pair ‘mobilised emotions/mobilising emotions’ (Latté 2015) is useful in clarifying this. Mobilised emotions refer to those emotions that are worked on strategically by leaders through ‘emotion work’ and ‘sensitising devices’ (Tawa Lama-Rewal, this volume; Traïni 2010). Mobilising emotions describes the process by which emotions move individuals to action (joining an organisation or protest event). In operationalising this dialectic in our empirical case studies, we have come to understand that it corresponds to two complementary facets of contentious emotions in their interactional and communicative functions: the expression of emotions can reflect either an intention (the mobilised emotion) or motivation

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(the mobilising emotion). This, we think, is an important theoretical finding of this collective exploration of the role of emotions in protests in South Asia. Let us first consider mobilised emotions. Mobilisations rarely erupt or develop spontaneously. They are shaped by the work of ‘social movement entrepreneurs’ (McCarthy and Zald 1977) or ‘issue entrepreneurs’ who frame the issue and organise the protest. Focusing on these leaders drives us to interpret the question ‘what do emotions do to mobilisations?’ in a somewhat different way, namely, as ‘what do people do with emotions to mobilise others?’. In other words, which emotions are mobilised by issue entrepreneurs as they try to evoke, incite and encourage participants in that movement? The focus here is on the ‘management of emotion’ or the ‘emotion work’ carried out by leaders and activists, with questions such as: do leaders attempt to mobilise hope, shame or anger to attract participants? Do they capitalise on pride or guilt to maintain commitment? Do they work on empathy and sympathy to attract bystanders? Traïni’s notion of ‘sensitising devices’ helps operationalise what is called the ‘management of emotions’ approach in social movements studies, insofar as it looks specifically at ‘the material support, the arrangement of objects, and the staging that activists deploy in order to inspire the affective reactions that predispose those who experience them to support the proposed cause’ (2010: 233). It asks the researcher to identify precisely and describe the many different elements that contribute to emotion work – not only speech and image but also spatial arrangement, body language and so forth. Tawa Lama-Rewal’s chapter, offering a situational analysis of a jan sunwai [public hearing] that took place in New Delhi in 2011, shows that this relatively new form of collective action is a sensitising device par excellence. Careful observation of its main constituents (the spatial disposition of participants, the opening song, the vocabulary used in discussions, etc.) leads her to argue that the jan sunwai is a ‘double-edged sensitising device’ insofar as it targets two kinds of participants in order to achieve different, but converging, ends. Traïni’s theoretical chapter in this volume, however, urges us to avoid a mechanistic conceptualisation of sensitising devices and to consider the processes of ‘emotional involvement’ in all their complexity. Besides the strategic dimension of the emotion work carried out by activists, he writes, we must be aware of the essential ‘serendipity’ of emotions, which makes it impossible to treat any given emotion as merely a resource or an explanatory variable in a given mobilisation. Those emotions mobilised by activists through various sensitising devices will not necessarily be the same emotions mobilising the audience they are targeting. Moreover, in working on other people’s emotions, activists also work on their own feelings, wittingly or not.

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Stille’s chapter adds yet another important nuance to this complex picture. Based on an analysis of the rhetoric of the wa’z mahfil (a popular Islamic sermon genre) in contemporary Bangladesh, he draws our attention not only to the importance of humour in religious speech but also to its ambivalent role in mobilising listeners. Humour – an essentially ‘polydirectional’ emotion – is used by preachers to mobilise their community of listeners by uniting them ‘against the powerful’. However, the parody that ridicules opponents, Stille shows, ‘has a self-distancing effect’ that can ultimately demobilise the audience. Voix’s chapter also offers a nuanced account of sensitising devices in his analysis of the use of nostalgia (for a lost, and reinvented, past) and hope (for a better future) by the leader of a millennial movement in Bengal. Indeed, he shows that both emotions resonate with potential followers because they are embedded in the region’s political history (see later discussion in this chapter). Let us now turn to mobilising emotions. It is clear from the previous theoretical and methodological discussions that these emotions, which refer to individual motivation, are the most vexing aspect of our exploration, indeed of any inquiry into the effects of (mobilised) emotions on people’s political actions. Three chapters focus on this motivational dimension of emotions. Blom discusses how felt emotions can account for the decision to join, stay with or leave a jihadist group in Pakistan. Based on the ‘exemplary narrative’ of a former recruit of the Lashkar-e Taiba, she discusses the methodological difficulties of accessing such mobilising emotions in general, and even through what might be considered the most reliable instrument – self-reports in a biographical interview. She also stresses the processual and incremental dimension of how emotions change along every step of the road towards militancy and violent action. Pernau reflects on the emotions motivating people who participated in processions and riots, in her analysis of three violent incidents in North India between 1870 and 1919. Through a parallel reading of different discourses on emotions – by the colonial administration, the Anglo-Indian press, Muslim intellectuals, and Gandhi – she demonstrates that a great variety of emotions and emotional practices, both individual and collective, are hidden by the vague, socially biased and intellectually obscure idea of ‘the emotional crowd’. Sundar’s chapter also focuses on felt emotions and what they do. She studies the civil war between Maoist guerrillas and state counterinsurgents in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, ongoing since 2005. Based on a large series of interviews and a deep, long-standing knowledge of this conflict, she argues forcefully that resentment – a particularly complex emotion – motivates the mobilisation of the two main actors of the counterinsurgency: the leaders of state-sponsored vigilante groups and the police. Resentment, she shows, is fed by the objective situation of people belonging to either group, as their lives are marked by the entanglement of ethnic, political and class rivalries. 20

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Finally, Ahmad’s chapter explores the relationship between mobilising and mobilised emotions while adding another crucial dimension: the norms that govern the expression of political emotions. Analysing the successful mobilisation against sexual harassment led by the Alliance Against Sexual Harassment (AASHA), a Pakistani women’s rights organisation, she illustrates perfectly the fruitfulness of navigating these three levels of observation and analysis. The chapter highlights how the individual trajectory of AASHA’s founder made her particularly sensitive to the issue of sexual harassment; it then describes the collective rituals whereby AASHA activists shared their emotions and nurtured those necessary to sustain a long and difficult struggle. Ahmad also presents a fine analysis of how activists have made strategic use of the emotion norms that govern Pakistan’s patriarchal society in general, and its male-dominated Parliament in particular, to achieve the passage of a bill that confronts patriarchy.

What do mobilisations do to emotions? We come now to the second direction taken by our research on the affectual dimension of mobilisations in South Asia, namely, how engagement and protest affect, or alter, people’s feelings. Indeed, an important part of the literature shows how mobilisations might change the way people feel about themselves, about the situation they are facing and about their adversaries. This happens, first, because individual emotions become collective emotions in the course of a protest: The ritualized sharing of instigating or initiating emotions which brought individuals to the collective gathering in the first place (outrage, anger, fear, etc.) gives rise to distinctively collective emotions, the feelings of solidarity, enthusiasm, and morality which arise in group members’ mutual awareness of their shared focus of attention. (Collins 2001: 29) There are indeed strong collective emotions derived from the very activity of protesting: ‘collective affection, enthusiasm, joy, even wonder, at possibilities for social change; the pride of revaluing a stigmatised identity; the many pleasures of protest, from erotic attraction to avoidance of boredom’ (Jasper 1997: 108). The occupation of Dhaka’s central square in 2013 and the sheer energy of the protest itself brought such extraordinary hope of political change to Shahbag protestors, shows Chowdhury (this volume), that their encounter with the reality of ‘religious politics’ became even more distressing. But mobilisations might also transform ‘feeling rules’ because they ‘offer a radically different emotional (re)-framing of reality’ (Flam and King 2005: 12).23 This is precisely what Tawa Lama-Rewal attempts to show. She 21

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argues that the political efficacy of public hearings as a mode of collective action lies in their capacity (in the best case) to assert and nurture, through the emotion work of the organisers, the ‘feeling rules of citizenship’. Because mobilisation changes emotions, it can also trigger demobilisation – an important issue to us because ‘in understanding the disengagement we also gain insights into the grounds for engagement and consolidation (of social movements)’ (Flam and King 2005: 9). Blom (this volume) shows, for instance, how the ‘affective dissonance’ between the positive emotions attributed to the new role of mujahid [one who wages jihad in the way of God] and the negative emotions felt as part of the militant group (disgust, disappointment, even fear) was a major factor in the disengagement of jihadist recruits. Chowdhury’s chapter on the aftermath of the Shahbag movement also addresses demobilisation through the prism of political despair. She offers a stimulating interpretation of the rapid demise of the movement, which started with demands for the death penalty for war criminals and evolved towards demanding a ban ‘on all religious politics’ – only to face a strong backlash that targeted so-called ‘atheist bloggers’. Some mobilisations can also affect the emotional-institutional context in which they take place, by endowing a given emotion with a new political status and, therefore, a new performativity. For instance, Zecchini’s analysis of the controversy surrounding the work of the painter M. F. Husain shows how ‘hurt’ has progressively become a major justification for claims – but also counter-claims – of censorship in India. She suggests that the mobilisations of attackers as well as supporters of the famous painter helped justify the invocation of ‘hurt’ in the public space, which ultimately led to a form of political legitimisation of this emotion.

What do emotions say about contentious politics? Finally, what is it that studying emotions in mobilisations reveals about South Asian politics? Looking closely at the mutual constitution of emotion and mobilisation demonstrates the symptomatic role of emotions – an aspect we did not anticipate would prove so critical. Emotions, indeed, ‘reveal’ something beyond themselves. In the various case studies presented, the expression and representation of emotions in mobilisations proved to be a valuable indicator of the transformative nature of politics in at least four dimensions: (i) power relationships, (ii) state disciplinary tactics, (iii) identity politics, and (iv) the porosity between different fields of social action. Several chapters in this book show compellingly that the public expression of emotions in mobilisations is a subtle but rich ‘sign of power relationships’ (Déchaux 2015). The link between emotions and class positions (Ahmed 2013; Barbalet 2001, 2006) has already been stressed, but it has not been much explored as far as South Asia is concerned (with the exception

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of Guru 2011). In this volume, we approach the question from two distinct, but connected, angles. The first is: who has the right to express specific feelings in the public space? For instance, in the public hearing observed by Tawa Lama-Rewal, the fact that a certain category of participants expressed their emotions more frequently, loudly and articulately than others can be interpreted as a sign that it was they who dominated the proceedings. The observation that the feelings of certain categories of people are more authorised in the public space than others brings to the surface the dominant ‘feeling rules’, which we can now see are a major constraint to the mobilisation of dominated groups. Thus, the feminist organisation that Ahmad studies had to ostensibly acknowledge (to better subvert) the patriarchal worldview that dominates Parliament in Pakistan to achieve its objective: the passage of a comprehensive bill against sexual harassment. Power relationships are revealed through not only which category of people are authorised to express their feelings publicly, but also which feelings they are authorised to express. Anger is a case in point because of its intrinsic judgmental dimension. In liberal democracies, anger is considered the prerogative of the powerful – something the powerless find hard to display and they, therefore, must often ‘reclaim the right to be politically angry’ (Flam and King 2005: 4). Anger confronts any regime with a dilemma: because popular anger always threatens the dominant group’s status quo, it must be domesticated through ‘strong . . . political norms that seek to suppress [its] expression’. But there is the equally important necessity of ‘listening to anger [that] may lead to a constructive public dialogue about the fairness of any political order’ (whereas repressing it could provoke more damaging resentment), notes Holmes (2004: 127). However, an epistemological risk is attached to focusing on the emotions of the powerless and dominated alone, as stressed by Mitchell’s chapter. Taking as her point of departure the representation by the Indian press of a recent mobilisation by Dalit students in Hyderabad, she shows how the description of this protest as an ‘expression of anger’ in effect disqualifies it as political action. Her essay links this recent event to a broader investigation of the norms and forms of ‘political practice’ in the Indian Subcontinent and how these conflict with colonial, Eurocentric conceptions in this regard. This leads us to the second way in which emotions attached to mobilisations reveal power relationships, namely, how they are represented. The pervasive and stereotypical images in the Indian media of the ‘enraged Kashmiri’ or the ‘angry Dalit’, for instance, attributing to their feelings a visceral irrationality, show that anger can be represented as either righteous (and then the privilege of the powerful) or as mere noise, deprived of any meaning (hence, attributed to the dominated). The subtlety of Mitchell’s argument is that it is not just attributing anger to the Other that actualises power but

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also that ‘only the form or rhetorical style’ of an emotion becomes ‘visible and audible’ rather than its ‘illocutionary dimension’ or ‘specific intended meaning’ (Mitchell, this volume). Contentious emotions reveal another important dimension of the region’s politics. They bring to the surface the state’s disciplinary tactics, to use a Foucauldian concept. How such tactics rely on emotions is best exemplified by the British Raj’s blasphemy laws that survived in the postcolonial states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – though Pakistan made these laws harsher by introducing the death penalty in the 1980s. A wide range of political parties in the Subcontinent – the Muslim League in Pakistan, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India – have ensured the permanency of this ‘political culture of self-expression’, i.e., a conception of individuals as ‘inward-looking and self-contained subjects whose sole purpose [is] the selfexpression of their inner essences’ and not their social or economic rights (Daechsel 2006). The specific way of emotionalising political subjects is thus nurtured by a political culture obsessed with abstract wars between metaidentities meant to stimulate an emotional state of empowerment. Thus, in India, the BJP, when in power, expects Hindus to be enraged by inter-caste marriage or the artistic representation of goddesses deemed inappropriate. Indeed, the emotion-based disciplinary tactics of the state explain why particular ‘vocabularies of motives’ (Polletta and Amenta 2001: 309) prevail in certain historical periods while others disappear or decline. The revived ubiquity of the political register of ‘hurt’ in present-day India, the prevalence of a ‘vocabulary of vulnerable political subjectivities, constantly living in fear of difference and critique’ is precisely what authorises an expansion of the scope of censorship and violence against perceived outrage to the majority’s feelings, note Ramdev, Nambiar and Bhattacharya (2016) – a situation captured by the powerful title of their book, The State of Hurt. This important intuition is developed further in this volume by Zecchini’s chapter. She addresses the circulation of the rhetoric of ‘cultural regulation’ and its association with the language and ‘performance of hurt’ between state institutions and social movements on the one hand and between conservative and progressive mobilisations on the other. A close reading of the discourses produced, respectively, by the Indian Penal Code, a Hindu nationalist organisation and an artists’ collective, allows the author to highlight parallel, competitive claims to the ‘rights’ conferred by the status of ‘hurt’ or ‘wounded’ communities. She thus offers an interpretation of this controversy as a case of ‘emotional war’ between ‘communities of sentiments’ (Appadurai 1990) mirroring each other. Disciplining people through the political use of emotions can go very far. Sundar (2004) has shown how attributing to Muslims a sense of guilt ex ante – by powerful institutional sites such as the BJP and mainstream newspapers and also the state’s anti-terrorist laws – facilitated the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat: portrayed as essentially potential terrorists, Muslims could thus 24

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be made culpable for their own victimhood. The sociologist follows this argument in this volume by investigating feelings of resentment against Adivasis. Sundar’s first-hand study of the dynamics of the civil war in Chhattisgarh demonstrates that resentment is also deliberately ‘cultivated’ through the state’s strategies for recruiting vigilantes. Paying attention to the affectual dimension of mobilisation reveals how certain emotions play a structuring role in local identity politics. Chowdhury shows that the political despair that replaced the hope initially felt by Shahbag activists brought to the surface a much deeper disappointment: ‘[Shahbag] has created ideological fissures that have gained exceptional affective density on questions of history, religion, justice, and democracy’, she writes. As far as the millennial movement studied by Voix, the Vaidik Santan Dal, is concerned, the antagonistic pair that matters is that of hope and nostalgia. Strategically used by the leaders of the movement, this pair helps to mobilise around the highly improbable return of freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945). But these emotions are meaningful because they correspond to the feeling of loss experienced by many Hindu East Bengalis. Intriguingly, Chowdhury and Voix come to the same conclusion on the centrality of hope, despair and nostalgia in Bengali political culture. These emotions are said to be ‘symptomatic’ of a ‘murky political present’ (Chowdhury), of a ‘dissatisfaction (with the state of affairs)’ (Voix) and also of a ‘contested’ (Chowdhury) or ‘undigested’ (Voix) past. In both cases, this emotional and temporal dialectic is performed through body politics in a literal sense: mobilisation around the ‘dead body’ of a blogger in Dhaka and around the missing body of Bose in Kolkata. Finally, the heuristic value of an emotion-centred analysis emerges through another collective finding: the porosity between different sites of mobilisation in South Asia. Rajamani, Petievich and Stille collectively show how political entrepreneurs skilfully direct and redirect emotions from one site (films, poetic performances, religious gatherings) to another (electoral campaigns, street demonstrations) to mobilise support. What these chapters highlight, therefore, is the key role of emotions in linking these sites. Rajamani observes the political fortunes of two stars of Telugu cinema, Chiranjeevi and Pawan Kalyan, both of whom successively embodied the ‘angry young man’. Based on a parallel analysis of their major films and subsequent electoral ventures, she demonstrates how their most popular films were a source of emotion knowledge about a crucial political emotion – anger. Her analysis thus sheds decisive light on the well-known (but often perplexing) ‘merging’ of politics and cinema that has characterised South India since the 1980s. Petievich provides a striking example of the porosity between the artistic and the political by highlighting connections between aesthetic and political emotions. Finally, Stille explores how preachers can form an emotional community of their audience during a wa’z mahfil, using jokes as a juncture of populist and religious convictions. All these examples attest to the interest in focusing on 25

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emotions to better understand the deep intricacy between what are usually considered separate fields of social action (politics and poetry, cinema or religion) – an intricacy that characterises South Asia’s political culture.

Conclusion The chapters presented in this volume – informed by three years of long, collective reflection on the value of, and challenges presented by, affective studies in understanding politics – bring new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights to the mutual constitution of emotions and mobilisations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. One important contribution of this volume is that it looks simultaneously at what emotions do to mobilisations and at what mobilisations do to emotions: this is what we mean by a ‘mutual constitution’. To do so, the volume combines inputs from South Asian studies, social movement theories and emotion studies. Another significant contribution is that it brings to the surface, in an inductive way, what emotions reveal about the political culture of protest in South Asia. The main pitfall we have tried collectively to avoid was that of taking the easy, but perhaps wrong, road of pre-given causal links between one specific emotion (fear, anger, etc.) and protest. Two safeguard mechanisms helped us to complicate the relationship between emotions and mobilisations. One such mechanism was to self-reflect on our methods of exploring emotions as an important prerequisite to what we can say about them. Another was to develop a thick contextual analysis of the mobilisations under study (or of the conditions of a study). The many ways in which emotions are linked to mobilisations highlight that this relationship is never devoid of ambivalence and indeterminacy; it is never unidirectional. Thus, we have seen that focusing on emotions goes a long way towards displacing simplistic, but pervasive, explanations of the role of anger in local Dalit protests in India, for instance; of the frustration associated with jihadist militancy in Pakistan; of the positive feelings linked to secular movements in Bangladesh. Indeed, the emotions central to mobilising support for a cause are sometimes far removed from both popular wisdom and casual analyses. Our collective research emphasises the importance of enchantment in jihadi militancy, of enthusiasm in communal riots and of humour in religious movements, for instance. This foray into the interplay between emotions and mobilisations in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh deals with too few case studies to be representative. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that going beyond what people think to get at what people feel offers a more accurate description of how, and possibly why, specific claims are made in the public space. Looking at feeling rules and emotional-institutional contexts also enriches our understanding of the social and political constraints attached to making such claims, due to power relations, identity politics and/or the state’s disciplinary tactics. 26

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We hope that this exploratory journey into some of the emotions at play in the political lives of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh will be followed by more empirical studies. Our final words are for the sceptics who remain doubtful of the interest in taking emotions as an entry point to political analysis. We would like to think this book invites students and analysts of South Asian politics to maintain a curiosity towards feelings, for ‘when we understand [emotions] as an incitement toward questioning rather than an indication of some static truth of the self or of the place one is studying, they become tools for deepening and enriching our analyses’ (Gould 2015: 170).

Notes 1 This neglect of emotions may stem from three sources (Aminzade and McAdam 2001): (i) the gendered character of universities, with men being socialised to downplay emotions; (ii) the dominance of American and European academic traditions, which identify emotions as illegitimate in decision making; and (iii) the prevalence of a positivist epistemology that sees emotions as distorting observation and impeding knowledge. 2 According to Damasio (1999), for instance, human beings cannot turn information into a course of action (or decision) if they cannot incorporate emotions into their information processing. 3 For a critical account of the affective turn in the sociology of mobilisations, see Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2001a); Jasper (2011); and Traïni (this volume). For a discussion of the limitations of crowd psychology, see Pernau (this volume). 4 This book originated from a three-year research project, Emotion and Political Mobilisations in the Indian Subcontinent (EMOPOLIS). Based in Paris, at the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), it comprised a team of specialists from Bangladesh, France, Germany, India, Pakistan, and the US. 5 None of the following comparative works include a South Asian case study: Clarke, Hoggett and Thompson (2006); Flam and King (2005); Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2001b); Hart and Bos (2007); and Traïni (2009). North Africa, Latin America, China, and Southeast Asia are, however, given some room. 6 For a clear synthesis of this debate, see Dhulipala (2015: 12–13). 7 For a criticism of this, see Blom and Jaoul (2008). 8 South Asia’s communal identities ‘are not just effects of momentous “poisoning” of the people by manipulators. They are . . . existing forms of subjectivity’, writes Hansen (1996: 149). Such subjectivities are then amplified by the everyday ‘back-to-back intimacy and suspicions which characterize the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims’ (italics ours). 9 As described so well by Spencer (2007: 3–4), referring to a Sri Lankan government official and his display of exuberant joy on his favoured candidate wining an election. 10 This special issue of the Indian Economic and Social History Review was published in collaboration between EMOPOLIS and the Centre for the History of Emotions in Berlin. 11 These include feelings of compassion, as among the North Indian Muslim philanthropists studied by Pernau (2017b) and the movie star-cum-political leader analysed by Rajamani (2017); of pride in a heroic past, as among the Urdu readers analysed by Oesterheld (2017); and of self-righteousness, such as among the Pakistani born-again Muslims investigated by Blom (2017).

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12 These dimensions are: (i) the pre-reflexive feelings that shift protestors into ‘attack mode’, (ii) the ‘feeling rules’ attached to a peculiar framing of the event, (iii) the emotions strategically managed by leaders, (iv) their idiosyncratic development during a protest event, and (v) ‘the emotional politics of the state’ that legitimates violence over blasphemy. 13 Jasper (2006) associates specific emotions with each category. Disgust, surprise, anger, fear, joy, and sadness would be ‘reflex emotions’. Love, hate, respect, trust, and resentment are ‘affects’. Sadness, happiness and self-confidence are ‘moods’. Pride, indignation and anger are ‘moral emotions’. But isn’t anger, for instance, all four, depending on the context? 14 Robert Solomon, a renowned emotion studies specialist and former partisan of a more constructivist approach to emotions, defines the concept in a very similar way in a recent version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: an emotion, he writes, is ‘a complex experience of consciousness, bodily sensation, and behaviour that reflects the personal significance of a thing, an event, or a state of affairs’ (Solomon 2014). 15 The eight primary emotions are love, humour, courage, disgust, anger, astonishment, terror, and pity. The 33 transitory emotions include, for instance, envy, despair and anxiety. Rasa theory is discussed further by Petievich (this volume). See also Graham and Buchta (2012). 16 Rasa theory was revealed in the Nātyashāstra, a Sanskrit treatise dated approximately between 200 BC and 200 AD. 17 For a thorough discussion of the research methods applicable to emotions, see Flam and Kleres (2015). 18 A topical case is the ‘deep acting’ of air-hostesses (Hochschild 1983). 19 See Plamper (2015) for a synthesis of the developments in the history of emotions. 20 ‘Emotional regimes’ describe the modes of emotional expression and thought that are dominant in particular periods and cultural contexts. ‘Emotional communities’ refer to ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’ (Rosenwein 2006: 2). 21 Interestingly for us, Reddy supports his criticism with a discussion of a book on a South Asian emotion term: Grima’s (1992) famous anthropological study of gham [sadness, sorrow] among Pashtun women in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gham is said to define the identity of these women – a fact explained by Muslim societies’ normative bias against the ‘dangerous’ joy and desire of women. But, notes Reddy, if ‘emotion is culture’, then ‘we must accept that those women who perform no emotional need to free themselves from [male] oppression have no need to do so. One cannot have it both ways’ (1997: 329, author’s emphasis). 22 For a detailed discussion of this ambivalence, see Lefranc and Sommier (2009) as well as Blom (this volume). 23 This is studied brilliantly in the case of ACT UP in the US (see Gould 2009): the mobilisation helped change the emotional response to the AIDS crisis from grief to anger and thus sustained a more confrontational approach to the issue.

References Ahmed, Saifuddin, Kokil Jaidka and Jaeho Cho. 2017. ‘Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya Protest: A Study of Emotional Dynamics in an Online Social Movement’, in ‘Technology, Media and Social Movements’, ed. Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Kevin Gillan, special issue, Social Movement Studies, 16(4): 447–65. doi:10.1080/1474 2837.2016.1192457. Ahmed, Sara. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Aminzade, Ron and Doug McAdam. 2001. ‘Emotions and Contentious Politics’, in Ron Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth J. Perry, William H. Sewell, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly. (eds), Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, pp. 14–50. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1985. ‘Gratitude as a Social Mode in South India’, Ethos, 13(3): 236–45. doi:10.1525/eth.1985.13.3.02a00020. ———. 1990. ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’, in Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Language and the Politics of Emotion, pp. 92–112. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aranguren, Martin. 2013. ‘The Emotional Transaction: A General Framework for Describing Emotions’. Paper presented at the 3rd EMOPOLIS Workshop, Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, Paris, 28 March. Aranguren, Martin and Jocelyne Arquembourg. 2015. ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: “Doing Things with Emotions”/“L’agir des émotions”’, in ‘Doing Things with Emotions/L’agir des émotions’, ed. Martin Aranguren and Jocelyne Arquembourg, special issue, Social Science Information, 54(4): 419–23. Barbalet, Jack. 2001. Emotions, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. ‘Emotions in Politics: From the Ballot to Suicide Terrorism’, in Simon Clarke, Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (eds), Emotion, Politics and Society, pp. 31–55. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. BBC. 2012. ‘Protests in India After Delhi Gang-Rape Victim Dies’, 29 December, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-20863707 (accessed on 20 August 2017). Benei, Véronique. 2008. Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Blom, Amélie. 2008. ‘The 2006 Anti-“Danish Cartoons” Riot in Lahore: Outrage and the Emotional Landscape of Pakistani Politics’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2. doi:10.4000/samaj.1652. ———. 2017. ‘Emotions and the Micro-Foundations of Religious Activism: The Bitter-Sweet Experiences of “Born-Again” Muslims in Pakistan’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1): 123–45. Blom, Amélie and Nicolas Jaoul. 2008. ‘Introduction: The Moral and Affectual Dimension of Collective Action in South Asia’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2. doi:10.4000/samaj.1912. Brass, Paul. 1997. Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Braud, Philippe. 1996. L’émotion en politique. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Calhoun, Cheshire and Robert C. Solomon, eds. 1984. What Is an Emotion? Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Cefaï, Daniel. 2007. Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on? Les théories de l’action collective. Paris: La Découverte. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ciotti, Manuela. 2012. Retro-Modern India: Forging the Low-Caste Self. New Delhi: Routledge.

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Clarke, Simon, Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson, eds. 2006. Emotion, Politics and Society. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Collins, Randall. 2001. ‘Social Movements and the Focus of Emotional Attention’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 27–44. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Czarniawska, Barbara. 2015. ‘The Rhetoric of Emotions’, in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds), Methods of Exploring Emotions, pp. 67–78. Abingdon: Routledge. Daechsel, Markus. 2006. The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan. Abingdon: Routledge. Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. Déchaux, Jean-Hugues. 2015. ‘Intégrer l’émotion à l’analyse sociologique de l’action’, Terrains/Théories, no. 2. doi:10.4000/teth.208. Dhulipala, Venkat. 2015. Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Dutta, Sujoy. 2016. ‘The Politics of Emotions: The Dalit and Lower Castes in Uttar Pradesh’, Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, 1(1): 65–79. Elster, Jon. 1999. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flam, Helena. 2005. ‘Emotions’ Map: A Research Agenda’, in Helena Flam and Debra King (eds), Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 19–40. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2015. ‘Introduction: Methods of Exploring Emotions’, in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds), Methods of Exploring Emotions, pp. 1–21. Abingdon: Routledge. Flam, Helena and Debra King, eds. 2005. Emotions and Social Movements. Abingdon: Routledge. Flam, Helena and Jochen Kleres, eds. 2015. Methods of Exploring Emotions. Abingdon: Routledge. Freitag, Sandria B. 1989. Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gammerl, Benno. 2015. ‘Can You Feel Your Research Results? How to Deal with and Gain Insights from Emotions Generated During Oral History Interviews’, in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds), Methods of Exploring Emotions, pp. 153–62. Abingdon: Routledge. Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta. 2001a. ‘Introduction: Why Emotions Matter’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 1–24. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———, eds. 2001b. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. ‘Emotional Dimensions of Social Movements’, in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, pp. 413–32. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2014. ‘Concluding Thoughts’, Contemporary European History, 23(4): 639–44. doi:10.1017/S0960777314000356. ———. 2015. ‘When Your Data Make You Cry’, in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds), Methods of Exploring Emotions, pp. 163–71. Abingdon: Routledge. Grima, Benedicte. 1992. The Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women: ‘The Misfortunes Which Have Befallen Me’. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Guru, Gopal, ed. 2011. Humiliation: Claims and Context. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 1996. ‘Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence and the Exorcism of the Muslim “Other”’, Critique of Anthropology, 16(2): 137–72. Harré, Rom, ed. 1986. The Social Construction of Emotions. Oxford: Blackwell. Hart, Marjolein’t and Dennis Bos, eds. 2007. Humour and Social Protest. International Review of Social History: Supplement 15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 85(3): 551–75. ———. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Holmes, Mary. 2004. ‘The Importance of Being Angry: Anger in Political Life’, in ‘Anger in Political Life’, ed. Mary Holmes, special issue, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 123–32. Jaoul, Nicolas. 2008. ‘The “Righteous Anger” of the Powerless: Investigating Dalit Outrage over Caste Violence’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2. doi:10.4000/samaj.1892. Jasper, James M. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. ‘Emotions and the Microfoundations of Politics: Rethinking Ends and Means’, in Simon Clarke, Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (eds), Emotions, Politics and Society, pp. 14–30. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2011. ‘Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research’, Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 285–303. Kakar, Sudhir. 1996. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Latté, Stéphane. 2015. ‘Des mouvements émotionnels à la mobilisation des émotions: Les associations de victimes comme objet électif de la sociologie des émotions protestatires’, Terrains/Théories [online], no. 2, https://journals.openedition.org/teth/244. Lefranc, Sandrine and Isabelle Sommier. 2009. ‘Les émotions et la sociologie des mouvements sociaux’, in Christophe Traïni (ed), Émotions . . . Mobilisation! pp. 273–93. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Lutz, Catherine A. and Geoffrey M. White. 1986. ‘The Anthropology of Emotions’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 15: 405–36. Lutz, Catherine A. and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds. 1990. Language and the Politics of Emotion. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, Owen M., ed. 1990a. Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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———. 1990b. ‘The Social Construction of Emotion in India’, in Owen Lynch (ed), Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India, pp. 3–34. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Marcus, George E. 2002. The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Mauss, Iris B. and Michael D. Robinson. 2009. ‘Measures of Emotion: A Review’, Cognition and Emotion, 23(2): 209–37. Mauss, Marcel. (1921) 1969. ‘L’expression obligatoire des sentiments (rituels oraux funéraires australiens)’, in Victor Karady (ed), Œuvres: 3: Cohésion sociale et division de la sociologie, pp. 269–78. Paris: Minuit. McCarthy, John D. and Mayer N. Zald. 1977. ‘Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory’, American Journal of Sociology, 82(6): 1212–41. Michelutti, Lucia. 2004. ‘“We (Yadavs) Are a Caste of Politicians”: Caste and Modern Politics in a North Indian Town’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 38(1‑2): 43‑71. Mitchell, Lisa. 2009. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Oesterheld, Christina. 2017. ‘Campaigning for a Community: Urdu Literature of Mobilisation and Identity’, in ‘Feeling Communities’, ed. Margrit Pernau, special issue, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1): 43–66. Omvedt, Gail. 1993. Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India. Abingdon: Routledge. Oommen, Tharaileth Koshy. 1990. Protest and Change: Studies in Social Movements. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Orsini, Francesca, ed. 2006. Love in South Asia: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Parashar, Swati. 2015. ‘Anger, War and Feminist Storytelling’, in Linda Ahall and Thomas Gregory (eds), Emotions, Politics and War, pp. 71–85. Abingdon: Routledge. Pernau, Margrit, ed. 2017a. ‘Feeling Communities’, special issue, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1). ———. 2017b. ‘Love and Compassion for the Community: Emotions and Practices Among North Indian Muslims, c. 1870–1930’, in ‘Feeling Communities’, ed. Margrit Pernau, special issue, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1): 21–42. ———. Forthcoming. Emotions in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervour. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pernau, Margrit, Helge Jordheim, Orit Bashkin, Christian Bailey, Oleg Benesch, Jan Ifversen, Mana Kia, et al. 2015. Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pernau, Margit and Imke Rajamani. 2016. ‘Emotional Translations: Conceptual History Beyond Language’, History and Theory, 55(1): 46–65. Plamper, Jan. 2015. The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Polletta, Francesca and Edwin Amenta. 2001. ‘Conclusion: Second that Emotion?’ in Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 304–16. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rajamani, Imke. 2012. ‘Pictures, Emotions, Conceptual Change: Anger in Popular Hindi Cinema’, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 7(2): 52–77. ———. 2017. ‘Feeling Anger, Compassion and Community in Popular Telugu Cinema’, in ‘Feeling Communities’, ed. Margrit Pernau, special issue, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1): 103–22. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 1997. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ramdev, Rina, Sandhya Devesan Nambiar and Debaditya Bhattacharya, eds. 2016. Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Rao, Madhugiri Shamarao Anathapadmanabha. 2000. Social Movements in India, 3rd ed. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors. Ray, Raka and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, eds. 2005. Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Reddy, William M. 1997. ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, Current Anthropology, 38(3): 327–51. ———. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Rosenwein, Barbara H. 2006. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Roy, Mallarika Sinha. 2011. Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975). Abingdon: Routledge. Scherer, Klaus R. 2005a. ‘Unconscious Processes in Emotion: The Bulk of the Iceberg’, in Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal and Piotr Winkielman (eds), Emotion and Consciousness, pp. 312–34. New York, NY: Guilford Press. ———. 2005b. ‘What Are Emotions? And How Can They Be Measured?’ Social Science Information, 44(4): 695–729. ———. 2009. ‘The Dynamic Architecture of Emotion: Evidence for the Component Process Model’, Cognition and Emotion, 23(7): 1307–51. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schweig, Graham and David Buchta. 2012. ‘Rasa Theory’, in Knut A. Jacobsen, Helene Basu, Angelika Malinar and Vasudha Narayanan (eds), Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Hinduism. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2212-5019_beh_COM_2040070. Shah, Ghanshyam. 2004. Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Sinha, Mrinalini. 1995. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Solomon, Robert C. 2014. ‘Emotion’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, online ed., last modified 8 May 2014, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/185972/emotion (accessed on 2 July 2017). Spencer, Jonathan. 2007. Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sundar, Nandini. 2004. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Culpability’, American Ethnologist, 31(2): 145–63. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1996. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thompson, Simon and Paul Hoggett, eds. 2012. Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies. New York, NY: Continuum. Traïni, Christophe, ed. 2009. Émotions . . . Mobilisation! Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. ———. 2010. ‘From Feelings to Emotions (and back Again): How Does One Become an Animal Rights Activist?’ trans. James Terry, Revue française de science politique, 60(2): 219–40. Venkatesan, Radha. 2002. ‘Politics and Suicides’, Hindu, 2 June, www.thehindu. com/2002/06/02/stories/2002060201871700.htm (accessed on 9 July 2017). Verkaaik, Oskar. 2004. Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Part I BRINGING EMOTIONS BACK INTO SOUTH ASIAN POLITICAL MOBILISATIONS Theoretical and methodological perspectives

2 THE PROCESSES AND CONTEXTS OF EMOTIONAL INVOLVEMENT Christophe Traïni

That understanding oneself requires understanding other people has been well established since Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1835) brilliant demonstration: our most familiar habits can become objects of knowledge only if we attempt to decentre our observation, which requires a detour through other societies. This idea has been used primarily by comparative anthropology, which has added a substantial body of knowledge to the social sciences. The notion is so old that it is almost surprising it should remain relevant in today’s ‘globalised’ world. Yet it would be wrong to believe that the increasing interdependency of exchanges and extensive use of the Internet all over the world have made it any less necessary to grasp objects of study within multiple, differentiated contexts. On the contrary, some research themes continue to suffer from an absence of comparisons that rely on a finely nuanced understanding of contexts. What is true in general is even more so when studying the relationship between emotions and political mobilisation.

Emotions: nature or culture? Any study of emotions involves addressing a debate that is as old as the social sciences. Emotions cannot be understood independently of their physiological substrate. ‘Fear’, ‘joy’, ‘anger’, ‘shame’, and ‘love’ are not only categories that allow us to organise the world of ideas, but they are also reactions that affect our bodies according to the event and environment we happen to be facing at the time. The physiological substrate and the adaptive function of emotions did not escape the attention of the first thinkers to theorise emotions, including Charles Darwin or William James (Rimé 2005). More recently, the neurosciences have shown that emotions cannot be dissociated from the (often automatic and unconscious) physiological mechanisms of the brain (Damasio 1995). This physiological basis necessarily affects the

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mode of scientific comprehension that appears most relevant to the study of emotions. It also encourages the idea that the foundations of emotions are more natural than cultural. Can the social sciences and their concern with the diversity of cultures, then, expect to be of any use when examining mechanisms that concern the human species? Is not biology, or even ethology, better equipped to understand invariant physiological laws? Many researchers have constructed long, congruent lists of supposedly universal emotions. As early as 1872, Darwin identified eight discrete, universal emotions1 corresponding to adaptive functions that had evolved over time (Darwin 1872). A century later, the psychologist Paul Ekman singled out six universal emotions (a list that would later be expanded). From this perspective, he developed a facial action coding system that tried to identify how emotions correspond to certain physiological mechanisms controlling the nervous and muscular fibres of the face (see Ekman and Friesen 1971). Confronted with such perspectives, should social scientists renounce an object of study that appears to lie beyond their competence? Clearly not. The existence of an incontestable universal basis is precisely what makes the comparative perspective of the social sciences so important in this case. To satisfy oneself with an ethological approach to emotions would be tantamount to stopping midway. Indeed, even if many emotions are probably universal, they can still assume very different meanings across time and space. The expression of emotions – laughter, tears, signs of rage or grief – does not result from an individual’s inner turmoil alone. Emotions are also evoked and shaped by social norms. Thus, as Calhoun (2001: 47) points out: The importance of the sociological study of emotions lies precisely in studying emotions sociologically, that is, not as an autonomous psychological or ‘internal’ phenomenon which can be adduced as such to explain social phenomena. Emotions are both produced and shaped by social interaction and cultural understanding. In this regard, the contributions of history and anthropology are too numerous to mention. As early as 1921, in one of the founding texts of anthropology, L’expression obligatoire des sentiments (The mandatory expression of feelings), Marcel Mauss emphasised, in a section on death rituals, the extent to which social norms dictate the type of emotion people are expected to express in a given situation (see Mauss [1921] 1969). Since then, many other works have demonstrated that the subjective experience associated with such apparently universal categories as sadness, anger or pity can be extremely difficult to translate across cultural contexts (see Briggs 1970; Doi 1988; Lutz 1982).

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What these contributions to comparative anthropology teach us is that the physiological, universal substrate of emotions should in no way let us overlook the necessity of accounting for their formalisation according to social norms. By formalisation, I mean that the expression of emotions is informed by a set of consensual rules that establish what – for the observed actors – is desirable or suitable. Such rules, far from pertaining to biology, have a regional and historical context and thus depend on the diverse dispositions that social actors inherit from prior socialisation. Such rules also owe a great deal to the specific constraints of political institutions – to the extent that their relevance is socially recognised in framing the development and resolution of conflicts. Indeed, as substitutes for the use of physical violence, political institutions and rules force social actors to engage in discursive battles and tactical rivalries that require a high degree of control with respect to the formalisation of emotions (Garrigou 2003). Of course, there is no denying the truism that ‘compassion’, ‘anger’ or ‘fear’ might emerge during political mobilisation anywhere in the world. Yet social scientists, including South Asia specialists, can tell us much more: namely, that the subjective content of emotions and their impact on observed modes of interaction cannot be understood without a deep knowledge of the society in which this mobilisation takes place. This statement does not mean that one is in any danger of falling back into the excesses of culturalisms and orientalisms. As we see later, this is because the actors’ room for manoeuvre is far from negligible – as demonstrated beautifully by Appadurai (1985), for instance. Moreover, what is at stake here is our ability to produce knowledge that will help refine general theories of mobilisation whatever their context or, more precisely, by treating the context as a set of parameters one simply cannot forgo. One must remember that the history of the sociology of mobilisation is marked by long debates concerning the best way to account for the role of contexts in the dynamics of mobilisation. Thus, promoters of the ‘political process’ approach challenged theories drawing on psychology that had been used to explain mobilisation. Subsequently, the latter perspective was criticised for having reduced the role of contexts to ‘expanding . . . political opportunities’, which quickly became an omniscient explanatory variable in turn (Goodwin and Jasper 2004). The attention paid to political institutions, however, has occasionally encouraged a very selective conception of those emotions that might play a decisive role in the emergence of mobilisation. This is, for instance, the case of McAdam’s ‘cognitive liberation’ theory, according to which people mobilise ‘on the basis of some optimistic assessment of the prospects for successful insurgency weighted against the risks involved in each action’ (1982: 34). Given the history of this discipline, the present book invites us to enlarge our understanding of the range of emotions that matter in how mobilisations

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evolve. Such emotions are, of course, not limited to the mere enthusiasm generated by the impression that political circumstances offer an opportunity at last for demands to be heard. Emotions appear at every stage of the mobilisation process – before as well as after it has begun and in other successive phases (Polletta and Amenta 2001: 305). Indeed, this book attempts to answer important empirical questions such as: which emotions are at work in various mobilisations? How do they work? How do emotional dynamics evolve as mobilisations erupt, develop and sometimes end? Given that its perspective is anchored in South Asian societies, the book provides an opportunity to think more deeply about the place of contexts in explanatory theories of mobilisations. What is at stake here is the chance to demonstrate that the emotions shaping the ways mobilisations unfold are neither merely avatars of a supposedly all-powerful ‘culture’ nor are they dependent variables within a structure of political opportunities understood in a reductive sense (Fillieule 2006). Emotions constitute a privileged empirical entry point in addressing a crucial aspect of the sociology of mobilisation: how best we can articulate three complementary aspects of analysis. These include: (i) the processes of individual engagement, (ii) the ways in which collective action is coordinated and (iii) the constraints and resources that characterise various contexts. It is worth noting, as evident from the impact of the 2015 terrorist attacks on public opinion in France and elsewhere, that political contexts may include an affective tone that must be taken into account if we want to understand why certain emotions are mobilised in the aftermath of such events (Sommier 2015). In other words, the knowledge of contexts that is needed to understand mobilisations is necessarily evolving and historicised. Moreover, in no way does it require us to defer to an essentialist vision of supposedly unchanging ‘cultures’.

The modulation of emotions and mobilisation processes We can see that there is no reason for researchers to go from bad to worse, to try and escape the socio-biology of emotions only to become mired in a sort of culturalism that considers social actors to be passive beings determined entirely by social norms that pre-exist them. Thinking in terms of the formalisation of emotions allows us to keep sight of the fact that the rules governing the correct expression of affective states – similar to the rules of grammar in discourse – are applied in a manner that varies considerably, depending on individuals and circumstances. Realising that social norms carry such strong influence must not blind us to their unequal performativity or the room to manoeuvre that belongs to individuals insofar as they can play with emotions, that is, they can modulate their affective states based on their appraisal of the situation.

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Here, one must emphasise the central contribution of Arlie Hochschild, the American sociologist, whose work was directed initially at the sociology of labour. She has tried to demonstrate the extent to which managing one’s own emotions and those of other people becomes a specific skill in many occupations (see Hochschild 1975, 1983). Through the concept of ‘emotion work’, she invites us to analyse the activity in situ, which consists of conforming (or refusing to conform) to the social rules that govern the expression of emotions. This type of investigation proves invaluable when applied to the numerous activities through which mobilisation entrepreneurs strive to demonstrate – to themselves as well as others – the compelling nature of the cause to which they have dedicated themselves. This perspective gives us a chance to overcome the reductionism of paradigms according to which activists’ concern with optimising utility and tactical gains comprises the bulk of what fuels mobilisation. Of course, the approach in terms of formalisation and ‘emotion work’ must not lead us to ignore the strategic dimension of emotional expression in the framework of mobilisations. The concept of ‘sensitising devices’ includes precisely the tactical intention of mobilisation entrepreneurs as they use material means, arrangements of objects, staging and so forth to evoke affective reactions that predispose those who experience them to become engaged in or support their cause (Traïni 2010). The quasi-ethnographic observation and description of sensitising devices compels us to specify how issue entrepreneurs, by relying on the norms mentioned earlier, strive to express emotions and to evoke emotions in their audience at the same time. Indeed, in the wake of Erving Goffman’s contribution to the sociology of collective action (see Cefaï 2007), we need to account for the strong dramatic dimension of the activities involved in attempting to rally support for a cause. In any case, the ways in which ‘issue entrepreneurs’ try to evoke emotions in their audience present many analogies with artistic performance in theatre or opera. Put differently, to be able to win over the largest possible audience to their cause, mobilisation entrepreneurs must display know-how, self-control and training. Such skills pertain to what the anthropologist David Le Breton, writing on the social expression of emotions, calls the actor’s paradox, which consists of ‘the art of shaping signs, of converting one’s body into a legible script in order to display, on demand, the throes of pain or jealousy or an irrepressible hilarity – in reaction to a line that was repeated hundreds of times’ (2004: 286). The analogy with theatre is of strong interest to the sociology of mobilisations, inviting us to examine how issue entrepreneurs can modulate the expression of emotions according to the tactical objectives of the situation. It also means that we must take seriously the fact that mobilising an audience requires skills that can be mastered very differently – from the clumsy

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beginner to the virtuoso. In other words, the enactment of emotions is one of the skills that define collective action as a specific domain of activity (see Mathieu 2012). Notwithstanding the convenience of this theatrical analogy, we must also ensure it does not yield stereotypes that obscure more than they enlighten. It is admittedly conceivable that issue entrepreneurs with considerable experience could end up playing with emotions in a manner that is tactical to the point of bordering on cynicism. The idea that political actors are characterised by their ability to simulate emotions with purely instrumental goals is certainly one of the oldest and most common accusations against the supposed amorality of politics. This is so true that denouncing the lack of authenticity of emotions can sometimes become a powerful motive for counter-mobilisation against those accused of manipulating people’s affective impulses. The sincerity of emotions constitutes one of the social norms mentioned earlier and its relative strength depends on the context, professional milieu or circumstances. What must be emphasised, however, is that the place of emotions in mobilisation dynamics cannot be reduced to the mere use of emotions by individual strategists who excel in the art of winning over (initially) sceptical audiences. The effects of implementing a sensitising device are not limited to proselytism and legitimisation. When they express emotions, activists – including the most tactical among them – are often their own target. The implementation of a sensitising device involves working on oneself, on one’s pre-existing sensibilities. It allows one to explore and therefore gauge the intensity of those dispositions that compel commitment. This is why research perspectives that are exclusively strategist always prove reductive. Emotions are not merely resources that pre-exist collective action and that issue entrepreneurs can deftly appropriate to meet their tactical objectives. Emotions enacted through sensitising devices are characterised by a form of ‘serendipity’ that no one can claim to anticipate before the mobilisation unfolds. This is not surprising if we consider the proprieties that the historian William Reddy (1997) assigns to the concept of emotive, distinct from that of emotions. When individuals express their affective states and thus allow other people to perceive them, they are not merely stating what they feel (Traïni 2010). Emotives are not limited to describing pre-existing affective states; they help explore, change and intensify the latter, which is why Reddy (2001) speaks of the ‘navigation of feelings’ to explain the performative character of emotives. Such performative character is crucial to understanding the extent to which the expression of emotions contributes, in a single move, to building public causes and shaping the sensibilities of their supporters. In other words, the navigation of feelings is not limited to the individual level: it must also be understood at the interactive, collective level. When they express an emotion and challenge that of others, the supporters of a cause produce an

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effect on the people around them as well as explore and modify the sensitivities born of their personal history. The serendipity of emotions felt in the course of activism is what prevents us from considering them an explanatory cause and mobilisation, a dependent variable. Of course, as I have said, the commitment of different people to a given mobilisation depends on their past sensibilities and dispositions. Yet the sensitising devices implemented by issue entrepreneurs enable such pre-existing sensibilities (which can be heterogeneous) to evolve into new emotions determining the fate of the mobilisation and its supporters. In short, emotions are neither simply resources available to actors nor the explanatory causes of an unavoidable chain of events. Emotions are produced in the very course of the mobilisations they help to shape, from their development to loss of impetus and eventual break up. Thus, studying the place of emotions in the dynamics of collective action amounts to examining not only their occasionally eruptive and disruptive nature but also their ability to institute new regularities. These, in turn, can be observed at the level of (i) individual dispositions (sensitivities), (ii) the operators of collective coordination (emotional registers) or (iii) sociopolitical systems or ‘passion contexts’ (Sommier 2015: 25).

The strategic dimension and the ambiguous effect of sensitising devices When linked to mobilisation, emotions are not characterised solely by the adaptive, instituting nature I have just underlined. They are also invariably ambiguous, albeit to varying degrees. Such propriety emerges widely in investigations that pay attention to sensitising devices. Not only does this notion lead researchers to produce quasi-ethnographic descriptions of how issue entrepreneurs attempt to evoke affective reactions, it also means we must remember that the emotions evoked are never limited to those which issue entrepreneurs might have expected to stir. Even compassion at its most consensual, even the indignation that seems to compel a group – indeed, sometimes an entire people – to march in unison, covers multiple sensibilities.2 These sensibilities, beyond their convergence within coordinated collective action, will be socially invested in what can be an eclectic range of activities and convictions. From a methodological point of view, this implies that the semiological approach to sensitising devices must be combined with a detailed study of the diverse biographical journeys that have led individuals to participate in collective action. This is important in order not to overlook the fact that seemingly shared emotions in the course of mobilisation do not override the diverse social processes underlying people’s commitment. Thus, acknowledging the importance of emotions in the dynamics of mobilisation does not condemn us to

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retreat, for instance, closer to some form of crowd psychology à la Gustave Le Bon. To say that the enactment of emotions through well-thought-out sensitising devices constitutes a form of coordinated collective action is not akin to postulating the development of a supposed ‘conscience’ or ‘vision’ shared by all members of the mobilised group. We must not revive the figure of the leader who, by playing on people’s natural tendency to mimesis, can force individual consciences to merge into a crowd led by a single impulse. Such a stereotype does not in any way impose itself – to the extent that those emotions incited by issue entrepreneurs on a given object never evoke unanimity among their fellow citizens. On the contrary, they can provoke controversies during which their character is deemed unsuitable; they can be associated with an impression of scandal or even considered outrageous by other social groups. Indeed, any analysis must be careful to question the place of emotions in the dynamics that characterise not only mobilisation but also counter-mobilisation. What is worth repeating ceaselessly is that, through the emotions they express, issue entrepreneurs sometimes mobilise more adversaries and critics than new supporters. Indeed, and as per a methodological principle that is now well established, we must refrain from looking at mobilisations as discrete, self-bound entities to try and account for the multiple forms of interdependence on which their future depends (Mathieu 2012).

Notes 1 These are: fear, surprise, disgust, happiness, sadness, anger, pride, and shame. 2 This term refers to a durable tendency to react affectively in a specific way when facing objects and situations that are perceived as similar. Individuals’ sensibilities result from the succession of experiences that characterise their socialisation.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1985. ‘Gratitude as a Social Mode in South India’, Ethos, 13(3): 236–45. doi:10.1525/eth.1985.13.3.02a00020. Briggs, Jean L. 1970. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calhoun, Craig. 2001. ‘Putting Emotions in Their Place’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 45–57. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cefaï, Daniel. 2007. Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on? Les théories de l’action collective. Paris: La Découverte/MAUSS. Damasio, Antonio R. 1995. L’erreur de Descartes: La raison des émotions. Paris: Odile Jacob. Darwin, Charles. 1872. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray. Doi, Takeo. 1988. Le jeu de l’indulgence: Etude de psychologie fondée sur le concept japonais d’amae. Paris: L’Asiathèque.

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Ekman, Paul and Wallace V. Friesen. 1971. ‘Constants Across Cultures in the Face and Emotion’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2): 124–29. Fillieule, Olivier. 2006. ‘Requiem pour un concept: Vie et mort de la notion de structure des opportunités politiques’, in Gilles Dorronsoro (ed), La Turquie conteste: Mobilisations sociales et régime sécuritaire, pp. 201–18. Paris: Presses du CNRS. Garrigou, Alain. 2003. ‘Les mœurs de la politique: Maîtriser les passions’, in Jacques Lagroye (ed), La politisation, pp. 9–29. Paris: Belin. Goodwin, Jeff and James M. Jasper. 2004. ‘Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory’, in Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper (eds), Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning, and Emotion, pp. 3–30. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1975. ‘The Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected Possibilities’, Sociological Inquiry, 45(2–3): 280–307. ———. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Le Breton, David. 2004. Les passions ordinaires: Anthropologie des émotions. Paris: Payot. Lutz, Catherine. 1982. ‘The Domain of Emotion Words on Ifaluk’, American Ethnologist, 9(1): 113–28. Mathieu, Lilian. 2012. L’espace des mouvements sociaux. Paris: Editions du Croquant. Mauss, Marcel. (1921) 1969. ‘L’expression obligatoire des sentiments (rituels oraux funéraires australiens)’, in Victor Karady (ed), Œuvres: 3: Cohésion sociale et division de la sociologie, pp. 269–78. Paris: Minuit. McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Polletta, Francesca and Edwin Amenta. 2001. ‘Conclusion: Second That Emotion? Lessons from Once-Novel Concepts in Social Movement Research’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 303–16. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Reddy, William M. 1997. ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, Current Anthropology, 38(3): 327–51. ———. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rimé, Bernard. 2005. Le partage social de l’émotion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Sommier, Isabelle. 2015. ‘Sentiments, affects et émotions dans l’engagement à haut risque’, Terrains/Théories, no. 2. doi:10.4000/teth.236. Traïni, Christophe. 2010. ‘Des sentiments aux émotions (et vice-versa): Comment devient-on militant de la cause animale?’ Revue française de science politique, 60(2): 335–58.

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3 PARTICIPATORY AND ADVERSARIAL POLITICS Representing speech action, collective action and emotion Lisa Mitchell

When and why do the emotions of those engaged in politics become an object of inquiry? On 10 January 2002, 10 students from the University of Hyderabad in India were expelled, following efforts by a group of more than 100 students to collectively present a list of concerns to the university’s chief hostel warden. The students were members of the Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA), an organisation founded in 1993 by a small group of Dalits (those regarded as ‘untouchable’ by orthodox Hindus) studying at the University of Hyderabad. Established to respond to various forms of discrimination and advocate for the rights of Dalit students, the ASA has subsequently expanded to other university campuses, including Hyderabad’s Osmania University, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and Pondicherry University.1 Although a propensity for violence was the reason university officials cited for rusticating the 10 students, ASA members had been attempting to raise several issues with the chief hostel warden during the encounter that precipitated their expulsions. Their most immediate concern was that the hostel mess fees had risen by nearly 60 percent over the previous six months, brought on by the chief warden’s move toward privatising the mess catering service. The warden’s decision to centralise purchasing not only increased financial strain on students whose university fellowships were insufficient to cover the rising mess fees, but was also seen as ‘a slur on the integrity of mess secretaries’, who were frequently Dalits without familial financial support, seeking to defray expenses by offering their services in exchange for reduced mess fees (Anveshi Law Committee 2002b: 1001). An additional concern was the recent demotion of a Dalit warden – who had opposed the privatisation of the mess catering service and acted as an advocate for many Dalit students – from his overall administrative and 46

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financial responsibility for the hostel, to care of ‘sanitation and gardening’. His demotion was seen as a deeply insulting move to members of a community historically relegated to such tasks. This was not the first time these students had attempted to voice their concerns to university authorities. Their collective effort in January followed a series of earlier attempts, including participation in meetings at the hostel, contributions to a general body meeting, a petition to the vice-chancellor, and a previous effort by a smaller group to meet the chief warden and present a memorandum, during which they were turned away and asked to return on the day in question. It also followed a formal written complaint made by the same students to university authorities six weeks earlier (in November 2001) in response to posters that had appeared in the hostel, calling Dalit students ‘pigs and uncivilised, violent brutes’ and describing them as ‘corrupt’ and ‘shameless’.2 No action was taken in response to their repeated efforts to raise these concerns, nor did university officials acknowledge their formal complaint, their petition to the vice-chancellor or their memorandum to the chief warden. Yet, in the wake of the students’ expulsions, rather than addressing how the university had failed to acknowledge the escalating series of concerns raised by Dalit students, The Hindu newspaper quoted the vice-chancellor as asking ‘what makes the Dalit students so angry?’ (Anveshi Law Committee 2002a).

Emotion and collective action The discursive representation of emotion can be used to include and incorporate others into a social body, but it can also exclude, mark out as different, silence, and prevent active participation in discussion and debate. In Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, I have explored ways that emotion has been invoked and represented to incorporate and suggest inclusion in a social body, paying particular attention to the sudden appearance of new recognitions of emotion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see Mitchell 2009). In this chapter, however, I turn to ways in which the representation of emotion has been used to silence others, prevent or counteract formal inclusion, and mark difference. In recent years, the question of why Dalits in India are so ‘angry’ has been voiced repeatedly by non-Dalits, particularly as Dalit political mobilisation has become more publicly visible since the 1980s and 1990s (see, for example, Deshpande 1997; Sharma 2006; Wankhede 2006; Jaoul 2008). Indeed, just a glance through newspaper headlines and academic paper titles alike suggests that we are witnessing, in the words of Jaoul (2008), a shift from ‘meek Harijans’ (Gandhi’s somewhat patronising term for Dalits) to ‘angry Dalits’. Rather than endeavouring to explain ‘why Dalits are so angry’, 47

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I argue that we need to ask how and why efforts to intervene in the public sphere and make one’s voice heard are so often framed as something other than acts of communication or constructive participation. Particularly for members of already marginalised groups, representing political articulations as emotion, or as noise, violence or excess, can sometimes serve to silence the illocutionary dimension of a communicative act. It does so by making only the form or rhetorical style of a communicative act visible or audible, eliding the specific intended meaning that an intersubjective performance seeks to make understood, which often remains unheard and unacknowledged.3 Asking this question draws our attention to how an exclusive focus on form or style of communication allows potential listeners – in this case, authorities at a central government-administered university – to convince themselves they need not recognise an act as communicative and can, therefore, avoid hearing it. In what follows, I focus on acts of communication that are specifically addressed to authorities, examining how social theory has been complicit in framing communicative acts in ways that license a refusal to hear. In doing so, this essay asks why individual communicative acts – writing a letter to an elected official, speaking at a public meeting, or voting – are so often celebrated by social theorists as being participatory, while collective action is commonly assumed to be confrontational, adversarial and oppositional, even when non-violent. The chapter presents two arguments. The first is that we should be careful to distinguish between (i) forms of collective mobilisation that are participatory and that seek inclusion or recognition and (ii) forms that seek to resist or reject existing structures of rule. Second, we must situate each collective act of mobilisation within a longer temporal frame to identify how earlier refusals of recognition may have shaped later actions. Attention to emotions in the absence of such larger contextualisation can function as a mechanism for disregarding efforts to be included and recognised as members of a social body.

Participatory collective action in South Asia: beyond European historical genealogies Daniel Cefaï offers an influential definition of the concept of mobilisation, defining it as ‘any collective action oriented by a concern for promoting a public good or for repealing a public evil, that gives itself adversaries to fight against, so as to make the process of participation, redistribution and recognition possible’ (Cefaï 2007, quoted in Blom and Tawa Lama-Rewal 2016). Cefaï is not alone in associating collective actions with an adversarial stance. As scholars of the political in South Asia, we have, unfortunately, inherited most of our analytical tools from European and colonial political projects and therefore find it hard to move beyond an understanding of

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collective mobilisation as contention, insurgency, opposition, or rejection of authority. At best, forms of collective assembly are recognised as external corrective forces on political institutions, or as playing a role in the transition to more democratic political structures. They are less commonly – at least today – portrayed as constructive ongoing features within a democratic polity.4 Schnapp and Tiews capture this widely accepted view when they write that historical shifts in the role of ‘mass assembly and collective social action’ and the representation of ‘the equation between crowds and modernity’ have ‘assign[ed] to large-scale mass political actions a fallback function restricted to times of exception (war, acute social conflicts, and the like)’ (2006: xi). Even Judith Butler, writing in the wake of Tahrir Square, has difficulty recognising bodies assembled collectively in public as anything other than ‘resistance’ to the state and opposition to its legitimacy. She sees bodies massed in public as an effort to ‘redeploy the space of appearance in order to contest and negate the existing forms of political legitimacy’ (Butler 2015: 85), rather than as an acknowledgment, even reification, of state sovereignty or as an effort to be recognised by the existing state, actively (willingly, even eagerly) interpellated by its networks, and included within its ongoing processes of decision making.5 The ideas of negation and adversarial opposition loom large in discussions of collective forms of state-directed assembly in South Asia as well. Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, for example, does much to reclaim peasants as political actors, particularly in his critique of Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the ‘pre-political’ (Guha 1983: 5–6). However, by focusing only on the stages of protest in which actors have already become ‘rebels’ and framing his analysis as an examination of peasant insurgencies specifically, he inscribes a deep separation between the actions and ideologies of the peasant actors who form the object of his analysis and the forms of practice engaged in by elites. This is a bifurcation that lives on, for example, in Partha Chatterjee’s more contemporary distinction between political society – those who act collectively as objects of governmentality – and civil society or the bourgeois minority who function as individual ‘rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution’ and who interact with ‘organs of the state’ either ‘in their individual capacities or as members of associations’ (Chatterjee 2001: 8–9). Although the intention of these interventions has been to develop tools that take ‘subaltern’ forms of claim-making seriously, the acceptance of categorisations such as insurgency, rebellion, riot, and revolt, to historicise even the many non-violent actions and efforts to communicate with state officials that preceded uprisings, has had the effect of collapsing both violent and non-violent forms of collective assembly under the sign of

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violence and sharply contrasting collective action with forms of individual action. What is crucial to recognise is not a distinction between elite and nonelite cultural forms, as Ranajit Guha implies in his use of terms such as ‘rebel consciousness’, his understanding of society as shaped by ‘class antagonisms’ and his adoption of the Gramscian perspective that the peasant ‘learnt to recognize himself not by the properties and attributes of his own social being but by a diminution, if not negation, of those of his superiors’ (Guha 1983: 12, 18). Rather, we should be attentive to distinctions in the level of responsiveness of authorities to various individuals and groups – responsiveness that has empowered some voices to be easily heard as individuals, while others have no hope of being heard unless they come together to act collectively, and even then, they may still not be heard. Efforts to communicate with the colonial state that began as nonviolent – including conventionally recognisable civil society tactics such as letters, petitions and delegations as well as other non-violent forms of what we would recognise today as civil disobedience or non-cooperation – often grew violent only after being repeatedly ignored, or, more often, in response to violent efforts by the British to quell them (Guha 1983: 97). Guha acknowledges this in a single sentence in passing when he writes: In many instances [peasants] tried at first to obtain justice from the authorities by deputation (e.g. Titu’s bidroha [revolt] 1831), petition (e.g. Khandesh riots, 1852), and peaceful demonstration (e.g. Indigo rebellion, 1860) and took up arms only as a last resort when all other means had failed. (1983: 9) With the exception of this sentence, there is little acknowledgement of the deputations, petitions, strikes, peaceful assemblies, and other non-violent efforts in which Guha’s various ‘rebels’ engaged before resorting to violence, turning a continuum of practices shaped by the responsiveness of authorities into a binary opposition between elite and subaltern ‘cultural’ worlds. Although collective forms of action have a long history of being used as mechanisms to discipline those who have violated social norms (e.g., punishing a hoarding miller or an adulterous spouse), historians of collective politics have argued that the development of widespread modular and statedirected forms of collective appeal emerged only in urbanising post-industrial Europe before spreading elsewhere around the world.6 Sidney Tarrow, for example, in his study of social movements and contentious politics, locates the rise of ‘modular forms of contention such as the mass demonstration, the strike, or the urban insurrection’ in late 18th-century and early 19th-century Europe, distinguishing them from earlier, more localised forms in which groups might ‘take revenge on wrongdoers and people who had 50

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violated community norms’ (Tarrow 2011: 38). Building on Charles Tilly’s work on repertoires of contention, he writes that, by the end of the 1848 [European revolutions], performances such as the petition, the public meeting, the demonstration, and the barricade were well-known routines of contention, which were used for a variety for purposes and by different combinations of social actors. (Tarrow 2011: 38) This repertoire of contention, he argues, developed first ‘in early modern Europe’ and then later ‘spread around the world’ (Tarrow 2011: 38; see also Tilly 1995).

The erasure of South Asia in global histories of the political South Asian historians, too, have largely supported this European-centred chronology when attributing Gandhi’s political innovations of the early 20th century to his exposure to post-industrial European influences. David Hardiman’s book on Gandhi is representative of this general trend. ‘Mass civil resistance’, writes Hardiman, emerged in Europe in the ferment of the post-French revolutionary period. It came from the sphere of civil society – the site of a free association of individuals in public bodies, associations and the like – which were valorised in the political thought of the Enlightenment as providing a means for checking and correcting the excesses of state power and governmental authority. (2003: 39) Although Hardiman acknowledges that ‘these forms of struggle developed in embryonic form in India long before Gandhi emerged as a leader’ (2003: 39), he limits his recognition of direct influences to movements in the latter half of the 19th century which, he claims, had significant elite leadership comprising people who had already been exposed to the influences of new European forms of industrial protest. In this, he follows more general historians of civil resistance such as Michael Randle, who identify forms of civil resistance as a by-product of the industrial capitalism, urbanism and factory system – with their new forms of trade unions, labour movements and radical parties – that emerged in Europe in the 19th century (see Randle 1994: 21). Yet archival evidence from India suggests that modular, state-directed forms of contentious collective assembly ‘such as the mass demonstration, 51

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the strike, or the urban insurrection’ (Tarrow 2011: 38) emerged much earlier in South Asia than in Europe – at least as early as the 1660s.7 Rather than seeing such practices as derivative of post-industrial European forms of the political, I have argued elsewhere that archival evidence ties the history of mass collective political assembly to the expansion of concentrated nodes of dependence within global commodity chains more generally (see Mitchell 2018: 236–7).8 From its very earliest days of trading, the British East India Company found collective forms of assembly in India to be breathtakingly wellorganised and powerful – a far cry from the narratives of riots, disorderly mobs and violent insurgency that even the most sympathetic of historians have bequeathed us (Mitchell 2018: 235). As their foothold in the Subcontinent grew, the East India Company struggled to establish legal, ideological and policing structures that could keep the influence of collective forms of assembly at bay. This process may have contributed to what appears to be our collective amnesia regarding the scope and effectiveness of earlier forms of what the British identified as ‘combinations’ – their term for any collective effort that sought to leverage power. Indeed, colonial archival sources betray a sense of surprise and bewilderment at just how well organised such actions were – surprise that suggests a significant difference from what the British were familiar with at home. When weavers on the Coromandel coast of southwestern India felt, in 1798, that their concerns over the East India Company’s new procurement policies were not being taken seriously, they refused to undertake any new work for the Company. Officials responded with confusion and disbelief at the impressively well-orchestrated organisational capacity of the weavers, asking ‘by what means people so miserably poor as weavers are generally known to be, could now contrive to keep so long together’ (Swarnalatha 2001: 117). A decade later, in 1810, when most residents of Banaras vacated the city to emphasise their concern over the introduction of a new house tax, the acting third judge of the Court of Appeal and Circuit for the Division of Banaras wrote that, ‘instead of appearing like a tumultuous and disorderly mob, the vast multitudes came forth in a state of perfect organisation’ and were able ‘to maintain the greatest order and tranquility’ (East India Company 1820: 89). Mill observed that ‘their conduct was uniformly peaceable; passive resistance was the only weapon to which they trusted’ (1845: 467). Later in the century, in 1860, during what has come to be historicised as ‘the Indigo rebellion’, the governor general of India, Lord Canning, summed up the colonial surprise at the organisational capacity of local residents in a letter to the secretary of state for India, Sir Charles Wood, writing that ‘a people who can do this, and do it soberly and intelligently, may be weak and unresistful individually, but as a mass they cannot be dealt with too carefully’ (Kling 1966: 169).9 Parthasarathi (2001: 130) goes so far as to suggest the existence of a very different everyday understanding of sovereignty that 52

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may have encouraged or, at the very least, freely permitted such routine collective appeals. In offering a much longer genealogy for South Asian forms of political practice – forms that first attracted global attention only during the anticolonial nationalist mobilisations of the early 20th century and that, today, play a vital, if sorely under-theorised, role in contemporary South Asian politics – I am also seeking to bring South Asia more centrally into a global history of the political and to challenge existing histories of European civility and civil society as the exclusive foundations of contemporary democratic forms. Although the widespread interventions of the East India Company (and later, the British Crown) to limit the influence of state-directed collective assemblies were not entirely successful in their efforts to eliminate such forms of collective mobilisation from available political repertoires, they were somewhat more effective at erasing them from global historical narratives of the political. At least three mechanisms influenced this erasure. The first was the development of legal innovations by the East India Company in India from the 1790s onward. The second was the creation of more centralised systems of policing in the 1810s and 1820s. The third factor was the emergence of new ideologies that privileged the individual over the collective and valorised individualised forms of ‘rational speech action’ (closed to those who did not command dominant languages or dialects), while attempting to delegitimise collective forms of corporeal political communication (Mitchell 2018: 222). These continue to shape our analyses of collective political action even today. East India Company administrators, importing liberal ideologies of the autonomous individual, frequently sought to disempower ‘combinations’ by insisting on recognising only individuals petitioning on their own behalf.10

Anger, strong emotion and the representation of rational speech action Holmes (2004: 127) has written of ‘the threat that anger poses for political order’, suggesting that this has produced ‘strong cultural and political norms that seek to suppress the expression of anger’. Although she acknowledges that ‘anger bears no “natural” allegiance to the downtrodden’, any anger that challenges the status quo appears more marked and visible to those in power. Holmes, therefore, advocates for the importance of analysing ‘anger as embedded within situated power relations’ (2004: 127). She draws on Elizabeth Spelman, who shows that, unlike the expression of other emotions, the anger of subordinate groups is not well tolerated by those in dominant positions. It is, therefore, much more likely to provoke both comment and retaliation (Spelman 1989: 264). As in the case of the university authorities’ reaction to members of the ASA, the expression of anger by 53

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those in historically marginalised positions is often interpreted by those in power as ‘an act of insubordination’ (Spelman 1989: 266). All of this suggests that, when it comes to the expression of anger, what matters is who is doing the expressing. Ring’s (2006) study of everyday life in a Karachi apartment building in Pakistan demonstrates how anger can be cultivated as ‘a hallmark . . . of masculine efficacy and power’, not simply permitted, but indeed encouraged in boys – but not in girls – from a very young age, while also functioning as ‘a powerful lexicon of difference’ that is ‘deeply imbricated in the specific symbolic content of ethnic enmity’ (2006: 103–36; see especially 117). Her deep ethnography supports the view that anger expressed by a girl, or coming from anyone in an historically subordinate position, is much more likely to receive comment and censure, while anger expressed by those in dominant positions does not. Thus, when Lyman (2004: 133) identifies anger as ‘an indispensable political emotion’, writing that, ‘without angry speech the body politic would lack the voice of the powerless questioning the justice of the dominant order’, he is careful to demonstrate that ‘the expression of anger is [also] a resource for the dominant’. Can the voice of the powerless be heard without anger? Or can the analysis of mobilisation in South Asia offer another method for approaching collective communicative action that does not rely centrally on anger? Daniel Cefaï argues that ‘there is no collective action without perceiving, communicating, dramatizing and legitimizing an experience of indignation’ (2007: 163, quoted in Blom and Jaoul 2008: para. 3). Building on this, Blom and Jaoul argue that ‘public responses to illegitimate orders and perceived injustices are rarely devoid of anger’ (2008: para. 39). Yet how much of our understanding of the role of anger within collective mobilisation is shaped by existing social theory? Lyman (2004), for example, reminds us that the dominant representation within social theory of anger as a ‘subordination injury’ emerges out of a very particular European historical genealogy shaped by European class and status anxieties.11 In doing so, he illustrates the importance of historicising representations of emotion within the political. Lyman links the emergence of the association between anger and subordinate status to the development of the liberal rulegoverned administrative technique advocated by the new European middle classes, characterised variously as artisans, mercantilists or professional knowledge workers. Because these middle classes are defined primarily by their education and professional training, they find themselves located precariously between a wealthy aristocracy on the one hand and those who lack both wealth and education on the other. Drawing on Max Weber’s analysis of Protestant asceticism and the rise of bureaucratic knowledge techniques, as well as Ranulf’s (1964) study of middle-class indignation at the European aristocracy’s arbitrary power, Lyman demonstrates how the claim that ‘reason should be in control of the emotions’ functions as a form of ideology specifically intended ‘to silence 54

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angry speech’ (2004: 134). The establishment of an impersonal criminal law and rule-governed administrative technique carried out by disinterested professional knowledge workers, and its corresponding displacement of emotion to the lower orders, served simultaneously to rein in and check the power of those above them, while limiting the ability of those below to share in the redistribution of power. ‘When justice is transformed from a substantive to a procedural concept’, writes Lyman, ‘politics becomes rule-governed administrative technique’ (2004: 145). This is precisely the moment in which anger begins to be represented in opposition to order and rationality, he concludes, characterising anger as ‘always a personal appeal for recognition and for substantive justice, rather than due process’ (2004: 145). In short, he locates ‘the social construction of order as the opposite of anger’ within many of the most fundamental contradictions of European liberalism (2004: 145). The context of opposition to an entrenched and arbitrary European aristocracy by an emerging and status-anxious European middle class is, however, very different from the context experienced historically by various populations in South Asia as they engaged with this same European middle class of professionals – a class that eventually came to rule them. Although European commodity traders and administrators brought with them a version of these emerging legal and bureaucratic structures, the reasons for introducing them and the receptions and meanings attributed to them locally by those who had little ideological investment in them meant that law and bureaucracy were understood much differently by residents of South Asia, and taken up by many as a new domain for playing out local competitions (see Raman 2012). European discourses of liberalism – with their construction of an opposition between rationality and emotion, order and anger – have obviously spread elsewhere, particularly through colonial encounters, but when doing so, they never entered a vacuum. Instead, these new discourses intersected with pre-existing practices, ideas and representations wherever they were introduced, leading to very different histories of the relationship between emotion and politics in, for example, South Asia, when compared with Europe (see Bayly 2011). It is these historical differences to which we must be attentive as we approach the representation of emotion within politics, being cautious not to assume that practices that appear similar mean the same thing to everyone. Take, for example, the contrast offered by Ramachandra Guha in his analysis of the reactions of the native rulers of the hill province of Tehri Garhwal and the British colonial administrators who controlled the neighbouring territory of Kumaun, to nearly identical forms of practice. Analysing a series of collective appeals in both locations during the early 20th century, he demonstrates a marked distinction in understandings of what he calls ‘rebellion as custom’ and ‘rebellion as confrontation’ (Guha 1990). Although his 55

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use of the term ‘rebellion’ here already reflects the dominant ideology that assumes collective action is rebellious rather than participatory, his close readings of tangible examples suggest something else. Guha features the non-violent form of non-cooperation known locally as dhandak, writing that ‘there existed in the moral order of society mechanisms whereby the peasantry could draw the attention of the monarch to the wrongdoings of officials’ (1990: 67). He writes: In the dhandak the absence of physical violence, barring isolated attacks on officials, was marked. The moral and cultural idiom of the dhandak was predicated firstly on the traditional relationship between raja [king] and prajā [people, subjects], and secondly on the democratic character of these peasant communities. The rebels did not mean any harm to the king, whom they regarded as the embodiment of Badrinath. In fact they actually believed they were helping the king restore justice. (1990: 68) Guha contrasts this understanding with that of British officials, writing that ‘the officials, particularly those deputed from British India, who were often the targets of such revolts, were unable to comprehend the social context of the dhandak. They invariably took any large demonstration to be an act of hostile rebellion’ (1990: 68). Sanctioned by Hindu scripture in circumstances where the king has failed to protect his people, dhandak, dum or dujam – the latter two describing very similar forms of protest practiced in Simla – sought to ‘draw the king’s attention to some specific grievance’ by ‘abandon[ing] work in the fields and march[ing] to the capital or to other prominent places’ (1990: 69). Since revenue collection would be affected by the suspension of agricultural labour, Guha tells us that ‘the king would usually concede the demands of the striking farmers’ (1990: 69). Although British officials clearly interpreted large demonstrations as angry and aggressive, it is not at all clear that anger necessarily defined such events. Instead, Guha portrays the dhandak as a socially condoned mechanism for communicating with authority and being recognised as members of a larger social body. This example opens new possibilities for better conceptualising how people in contemporary India understand their relationships with state officials – not always in adversarial terms but also often characterised by a desire for recognition and inclusion. Anger is a likely outcome specifically when efforts to be recognised and heard are repeatedly ignored, but violence, too, is most obvious in the historical record in cases where the state has forcibly sought to silence or disband an assembled group rather than recognising them and acknowledging their concerns. Guha writes that, although the peasants of Kumaun offered a direct challenge to state

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authority, ‘physical violence was very rarely resorted to’ (1990: 129). Only when authorities continually ignored the concerns of villagers were police or soldiers sent to quell the strikes and other agitations that ensued. Violent deaths were usually a result of the authorities firing on the collected assemblies (1990: 124). The historical construction of a dichotomy between order and anger has been so successful that social theorists and authorities alike frequently assume that anger plays a constitutive role in virtually any large collective effort to approach or meet those in positions of power.12 The same assumptions are not made in response to individual efforts to meet authorities, even if the motivating concern is the same. A sharp distinction between rationality and emotion also continues to inform both theories of the political and theories of communication in ways that aspire to be universal. Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action is one of the more influential examples of how this dichotomy continues to pervade social theory.13 Building on Weber’s ideas of modernisation as social rationalisation, Habermas’ explicit interest in how communication enables coordinated action implies that he is interested in both sides of an intersubjective process of mediation – what he calls ‘linguistically mediated interaction’. He represents his intervention as a focus on ‘what it means for two subjects to come to an understanding with one another’ (1986: 287–88). He writes, for example, that The speech act of one person succeeds only if the other accepts the offer contained in it by taking (however implicitly) a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ position on a validity claim that is in principle criticizable. Both ego, who raises a validity claim with his utterance, and alter, who recognizes or rejects it, base their decisions on potential grounds or reasons. (Habermas 1986: 287) Let us apply Habermas to the situation with which this essay opened. Members of the ASA repeatedly raised what he would call a validity claim, but rather than receiving either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ – agreement with, or rejection of, the validity claim in question based on ‘potential grounds or reasons’ – members received silence (from the authorities they were addressing), sanction (in the removal of the Dalit hostel warden who had supported them), scorn, and degradation (from others in the hostel mess who objected to their very presence and participation in the university public sphere and expressed this through hostile posters in the mess hall). What the ASA members did not receive were arguments countering their claims. By Habermas’ definition, this is a failed speech act. But why has it failed? To answer this, we must look beyond the purely linguistic features of the communicative acts engaged in by ASA members.

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In contrast to Habermas, Young’s (2000) theory of democratic inclusion advocates for what she characterises as ‘an expanded conception of political communication’. This draws on Emmanuel Levinas’ attention to the ‘Saying’ (the aspect of communication that involves ‘subject-to-subject recognition’) as a supplement to Habermas’ attention to what Levinas calls the ‘Said’ (the ‘aspect of expressing content between the subjects’) (Young 2000: 56, 58). Expressing frustration with Habermas’ efforts to ‘theorize modes of rational discourse purified of rhetoric’, Young argues that he builds on ‘a strain of Western philosophy’ that claims that ‘allegedly purely rational discourse abstracts from or transcends the situatedness of desire, interest, or historical specificity, and can be uttered and criticized solely in terms of its claims to truth’ (2000: 65). Although Levinas’ conceptualisation was not addressed to politics, Young extends his theory of the Saying and the Said to the role played by forms of public recognition within political interactions (2000: 59). She identifies the role of greeting as a fundamental part of inclusive communication, writing: Greeting, which I shall also call public acknowledgement, names communicative political gestures through which those who have conflicts aim to solve problems, recognize others as included in the discussion, especially those with whom they differ in opinion, interest, or social location. (Young 2000: 61) Unlike Taylor’s (1992) attention to a politics of recognition as a political end, however, Young sees recognition ‘as a condition rather than a goal of political communication that aims to solve problems justly’ (2000: 61). Locating her intervention within ‘a theory of democratic inclusion’ which, she argues, ‘requires an expanded conception of political communication’, Young writes that ‘the political functions of such moments of greeting are to assert discursive equality and establish or re-establish the trust necessary for discussion to proceed in good faith’ (2000: 60). As such, she argues that they represent a moment ‘prior to and a condition for making assertions and giving reasons for them’, but as a pre-condition, they are as essential to inclusive political communication as the actual assertions and reasons (2000: 58). What Young introduces is the importance of attending to efforts that expand or reduce opportunities for recognition and face-to-face communication. In India, earlier ideals of socially embedded relationships with those in positions of authority now intersect in complex ways with discourses of ideal speech action drawn from liberal frameworks that celebrate individual autonomy, disinterestedness and impersonal technique. Practices such as holding regular audiences to which constituents can bring their concerns,

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formally acknowledging collective appeals and permitting spaces in front of government offices to be used for assembly have long been regarded by many in South Asia as essential parts of how democracy works. These have been threatened by a long history of efforts to reduce or limit opportunities for recognition and face-to-face communication, and by new innovations that individualise and depersonalise administrative processes, including moves towards ‘e-governance’ (see India, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology 2017) and individual identity numbers (see Unique Identification Authority of India 2016).14 In the mid-1990s in Hyderabad, for example, the common practice of dharna [holding a sit-in or non-violent demonstration] – previously held throughout the city, but especially in front of the Andhra Pradesh State Secretariat – was suddenly and severely restricted. Those dharnas and processions that were permitted by the authorities were moved to a new location well away from the main roads and government offices – a space christened ‘Dharna Chowk’. More recently, in May 2017, in yet another move to further constrict face-to-face collective assembly and interaction with elected officials, the government stopped granting permission for meetings at Dharna Chowk and proposed that assemblies be moved out of the city centre to one of four locations on the city’s outskirts (see Lasania 2017; Nag 2017).15 These growing restrictions on collective forms of communication were captured in a series of interviews I conducted in 2012 on the changing nature of democratic spaces in Hyderabad. One teacher, waxing nostalgic for an earlier era, mourned that, on earlier occasions, [processions] were permitted to go up to Assembly; that was in the 1970s and 1980s, early 1980s. . . . Dharnas were permitted in front of the Secretariat. Permissions we had to get, but they were never denied. It was a kind of routine affair. I don’t even remember even one instance where [the police] rejected. (interview with the author, 21 August 2012, Hyderabad) Now, however, he continued, there are . . . court orders which do not allow any processions at all. . . . [In] Hyderabad, in fact, the entire Telangana, the democratic activity [had] come to a standstill, after 1987 all over northern Telangana. And the situation has worsened after 1997, further deteriorated. You can’t go, you can’t organise a [dharna] and even your meeting could be disturbed. (interview with the author, 21 August 2012, Hyderabad)

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Even in the increasingly rare instances today that permission is granted, he lamented that the spaces in which political activity is allowed have declined dramatically: Now, if you want to take out a procession . . . only one route is permitted . . . Lower Tank Bund Road . . . via Dhobi Ghat . . . to Indira Park. . . . They stopped permission for dharna at Secretariat. It shifted to Indira Park and they named it Dharna Chowk [or protest space]. . . . It’s a place that no one ever goes. . . . It’s a godforsaken place; no one will see you at all. (interview with the author, 21 August 2012, Hyderabad) Here, too, the importance of visibility and recognition looms large. Burghart (1996) illustrates the difficulties in assuming that Western political theory can be applied unproblematically to the South Asian context, reinforcing the importance of careful attention to the pre-existing discourses and practices that have intersected with more recent ideologies brought by colonial officials. Challenging the pervasive assumptions of the Habermasian ideal of communicative action premised on equality, he points to the important role played by hierarchy in speech interactions. ‘The voice of authority in South Asia’, he writes, ‘is a deliberately curtailed speech in which the words used are few, the amplitude is low, the pitch is normal to slightly high’, and ‘agency in the Hindu universe is expressed by manual passivity and self-restraint’ (Burghart 1996: 301–2; see also Piliavsky 2013). These features, he continues, are imitated ‘in “big caste” speakers, leaving rustic speakers to express through their vociferousness the necessity of their domination’ (Burghart 1996: 302). Similarly, Bate (2009) documents the fact that, historically, high-status speakers in South Asia did not speak in public. Sovereigns did not address their subjects. They received them and listened to them, but it was a sign of their power that they did not need to speak. He demonstrates persuasively that political oratory – the speaking of higher-status individuals in public – emerged quite late in India, only in the early decades of the 20th century, prompting us to pay greater attention to the multiple sets of meanings that shape political practice in South Asia. Burghart (1996: 302) writes that, if the king or highest authority in the land has the voice of authority and is also the listener, then how is it for others who may wish to speak up? They cannot speak with authority. They cannot speak from a platform upon which they will be listened to. The dilemma is that, to speak in order to be heard, those from marginalised backgrounds must speak in ways that mark their hierarchically low 60

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position – loudly, repeatedly, emotionally, even angrily – or they must find another way to make their grievances known. For this reason, collective corporeal strategies for communicating within asymmetrical relationships have had longstanding effectiveness in South Asia. Burghart (1996) suggests that, in a political structure that reflects embedded social relations, power can move in two directions, the person at the top depending for his power on the cooperation and functioning of those below him to claim his right to power. Those who are in distress or have a grievance, perceiving themselves as part of a larger social body with reciprocal obligations, alert the more powerful party to this fact by making it known that there is a problem. In doing so, they reify the social body of which they are a part, as well as their inclusion within it. Burghart offers an extended illustration from Nepal, where holding a sanketī hartāl [token or symbolic strike] can effectively draw the attention of the authorities to the fact ‘that there is some taklīf [problem]’ and show that ‘the body politic no longer functions’ (1996: 310). If those in authority do not respond, however, then they are failing in their obligations and a moral space is created for public criticism, allowing dependents to escalate their protest, air their grievance in front of a broader – now public – authority (that of public opinion) and pose themselves as obstacles to their superior’s freedom of movement. This is something more easily achieved collectively, however, as petitioners in structurally less powerful positions have so clearly recognised in South Asia. As Burghart concludes: The very act of constructing a moral space for criticism . . . involves an attempt to communicate with the king, rather than simply an act of negation or rebellion. Therefore, as a form of consciousness it is rather more theatrical than critical. (1996: 318) This also helps explain why, despite the rise of democratic electoral politics in South Asia, with its ideology of one-person-one-vote, efforts to reify authorities and their relationships with particular social bodies have been a common precondition for political action, offering a dramatic contrast to theories of collective mobilisation as rejections of, or resistance to, authority.

Conclusion When writing of the relationship between emotion and politics, therefore, it is important to ask at every stage (i) whose emotions we are attending to; (ii) where these individuals are located socially and politically and (iii) perhaps most importantly, when – in a longer progression of efforts to engage with officials – anger or another emotion is first marked by others. We also need to be sensitive to how our interrogations might inadvertently 61

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contribute to the constitution and maintenance of power. Those in power can engage in individual communicative actions, speaking softly or in moderate tones, or writing to others with the expectation that their voices will be heard and acknowledged. They can also use this ability to speak moderately and be heard as an autonomous individual to stake exclusive claims to rationality and civility, enabling those with access to networks of power to frame their power simply as a product of the reasonableness of their arguments (see also Mitchell 2018). This enables them to refuse to acknowledge efforts to communicate that appear to take on a different form. Marking this difference enables those with access to power to discredit or dismiss communicative actions that are loud, angry, collective, repetitive, or emotional, and to ignore or silence communicative efforts they regard as noise or non-communication. This suggests that we must be particularly attentive to all such markings of difference, asking what work is being accomplished when collective actions are labelled angry, emotional, disruptive, uncivil, or irrational. We must also be cautious of attending only to the emotion or emotional styles of those in structurally less powerful positions, treating the communicative actions of those with access to networks of power as though emotion is entirely absent. In the case of the rustication of the 10 Dalit students from the University of Hyderabad in 2002, we should be equally interested in the emotional state of the chief hostel warden. Asking about the role that anger and resentment play among caste Hindus who fear their own loss of privilege in the face of the expanded inclusion of marginalised groups can help to redistribute our attention to emotion. As Young observes: ‘The only remedy for the dismissiveness with which some political expressions are treated on grounds that they are too dramatic, emotional, or figurative is to notice that any discursive content and argument is embodied in situated style and rhetoric’ (2000: 64). She continues by pointing out that ‘no discourse lacks emotional tone; “dispassionate” discourses carry an emotional tone of calm and distance’ (2000: 65). Attending to the ways in which proximity to institutional authority shapes the freedom to play with various styles of communication can help avoid reinforcing the idea that rationality is the absence of emotion. Bauman and Briggs (2003) describe how efforts to construct a new set of abstract norms that remove the particular from its embedded social context have quietly reconfigured forms of hierarchy while maintaining the guise of claiming to protect the public sphere as a domain to which all ostensibly have equal access. Rather than strengthening these new hierarchies by reinforcing the idea that anger is the standard choice of the marginalised and calm speech the choice of those in positions of power, we must recognise the work that goes into not hearing and attend to the ways that depersonalised bureaucratic structures relieve those in authority from any obligation to listen to or acknowledge collective communicative acts as political 62

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participation. Tracking historically, ethnographically and textually the constructions and maintenance of powerful distinctions in the representation and marking of emotions, interrogating the emotions of those in political power as often as we do the emotions of those not in power and asking what those in power stand to gain from dissecting the emotions of those on the margins can go a long way towards achieving these goals.

Notes 1 Podile Appa Rao, the chief hostel warden in 2002, was made the vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad in September 2015. Conflict between the administration and Dalit students has continued under Appa Rao’s vice-chancellorship, leading to the suspension of Dalit PhD scholar Rohith Vemula and four other Dalit scholars shortly after Appa Rao took office. In January 2016, following the confirmation of their suspension, Vemula committed suicide, sparking an international outcry. Appa Rao continues as vice-chancellor today, following a two-month leave in the wake of Vemula’s suicide. 2 The petition documents the appearance in the mess hall of posters offensive to Dalit students on 20 and 21 November 2001 as well as their earlier memorandum to the vice-chancellor, submitted on 26 November 2001, asking him to ‘take action against a group of persons resorting to hate campaign against the deprived sections and thereby insulting and humiliating the SC/ST [Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe] students community’ (petition to the vice-chancellor, University of Hyderabad, 16 January 2002). 3 I draw the terms ‘illocution’ and ‘perlocution’ from the speech-act theories of Austin and Searle, which have been widely adopted by political theorists, including Habermas. For a discussion of how his use of these terms departs from Austin and Searle, see Farrell (1993: chap. 5) and Young (2000: 66). 4 This has not always been the case. Paul Gilje shows that, in the decades leading up to American independence and the early decades of the newly independent American republic of the late 18th century, the belief that popular collective assemblies and other actions in the streets were essential to preventing tyranny was widespread. Writing to James Madison on 30 January 1787, Thomas Jefferson observes that ‘a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical’ (Peterson 1975: 414–18, quoted in Gilje 1987: 69). 5 Chakrabarty (2007) makes similar assumptions regarding the meaning of collective assemblies. 6 Charles Tilly famously argues that, by the 19th century, new collective forms of contention could increasingly be seen as ‘cosmopolitan’ (‘referring to interests and issues that spanned many localities or affected centers of power whose actions touched many localities’), ‘modular’ (‘easily transferable from one setting or circumstance to another instead of being shaped tightly to particular uses’), and ‘autonomous’ (‘beginning on the claimants’ own initiative and establishing direct communication between claimants and nationally significant centers of power’). See Tilly (1995: 46). 7 For an example from 1669, see Refai (1968: 32–5). See also Dharampal (1971, 2000). 8 My analysis of Indian collective action is inspired by Mitchell (2011), who focuses on how coal miners, dock workers and railway workers were able to demand greater recognition and inclusion in political decision making through

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their control over a single commodity essential to urban life, shaping the expansion of participation in what we now think of as democracy. His method suggests the importance of looking carefully at sites where new concentrations of people have controlled narrow flows of the commodities on which consumers depend. 9 For additional examples, see Mitchell (2018). 10 See, for example, the response of the Board of Trade at Fort St George to the arrival of a large delegation of weavers from the Coromandel Coast on 11 March 1817 (quoted in Mitchell 2018: 235). 11 Lyman points to the ways in which the Marxian tradition links anger, subordination, injury, and collective action, writing: ‘Revolutionary political movements must enable unfelt or unconscious emotional responses to injustice to become conscious and articulate. It does so by revealing that one’s own anger is shared by other people so that one is not alone; through revolutionary poetry that invents new words to express the meaning of inarticulate feelings; and by showing how collective action can resolve the causes of suffering’ (2004: 141). See also Lyman (1981). 12 See Lyman (1981: 141) for a discussion of the impact of Marxist theory on this. 13 See, for example, Young’s (2000: 65) discussion of Habermas. 14 For a discussion of how various democracies have approached public space, see: Hénaff and Strong (2001); Keller (2009); Parkinson (2012). 15 For a discussion of the restrictions imposed on the use of public spaces for political processions and dharna actions, see Mitchell (2014).

References Anveshi Law Committee. 2002a. ‘Castaway in Hyderabad’, Hindu, 3 March, www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2002/03/03/stories/2002030300280100.htm (accessed on 20 October 2014). ———. 2002b. ‘Caste and the Metropolitan University’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(12): 1000–3. Bate, Bernard. 2009. Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bayly, Christopher A. 2011. ‘Introduction: The Meanings of Liberalism in Colonial India’, in Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, pp. 1–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blom, Amélie and Nicolas Jaoul. 2008. ‘Introduction: The Moral and Affectual Dimension of Collective Action in South Asia’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2. doi:10.4000/samaj.1912. Blom, Amélie and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal. 2016. ‘EMOPOLIS: Emotions and Political Mobilizations in the Indian Subcontinent’, http://ceias.ehess.fr/index. php?3992 (accessed on 16 November 2016). Burghart, Richard. 1996. ‘The Conditions of Listening: The Everyday Experience of Politics in Nepal’, in Christopher J. Fuller and Jonathan Spencer (eds), The Conditions of Listening: Essays on Religion, History and Politics in South Asia, pp. 300–18. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India’, Public Culture, 19(1): 35–57. Chatterjee, Partha. 2001. ‘Democracy and the Violence of the State: A Political Negotiation of Death’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2(1): 7–21. Deshpande, J. V. 1997. ‘Behind Dalit Anger’, Economic and Political Weekly, 32(33–34): 2090–91. Dharampal. 1971. Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition; with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents. Varanasi: Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan. ———2000. Illustrations of Indian Non-Cooperation with Oppression and Mis-Rule: 1700–1850, vol. 17 of Archival Compilations. Sevagram: Ashram Pratishtan. East India Company. 1820. Selections of Papers from the Records of the East India House Relative to the Revenue, Police, Civil and Criminal Justice, Under the Company’s Government of India, vol. 2. London: Court of Directors. Farrell, Thomas B. 1993. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gilje, Paul A. 1987. The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Guha, Ramachandra. 1990. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, expanded ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1986. The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Hardiman, David. 2003. Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Hénaff, Marcel and Tracy B. Strong, eds. 2001. Public Space and Democracy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Holmes, Mary. 2004. ‘The Importance of Being Angry: Anger in Political Life’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 123–32. India Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. 2017. ‘E-Governance: Reforming Government Through Technology’, www.digitalindia.gov.in/content/egovernance-%E2%80%93-reforming-government-through-technology (accessed on 2 August 2017). Jaoul, Nicolas. 2008. ‘The “Righteous Anger” of the Powerless: Investigating Dalit Outrage over Caste Violence’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2: 1–32, http://samaj.revues.org/1892 (accessed on 17 October 2014). Keller, Lisa. 2009. Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kling, Blair B. 1966. The Blue Mutiny: The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal, 1859– 1862. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lasania, Yunus Y. 2017. ‘In Search of a “Dharna Chowk” in Hyderabad’, LiveMint, 4 May, www.livemint.com/Politics/E1B49GkzDEh0lxZrmXumTL/In-search-of-aDharna-Chowk-in-Hyderabad.html (accessed on 7 June 2017).

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Lyman, Peter. 1981. ‘The Politics of Anger: On Silence, Ressentiment and Political Speech’, Socialist Review, 11(3): 55–74. ———. 2004. ‘The Domestication of Anger: The Use and Abuse of Anger in Politics’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 133–47. Mill, James. 1845. The History of British India: From 1805 to 1835, ed. Horace Hayman Wilson. London: James Madden and Co. Mitchell, Lisa. 2009. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2014. ‘The Visual Turn in Political Anthropology and the Mediation of Political Practice in Contemporary India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 37(3): 515–40. ———. 2018. ‘Civility and Collective Action: Soft Speech, Loud Roars, and the Politics of Recognition’, Anthropological Theory, 18(2–3): 217–47. Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso. Nag, Kingshuk. 2017. ‘The Struggle over Hyderabad’s “Dharna Chowk” Is Bringing out the Worst in KCR’, The Wire, 17 May, https://thewire.in/136644/hyderabaddharna-chowk-kcr/ (accessed on 2 August 2017). Parkinson, John R. 2012. Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2001. The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2013. ‘Where Is the Public Sphere? Political Communications and the Morality of Disclosure in Rural Rajasthan’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 31(2): 104–22. Raman, Bhavani. 2012. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Randle, Michael. 1994. Civil Resistance. London: Fontana Press. Ranulf, Svend. 1964. Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology: A Sociological Study. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Refai, Gulammohammed Z. 1968. ‘Anglo-Mughal Relations in Western India and the Development of Bombay, 1662–1690’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge. Ring, Laura A. 2006. ‘Anger’, in Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building, pp. 103–36. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. and Matthew Tiews. 2006. ‘Introduction: A Book of Crowds’, in Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews (eds), A Book of Crowds, pp. IX–XX. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sharma, Kalpana. 2006. ‘Why Are Maharashtra’s Dalits So Angry?’ Hindu, 2 December, www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/why-are-maharashtrasdalits-so-angry/article3028039.ece (accessed on 7 November 2014). Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1989. ‘Anger and Insubordination’, in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (eds), Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, pp. 263–73. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. Swarnalatha, Potukuchi. 2001. ‘Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra’, International Review of Social History, 46: 107–29.

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Tarrow, Sidney G. 2011. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, revised 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and ‘the Politics of Recognition’: An Essay by Charles Taylor, ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1995. Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Unique Identification Authority of India. 2016. ‘About UIDAI’, https://uidai.gov.in/ about-uidai/about-uidai.html (accessed on 2 August 2017). Wankhede, Harish S. 2006. ‘Why the Dalits of Maharashtra Are So Angry’, Dalit Perspectives (blog), 3 December, http://dalitperspectivejnu.blogspot. co.uk/2006/12/why-dalits-of-maharashtra-are-so-angry.html (accessed on 7 November 2014). Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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4 REMEMBERING AND ACCESSING THE ‘EMOTIONS OF THINGS’ A methodological journey with a jihadist militant in Pakistan Amélie Blom*

New York, 11 September 2001. A group of young people sits sunbathing in a Brooklyn park. Behind them, across the river and in an immaculate blue sky, the twin towers crumble in a cloud of smoke as a hijacked airplane collides with the first building. When published some years later, this photograph became both iconic and controversial. Commentators saw in it, at best, an allegory of America’s capacity to ‘move on’ and, at worst, an insufferable callousness. This compelled one of the men in the photograph to speak out: although he and his girlfriend looked as though they were out enjoying a warm autumn day, he said, they were actually in ‘a profound state of shock and disbelief’ (Jones 2011).1 The story exemplifies the main points this chapter makes. First, accessing and documenting emotions is very difficult – even in a picture, pausing on still facial expressions, impassivity can be detrimentally confused with indifference. The difficulty stems from the composite nature of the object, emotion being ‘a complex experience of consciousness, bodily sensation, and behaviour that reflects the personal significance of a thing, an event, or a state of affairs’, as appraisal theory shows (Solomon 2014).2 Second, the ‘assignment of emotions’ onto others is never free of a cognitive and moral valuation (Paperman 1995), whether it is to condemn their lack of feeling or excess thereof.3 Third, in the case of the 9/11 photograph, the interjection of the ‘real man’ – someone who clearly remembered what he had felt then – is what restores the (his) truth of the experienced emotion. This makes a strong case in favour of first-person narrative interviews as an effective (albeit far from perfect) methodological tool for capturing emotions. It is precisely on autobiographic oral interview that this essay focuses, in order to demonstrate that even one specific emotion-exploring 68

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instrument might encompass different ways of accessing and documenting emotions; here, the emotions of recruits of jihadist militias in Pakistan. ‘Jihadist militias’ refer to the armed groups that fought against Indian rule in the disputed territory of Kashmir from the late 1980s onwards, doing so in the name of ‘jihad’ and with the political and logistical support of Pakistan’s regular army.4 Locally, they were known as ‘jihādī tanzīm’ (jihadist organisations). ‘I remember only the emotions of things and I forget all the rest.’5 As Spanish poet Antonio Machado puts it so eloquently, the affectual traces of past events are often what one remembers best, even long after the event. This is particularly true for emotionally intense experiences such as highrisk activism ‘because of the potentially dramatic consequences it entail[s], including persecution, torture, imprisonment and even death’ (Romanos 2014: 549). In this regard, jihadism is no exception, with its proximity to death, the constant (and exhausting) sense of fear and the exhilarating feeling of being a morally superior agent of political change fighting to restore justice within the umma [pan-Muslim community].6 This observation is borne out by the testimonies I collected during my fieldwork on jihadist militias in Pakistan during the second half of the 2000s. While based in Lahore from 2006 to 2009, I met several former recruits of one such militia, the Lashkar-e Taiba (LT) or ‘army of the pure’ – a Punjabidominated group that had begun operations in Afghanistan and shifted to Kashmir in 1990.7 Then in their late 20s, these young men had left the LT several years ago but recollected ‘the emotion of things’: the hopelessness, resignation, curiosity, and fascination that had steered them to an LT training camp and the disillusionment, fear and disgust (among others) that had driven them away. Almost 10 years later, I too still remember vividly what I felt when speaking to these young men. I was moved to tears by the tragic love story of one former recruit; overwhelmed by admiration for another who went on to university to study social development; and disheartened by one ‘Abu Mujahid’ (‘father of the mujahid’, his self-chosen pseudonym) who hoped that his 4-year-old son, then playing in his lap, would achieve what he had not: become a shahīd [martyr]. However unexpected, ‘when your data make[s] you cry’, as put by Gould in regard to her own research on ACT UP activists (2009: 6),8 it is impossible – or at least difficult – to ignore how this may affect your work. How do emotions direct, or redirect, militancy? And how does an external observer access them? Unlike most other studies on jihadism in Pakistan, the point of this essay is not to identify one ‘master’ emotion capable of explaining all patterns of individual recruitment. Rather, it aims to enrich our empirical knowledge of jihadist trajectories, based on an empirical and inductive assessment of the emotional dynamics at work. Building on the first-person narrative of a former LT recruit I happened to be friends with, this chapter addresses the earlier questions – one empirical, the other 69

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methodological – and their entanglement by making two main arguments. First, if emotions are such a useful entry point to the micro-foundations of militancy, it is because they provide a wealth of information on how individuals relate to their environment. Following in the footsteps of the various emotional states of former jihadists – even if mediated by language and memory – and isolating them enables one to mark each stage of the incremental process of engagement (and disengagement). This argument, however, raises an epistemological question: did these former recruits express their feelings in such clear-cut emotion terms as ‘hopelessness’, ‘fear’ or ‘fascination’? At times, yes, but marginally so, as I realised when revisiting my interview transcripts during the research programme that gave birth to the present collective volume. For the most part, what I perceived as ‘their emotions’ and saw to be a spontaneous, valid way of documenting and understanding them (see Blom 2011) resulted from a far more complicated process. This involved, among other things, the logic of their narratives, emotion markers and the nature of our interactions. Taking these situational elements into account when documenting emotions forms the second argument of this chapter. This essay is, therefore, as much an attempt to decipher the emotional dynamics of jihadist militancy in Pakistan as it is a methodological proposition. In reasoning ‘backwards’ or upside down – developing an analytical description before a methodology – the chapter presents an empirically grounded discussion showing how our methods of inquiry can affect the way we interpret the role of emotions in activism.

The emotions of jihadist militants: beyond frustration and humiliation Strangely enough, jihadism has failed to provoke much interest in the subfield of emotions and social movements. Our general understanding of how emotions and protests intersect is almost exclusively informed by Westerncentric empirical studies of progressive collectives (see Chapter 1 of this volume on this). Consequently, the rare attempts to analyse the role of emotions in high-risk activism are often based on causes for which the observer has at least some empathy.9 On the other hand, the existing literature on jihadist militancy in Pakistan tends to ignore the emotional complexity of its recruits.10 Three different, but converging, analytical directions make this neglect possible. One is to simply deny that such militants have any right to ‘feel’, given the depth of their ideological commitment and the assumption that they have been brainwashed at a madrasa [seminary]. The second way of overlooking emotions is to see them everywhere. Thus, jihadist recruits are said to be driven, even overwhelmed, by a ubiquitous and often conflicting set of (intense) emotions. This runs the gamut from hate, vengeance, 70

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compassion, and low self-esteem to inflated self-esteem, despair, hope, humiliation, and frustration – to the point that they lose all explanatory power. A third way is to identify one ‘master emotion’ that can make sense of each and every prospective recruit’s choice to engage in jihadist militancy. Unfailingly, this is either frustration (mainly material and sexual) or humiliation. The equation ‘poverty + frustration = jihadist militancy’ is repeated ad nauseam by the psychologists and security personnel working for military-run ‘de-radicalisation programmes’ since 2009 in Pakistan, for instance, not to mention the innumerable reports produced on this subject by West-based think-tanks.11 Humiliation is tagged as the other culprit – young men join the LT because it promises ‘glory and security’ in the Afterlife whereas their everyday life is dogged by ‘oppression and humiliation’ (Jalal 2008: 287). Similarly, Jasper’s review of 20 years of research on the role of emotions in social movements claims that, ‘especially after humiliations, revenge can become a primary goal, as in the case of Palestinian suicide bombers’ (2011: 290). This direct causal link between humiliation, with its sociological and political subtext, and the decision to join a jihadist organisation departs appealingly from the common-sense psychology linked to ‘frustration’. But on closer examination, it blurs the line further. There are indeed countless young and/or marginalised men in Pakistan who suffer daily indignities, but have no intention of fighting or dying in the ranks of a jihadist militia. How are we to account for this variation? The ‘master emotion’ thesis is problematic also because emotion studies demonstrate that it is impossible to prove that an emotional stimulus will necessarily provoke an automatic (re)action. In a highly repressive context, for instance, fear might either hinder or encourage high-risk activism (Goodwin and Pfaff 2001). To solve this conundrum, we must look at two sets of factors: (i) the specific properties of the situation and the social interaction involved – which, for instance, can make the resentment born of indiscriminate repression stronger than fear; and (ii) the mobilisation entrepreneur’s ‘emotion work’ (Hochschild 1979) – which, for instance, can alleviate fear by instilling in the people a sense of unshakable strength. In other words, to explain how an emotion experienced will direct a person’s action, we must analyse both situation and interaction. In any case, the state of our (still very poor) empirical knowledge of jihadist profiles and motivation – in Pakistan or elsewhere – does not make room for any one all-powerful explanatory variable. Proving that humiliation does not necessarily explain all jihadists’ recruitment does not mean that they are impervious to it. Indeed, it featured prominently in one of the testimonies I documented – that of Ashiq. But to determine what exactly humiliation explains in his case (his decision to run away from his village or to join an LT camp?) is no easy task. Only the young man’s story can help determine this. 71

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Accessing emotions: methodological debates Taking an intuitive approach to the emotional dynamics at play in jihadism presumes that emotions are unproblematic material for social scientists to work with. This is far from the case, as noted by Mauss and Robinson (2009: 209): ‘from an intuitive layperson perspective, it should be easy to determine whether someone is experiencing a particular emotion. However, scientific evidence suggests that measuring a person’s emotional state is one of the most vexing problems in affective science’. The importance of this methodological problem and how it impacts on social sciences inquiries into emotions in social and political life have only recently been explored (Flam and Kleres 2015).12 But in Jalal’s (2008) work, for instance, humiliation is taken for granted, not something that needs to be proven. In part, the (very limited) access to reliable sources explains this – a key methodological issue that is often overlooked in academic works on jihadism.13 The emotions attributed to jihadist recruits in Pakistan, for instance, are usually based on propaganda material and ‘testimonies’ produced under the watchful eye of the militia’s cadres (because their main objective is to emulate potential recruits). At best, one might safely say that jihadist cadres know how to approach, and relate to, restless teenagers.14 These strategised emotions are the privileged terrain of studies on the role of emotions in political mobilisations, which reveal how emotions are used as political tools rather than how they become an incentive to action. Drawing on Latté’s (2015) distinction, we know more about the emotions mobilised – used intentionally and strategically by leaders through ‘emotion work’ and ‘sensitising devices’ (Traïni 2009, 2010; see also Tawa LamaRewal, this volume) – than about the mobilising emotions: the process by which the experienced emotions motivate individuals and propel them into action (joining an organisation or attending a protest). This distinction should not be understood as a rigid dichotomy: the two processes are intimately connected to one another. Leaders do not simply strategise on emotions, but are themselves moved by the cause. Conversely, how followers can effectively – and hence affectively – be mobilised depends, as stressed by Traïni (2010) and as we shall see, on sensibilities and affective predisposition, which have not only been forged previously in their intimate and social histories, but are also shaped, modified and activated by the ‘sensitising devices’ put in place by the organisation. Nevertheless, it remains that the level of difficulty in accessing such devices or individual sensibilities clearly differs: getting to the core of an experienced emotion and demonstrating that it led to a specific action remains a challenging task. This is why most political anthropologists and sociologists treat this problem either as a non-issue or as an insurmountable obstacle. For the ‘hard’ constructivist view, for instance, it makes no sense to distinguish between experienced and expressed emotion because there is nothing to emotion 72

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beyond the local discursive structures through which it is figured and practiced. For the ‘rhetoric of emotions’ approach (Czarniawska 2015), the distinction make sense, but is impossible to operationalise. People’s accounts of emotions – theirs and those of others – is all that needs to be known because: (i) the relationship between such accounts of emotions and experienced emotions can only be examined by speculative means and (ii) there is nothing to emotions beyond their communicative nature.15 Psychological states (inner representations) exist, of course, but we can do without them: ‘to specify an emotion, we do not have to refer to the inner state of the subject but we have to locate the contexts that gave birth to it’ as well, adds Heurtin (2009: 105). This is easier said than done. It is frustrating to remain anchored to the level of intention – the emotions strategised by leaders or expressed by activists with a communicative purpose – and deprive oneself of the right to make any statement concerning the real (experienced) emotions of the people whose behaviour one is trying to explain. To return to our case study, it is certainly important to uncover how jihadist cadres, as entrepreneurs of a cause, transform feelings of powerlessness into heroism (to attract recruits) or turn fear into feelings of invincibility through the register of religious miracles (to enable recruits to carry out violence). Nonetheless, being unable to determine whether such attempts are successful in mobilising people is unsatisfactory. This tension explains, in my view, the frequent ambiguity in social movement studies regarding what experienced emotions do to actors. As a generic category endowed with agency, emotions are often described as ‘motivations for protest’ (Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2004: 414); as an ‘unseen lens that colors all our thoughts, actions, perceptions and judgments’ (Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2001: 10); as the ‘texture of social movements’ and ‘incentives for collective action’ (Romanos 2014: 552) – none of which explain the exact causal process. Experienced emotions, therefore, fall not within the no-access zone, but in a grey area. Attempts to conceptualise how mobilising emotions can thrust people into action suffer from a similar ambivalence. One is the popular notion of ‘moral shock’ or ‘the vertiginous feeling that results when an event or information shows that the world is not what one had expected, which can sometimes lead to articulation or rethinking of moral principals’ (Jasper 2011: 289). It is compared to an electric shock, the ‘last straw’ that spurs action by putting one into ‘attack mode’ (Jasper 1997: 106). The concept helps explain sensitivity to an event (Blom 2008), but not the act of protesting against it. As its inventor acknowledges, ‘moral shock, agency and activism have a complex relation’ in any case (Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2001: 17). Jasper thus proposes another causalist concept – that of the ‘moral battery’. The ‘tension or contrast’ between a ‘positive and a negative emotion’ (likened to the positive and negative terminals of a battery) is 73

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what ‘motivates action or demands attention’ (Jasper 2011: 291). Pride and shame, pity and joy, anxiety in the present and hope for the future are the most meaningful ‘pairs’ of emotions that entrepreneurs can mobilise (see also Voix, this volume). But, again, the impact of these emotions remains unresolved: the gap between ‘demanding attention’ and ‘motivating action’ is not quite so easily bridged. Another widely quoted attempt to theorise how felt emotions cause activism is Wood’s concept of ‘emotional in-process benefits’ (2001: 268). Based on interviews with 200 Salvadoran peasants carried out several years after they had joined the Leftist insurgency, she maintains they did so to ‘express moral outrage’ and ‘experience the pleasure of agency’ (272). These are emotional benefits because they were accessible only to those who had participated actively in the insurgency, thus solving the ‘free-rider paradox’ of collective action. The limitation of this concept is that it confuses a retrospective account of emotions with mobilising emotions in situ (see the following). In sum, if the consensus is that no organisation can mobilise potential protestors unless they are open to being mobilised, then we still know very little about how an emotional predisposition translates into an effective action. First-person narratives with activists do not solve this problem altogether because they allow access only to emotions expressed in hindsight. However, provided their methodological properties are addressed, first-person narratives can prove invaluable in getting as close as possible to mobilising emotions.

First-person narratives: jihadist militants in their own words Autobiographic and life-history interviews invite respondents to selfreflect on their experiences and the thoughts, feelings and impressions they attach to these (Levy and Hollan 1998). Some compelling analyses of militancy based on the life-stories of South Asian combatants – Sikh supporters of the 1980s Khalistan movement in India (Mahmood 1996) and teenagers recruited by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka (Trawick 2007), for instance – show how fruitful this method can be.16 This essay follows these inspiring works. In doing so, it uses material gathered for past research on the life histories of former jihadists (Blom 2011).17 Active jihadist combatants are, obviously, very difficult to access if one wishes to avoid going through the organisation’s channels (as in my case) and usually provide controlled and stereotypical accounts of their trajectory. Former recruits are likely to speak more freely, although they raise other methodological difficulties. Ashiq’s account of his experiences was, nevertheless, inevitably altered by memory and the specific settings in which we spoke (the courtyard of a school, my house).18 These 74

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properties of the inquiry are not an obstacle to ‘the truth’, but rather integral components of the situational analysis of contentious emotions that this chapter advocates. The life-story discussed in this chapter is that of Ashiq (pseudonym), a young man who joined an LT training camp in 1997 with the self-professed goal of ‘embracing martyrdom’ in Kashmir. He could have been one of the 12,000 Pakistani ‘martyrs’ who died on the battlefield in India, but he never crossed the Line of Control dividing Kashmir because this ex-recruit ultimately left the LT. I became friends with Ashiq at a cooking class in Lahore in 2007. He was born in a small Punjabi village in 1979, the year that Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – the only person who ‘ever did anything for the poor in this country’, he said – was hanged by General Zia-ul-Haq. Ashiq’s father, an agricultural labourer, made him leave school to work as a farmhand. At 16, he was sent to Lahore to work in a textiles factory. When he joined the LT, he was employed as a domestic worker – a job he still held when I met him. During one of our regular chats, I learnt that he had joined the LT 10 years ago. He agreed to being interviewed at my home in Lahore (May 2007).19 The discussion started with his conception of ‘jihad’. As he explained: Jihad means to give your life in the way of God (khudā kī rāh), to show others the way of God and remember Him all your life . . . and as you know, I took part in jihad with the people of Lashkar-e Taiba (jihad par Lashkar-e Taiba wālon kē sāth gayā thā). I nodded. He continued: ‘I went to complete their 21-day training, but ran away (bhāg āyā thā) after 20 days.’ ‘Why?’, I asked him, without clarifying if I was referring to his decision to go or to leave. He responded to both interpretations in one go: Just like that . . . the thing is, I went because I had this problem (bas jī . . . asal mēn, main to gayā thā apnē is maslē sē), but I saw there . . . this discord between Sunni and Wahhabi. Without taking liberties with interview extracts, what I want to convey here (to Urdu and Hindi speakers) is the tone in which Ashiq alludes to his engagement – and almost immediate disengagement – with jihad: he is direct, matter-of-fact and slightly disillusioned. Moreover, he recalls the experience in a way that his ‘emotional commitment’ (Mitchell 2009: 2) to jihad (which started the conversation) and his personal ‘problem’ (masla) form an indivisible whole. Explaining the latter, he mused: I had a love marriage [in English] independently of my parents [their decision] (mān bāp sē alag). . . . This love [in English] existed 75

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for 12 years. I dedicated my life to her, to Rushna (mērī pūrī zindagī usī kē nām par guzrī). The story unfolded. Twelve years ago, while working at the textiles factory, Ashiq met and fell in love with Rushna. His elders opposed the relationship to the point that his paternal uncle (whom he loathed) insisted he marry his daughter. Ashiq’s parents were too poor to risk disobeying. When he tried to resist, his mother and sister laid their dupattas [headscarves] at his feet. This subtle emotional practice represents self-imposed humiliation: literally, laying one’s ‘izzat or honour (symbolised by the dupatta or pagrī [turban] in the case of rural men) at another’s feet. It is also a bargaining practice intended to shame the person held responsible for the disgrace he/she has brought on his/her family. The gesture thus put the burden of reparation onto Ashiq: the women’s tainted honour could be restored only if he agreed to the match. He gave in, but warned his family he would run away the day after the forced wedding – which he did. Back in Lahore with his lover, but in disgrace, Ashiq realised he had burned his boats and now feared retaliation from their families. This turning point in his life provoked what I call an endless fuite en avant (Blom 2011), which is what eventually led him to join a jihadist militia. The French term fuite en avant has no English equivalent; it conveys both the idea of fleeing from a situation without knowing where to (the priority being to escape, not the destination itself) and that of rushing headlong into an even more dangerous situation than before. Indeed, what Ashiq refers to, in trying to explain his trajectory, has more to do with a sense of urgency and of being so desperate that he joined a group that was, in fact, doctrinally hostile – the LT is part of the Ahl-e Hadith tradition, while Ashiq is a Barelwi.20 Although Ashiq was certainly frustrated, humiliated and scared, none of these emotions explain his radicalisation in an automatic or deterministic sense because he did not go directly from his village to the LT camp. No, first he found work in a rich Lahori household. And there he met a friend whose brother ‘had become a martyr’ in Kashmir in the ranks of the LT. What the previously mentioned feelings did was to make him more receptive to the stories he heard from this boy. As Ashiq explained: I had heard about the mujahidin from the Lashkar but I had not seen them, so I was eager to see (dēkhnē kī chāhat hu’ī). I thought to myself, ‘Let’s see if [what is said about them] is true or not. Fascination and curiosity, therefore, seem to be more directly linked to his decision to walk into an LT office and register as a recruit, which he did some weeks later. But as our discussion continued, an even more complex cluster of emotions came into play, encompassing a sense of loss and derealisation. When the question I asked required a direct answer about his motivation 76

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(‘why did you take this decision to go there?’), Ashiq seemed rather lost and, after a long pause, mused: ‘Why go there? [Pause] . . . Hmm . . . because at that point, I could not see any way out (Udhar ja’ēngē kyūn? Kyūn kih yahān to mujhē ko’ī rāsta nazar nahīn ā rahā thā)’. He explained: ‘I thought to myself: all right, I’ll go there [training camp], see how things go, come back and then take her21 along. Either both of us will die or. . . ’. I could not hide my surprise and interjected, ‘You mean Rushna?’ Ashiq replied, ‘Yes. We’ll go to Kashmir, fight or embrace shahādat [martyrdom]. . . . But when I got there [to the camp], I saw it was nothing like I’d expected.’ Having channelled his emotions towards ‘jihad in occupied Kashmir’, Ashiq left the training camp soon after. As he put it, he had come proudly ‘to serve God’, but witnessed sectarian intolerance among his peers instead: ‘The boys there, when they see Sunnis [Barelwis], they laugh at them and I didn’t like that (larkē Sunnīyon ko dēkh kar kehkahē lagātē thē aur yeh mujhē achā nahīn lagtā thā).’ He also disapproved of the immorality of the Lashkar cadres who ‘think they’re so much better than us, but they’re just . . . sitting there, filling their stomachs, without going to fight in Kashmir’. Ashiq was even more horrified to find ‘poor girls, orphans’ there, servicing the jihadists. Realising it would be absurd to bring Rushna here, he came to his senses or down to earth – two spoken language expressions that, incidentally, convey perfectly the end of his state of enchantment and derealisation. He decided to focus on his initial goal: to marry her. The final nail in the coffin, as he explained off the record, was seeing ‘boys who [had] defied the jihadist cadres’ be murdered and their bodies presented to their families as ‘martyrs’ killed in Kashmir. The spell was broken. Fearing for his life, he fled once again, but this time he stole a weapon before leaving.

Emotions in context As Ashiq’s testimony illustrates, each context mattered: that of the village where he had been badly humiliated, his employer’s household where stories of the militia had piqued his curiosity and, importantly, the training camp itself. Indeed, his confrontation with daily life at the training camp gave rise to what I have termed elsewhere an ‘affective dissonance’ (see Blom 2011). The young man experienced an unbearable tension between the emotions he had originally associated with jihadism and what he felt while he was at the camp. He discovered that, within the ‘fascinating’ world of jihad were false martyrs and that the camp, far from being an alternative society, was a criminal enterprise structured around the same modes of domination and sectarian hatred that prevailed in the outside world. Ambitions of heroism ceded to humiliation; hope and curiosity gave way to fear. Specialists in the field of emotion studies warn against attributing agency to emotions while neglecting their contextual properties. ‘How specific emotions like grief, happiness or affection are generated, handled and expressed’, 77

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Gammerl (2012: 164) reminds us, ‘depends to a large degree on where they occur’. In other words, ‘feelings are context-bound, meaning their sources, objects, and effects are contingent, unpredetermined, and variable’ (Gould 2015: 169). Conversely, as the pragmatist approach to emotions shows, a situation or environment is modified in turn by the expression of emotions. Since ‘emotions affect the environment through their expression, the ecological study of emotions implies at the same time looking at expressions and looking at environments’ (Aranguren and Arquembourg 2015). Emotions are environment-bound and environments are emotions-bound. If it seems obvious that, say, ‘the supermarket calls for a different emotional repertoire compared to the beach or the office’ (Gammerl 2012: 164), a context that is generally overlooked is the conduit through which social scientists access the emotions expressed. Most studies on the affectual dimension of social movements neglect the idea that their preferred method of semi-directed interviews might affect how an emotional experience is documented.22 Consequently, and implicitly, they often reason as if emotions were ‘the expression of feelings inwardly contained by individuals that one could study in isolation from . . . the interactional situation in which they are embedded’ (Lefranc 2013). This can lead to important analytical errors. Wood (2001), for instance, acknowledges that the ‘retrospective reporting of participants in a social movement as to why, earlier, they had joined may reflect present interests as well as the intervening period of their own interpretation of their participation’ (270). She agrees that ‘this problem is not easy to address’ (ibid.), but maintains that the ‘pride and pleasure evident in the later interviews . . . was also an important factor in motivating participation earlier’ (ibid.). What she does not explain is why a post hoc account of motivation should describe pre ante emotional motivation – we simply have to take her word for it. The problem is that her respondents expressed the pleasure they derived from their insurrectionary activities – that is, from feeling they could revolutionise social relations or restore justice – as an outcome of their participation and the legacy of the war. When asked to label their feelings before they joined the insurgency, they talk about ‘social resentment’ and ‘rage’ and also the ‘terror’ of the majority to join the rebels. In other words, the ‘emotional benefits’ they gained are nothing but a retrospective evaluation of the struggle. The following case demonstrates that fieldwork-based interviews modulate the expression of emotions in an important temporal way. This interaction-based method of inquiry does more: it influences how emotions are expressed. This, rather than any narcissistic drive, indicates that researchers interested in uncovering the emotional world of their respondent take their own feelings into account as well. Interestingly, emotion studies specialists, and particularly those working with oral history interviews, have recently shown a growing need to self-reflect on 78

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the emotional dynamics attached to their methods of inquiry (Gammerl 2015; Gould 2015). Let me develop this point further. Sociologists relying on autobiographical interviews are often criticised for assuming they constitute an unmediated way of getting at the authenticity of people’s ‘experiences’ and ‘perceptions’; in assuming this, there is a direct link between the language of people’s accounts and their past and present psychic states (Silverman 2017). In other words, there is indeed a risk of confusing jihadists’ motives (how they account for their action) with their motivations (their mental states when they did what they did). To correct this unavoidable bias of interviews, Silverman and others suggest considering this method as exhibiting behaviours rather than experiences (more on this later). This proposition is based on the observation that ‘meaning is not merely directly elicited by skilful questioning, nor is it simply transported through truthful replies; it is strategically assembled in the interview process’ (Holstein and Gubrium, quoted in Silverman 2017: 147). As such, interviews would thus be a privileged route to accessing ‘taboo emotions’ (Flam 2015: 12–13). These would be revealed through Freudian slips, self-contradictions, speech and story disruptions, metaphors, etc., all signs that the researcher can record during the interview. Yet this runs the risk of seeing interviewers mutate into lay-psychoanalysts. A most convincing approach is to focus on the emotional interactions between interviewees and interviewer to bring to the surface the suppressed emotions not of the former but of the latter. Both Gould (2015) and Gammerl (2015), in their highly original chapters, demonstrate that, once recognised and critically reflected upon, such emotions help them to identify unacknowledged expectations – of, for instance, the most mobilising emotion in a given group (anger for the US ACT UP activists studied by Gould, insecurity feelings among homosexuals in 1960s–1970s rural Germany studied by Gammerl). Paying attention to feelings generated during the research process is also a particularly rewarding route of enquiry because it generates new insights (such as, in Gammerl’s case study, how his irritation at one of his interviewees revealed to him an opposition of emotional styles typical of the different generations of gay men to which they both belonged). This essay follows these inspiring and self-critical reflections on oral interviews. As I said in the introduction, I was moved to tears by Ashiq’s story. I did not cry in front of him but, undoubtedly, the former recruit sensed my feelings during the interview. Identifying and demonstrating how this may have affected the way he expressed his emotions is almost impossible, but to ignore the problem would be worse. The interview with Ashiq actually compelled me to self-reflect on my compassion and on its political meaning. Why was I so moved? Why did other respondents not provoke the same feeling? 79

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There are several aspects to this response. First, unlike other respondents (such as Abu Mujahid) who remained staunch supporters of jihadism even after leaving the militia, the man in front of me was critical of it. Moreover, Ashiq was also akin to a modern-day Majnūn – a comparison that cropped up in the conversation – who had gone astray into the seductive yet deceptive world of jihad. Strictly speaking, his emotions were more ‘accessible’ to me: he was closer to my moral preferences (rejecting jihadism) and (romantic) ideals. I could feel greater empathy. Second, I came to realise, through Ashiq’s interview, that I felt a complex mixture of anger and sorrow towards my scientific object: anger at the Pakistan army, which uses idealistic young men to fight its irredentist war in Kashmir, and sorrow for those who have died for a lost cause and in complete indifference. This respondent embodied this ambivalence perfectly. Third, listening to someone recount how close they came to death – in Ashiq’s case, not just in Kashmir, but as soon as he had joined the training camp, which did not tolerate dissent – and how deeply puzzled they are about what they have done to themselves or to their loved ones, left me far more shaken than I had anticipated. Another self-reflective way to elucidate how the setting of an interview might have affected not only the way my respondent expressed his emotions but also how I understood these emotions, is to track as accurately as possible the ways in which I accessed them. This exercise helped me identify five different types of documented emotions in interview-based self-narratives. A logical place to start was to ask myself which of us was articulating the emotion in question. At times, respondents explicitly use emotion terms, but often, emotions are attributed to the respondent by the observer. Based on this, two main categories of accessed emotions emerged: (i) emic or uttered emotions and (ii) etic or recorded emotions. This distinction helped disclose two things. First, that Ashiq used very few emotion terms. He never said he was ‘desperate’ or ‘afraid’ or ‘humiliated’ – I deduced these feelings. Second, an important dimension of the affectual dynamics of political engagement my respondents referred to was their ‘temperament’ (mizāj) – which was both uttered and recorded. Refining such findings, I identified five types of accessed emotions in autobiographic oral interviews: (i) the verbally expressed emotions used by actors to explain their own behaviour; (ii) the verbally expressed emotions employed as part of a discursive process of qualifying and disqualifying people, situations, relations, things (as well as other people’s emotions); (iii) recorded emotions by the respondent as part of a plausible emotional scenario; (iv) recorded emotions sensed by the observer through various ‘emotion markers’ that suggest what the respondent is feeling; and (v) temperament, which explains my respondents’ sensibility to specific events and situations (see Table 4.1).

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3

2 Evaluative emotion terms Emotion terms used to qualify or disqualify people, situations, relations, etc.

Emic emotions (named by respondent)

1

Motive conveying emotion terms Emotion terms used to describe motivation and provide causal explanation of behaviour.

Source: Prepared by author based on fieldwork.

How? Discursive operation

Etic emotions (inferred by the observer)

Uttered

Who is speaking? Respondent vs. observer

Inferred from the narrative’s logic and/or interaction during the interview.

Emotional scenario

Recorded

Types of documented emotions

Comparative variables

Inferred from linguistic and/ or body markers. Sensed and typically recorded in a fieldwork diary.

Emotion markers

4

Table 4.1 Modular ways of accessing activists’ emotions through interview-based narratives

Accessible from a range of indicators.

Tempera-ment/sensibilities

5

Uttered or recorded

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Accounting for variations in accessing emotions Uttered emotions The verbal expression of emotion emerges through emotion terms. These are uttered under different regimes of speech or discursive operations, either as motivational emotion terms or evaluative emotion terms. In the first case (type 1), respondents will name an emotion to make their actions intelligible (to the researcher and/or to themselves) as motives, that is, as a way of explaining or justifying their intentions. In Ashiq’s case, this occurred when he described ‘love’ as a ‘problem’ that compelled him to ‘go to the Lashkar’. Here, it is useful to distinguish between the direct use of specific emotion terms (‘love’) and indirectly used emotion terms, interpreted as such by the listener. Thus, Ashiq used the term chāhat [eagerness] to explain why he had wanted to find out whether jihadist militias were as extraordinary as his friend would have him believe and why, therefore, he had gone to the LT office. This emotional state had, in my view, the definitional features of ‘curiosity’. Whenever emotions are named to qualify or disqualify people, situations, relations, and things (type 2), another discursive operation comes into play: evaluation. This evaluation concerns, first, people’s attitudes. Thus, when Ashiq said, ‘The boys laughed at Sunnis and I didn’t like that’ [italics mine], it was close to a motivational explanation (why he left). Here, the emotion term functions differently, not only describing one’s affective state but also implying a judgement. Additionally, this judgmental narrative can qualify other people’s emotions (and sometime even the jihadist militia’s ‘emotion work’ itself).23 For instance, Ashiq said with ironic humour: ‘I am so used to my elders and rich people (barē log) speaking to me with anger that, when they don’t, I think, “Hey, what’s happened to them today?”’ [italics mine]. This echoes an important emotional dimension of dominance, which anthropology identifies as the public expression of anger being a privilege of the powerful (Holmes 2004: 127; see also Blom and Tawa Lama-Rewal, this volume; Mitchell, this volume). Another aspect of uttered emotions to explore is their performative property. For Reddy (1997), emotion words (the expression of one’s feelings through language communicated to others, following a set of norms dictated by the situation) are very different from emotions proper (the subjective emotions an individual feels). He coins the word ‘emotives’ for the former. This demarcation stems from the fact that ‘emotives’, says Reddy, have a strong performative dimension – the statement’s referent changes by virtue of the statement. The statement ‘I am sad’, for instance, constitutes not only the feeling itself but also its intensity, which is captured by the utterance and not by the experience to which it refers. Looking at emotional utterances as being both self-exploring and self-altering is very useful to this 82

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discussion, although studying the performative aspect of ‘emotives’ can be methodologically demanding. Recorded emotions More often than not, the emotions attributed to activists are, as I have said, recorded by the observer. It is, therefore, worth examining how observers capture these in semi-structured interviews. In this case, two distinct ways of recording emotions emerged. The first is based on the intrinsic logic of the narrative and of the interview interaction, both of which unfolded like a sequential emotional scenario (type 3). Ashiq, for instance, did not say, ‘I was caught in a fuite en avant because I was afraid and did not know what to do next’, but he provided several pieces of information that helped me reconstruct the mechanism of events as well as the emotions that directed and redirected his trajectory. First, running away appeared to be a repetitive behaviour pattern: Ashiq had run away from his village, his subsequent job and the training camp. Second, he alluded implicitly to his despair by expressing it as a lack of perspective (‘I could not see any way out’). He also evoked his fear, not explicitly, but in the shape of objectively fearful situations: possible retaliation by his family or that of his lover and witnessing the murder of fresh recruits while at the training camp. Finally, he explained that stealing the gun had been his way of ‘protecting’ the runaway couple. Based on all these, I identified despair and fear as the emotions that triggered his fuite en avant. It seems that, whenever the young man felt hopeless or scared, this was how he dealt with his feelings. While this fuite was not without purpose (the objective was always to find a solution to his ‘problem’ – a way to marry Rushna), it lacked direction. This is evident from his original, impractical plan to take his lover with him and fight in Kashmir or embrace ‘shahādat’. Emotional scenarios can also occur during an interview, helping to confirm or invalidate the findings gathered through other means of accessing emotions. A case in point is when Ashiq asked me to stop the tape recorder when about to disclose two sensitive issues: the murder of dissenting recruits and the gun he had stolen before running away. This signalled the sensitivity of both accounts, which, in turn, left me feeling uneasy because I thought I was about to learn something I should not know, which might put his security at risk, for instance. My uneasiness was communicated to Ashiq and this probably increased his own apprehension at that point. Another interview with a former jihadist recruit illustrates how such emotional scenarios during the interaction between respondent and observer can affect scientific interpretation. The young man was trying to convey how much he resented the fact that his father had not stopped him when he expressed his desire (as a teenager) to join a Lashkar camp soon after he had started to attend a mosque controlled by the jihadist group (Blom 2011). In 83

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his words: ‘When I told [my father] the first time, “I want to go on jihad, give me your permission”, he said, “You’re too young. You’ll go later.” He didn’t oppose my inclination to carry out jihad’. I did not grasp how important this memory was to him and merely continued by asking how old he was at that time. My lack of comprehension evidently irked him. Raising his voice, he said: But you don’t understand! If my parents thought this was not a good thing, they should have said: ‘Leave this mosque. Go somewhere else’ – that was their responsibility. But no, they just said, ‘Go later.’ For me, that was the green light. [italics mine] This revealed an overlap between what he took to be a lack of consideration for his feelings, from me, and from his father. Being compelled (by his raised voice) to sense (before interpreting), led me to analyse the father’s attitude as something the young boy might have experienced, back then, as an emotional betrayal. As both examples show, many emotions expressed during field interviews are sensed, intuited, by the observer: these constitute the fourth category of accessed emotions. Scheff’s (1988: 400–2) notion of ‘emotion marker’ proves useful here. In his study of shame, he distinguishes between verbal and non-verbal markers. Verbal markers are expressions, images or allegories that suggest an underlying emotion. For instance, ‘I felt stupid: I don’t know how I could have done that’ indicates shame without the emotion being explicitly mentioned (hence, and in addition to explicit emotion terms, verbal markers form part of the verbal expression of emotions). In Ashiq’s case, I interpreted the (key) sentence ‘I could not see any way out’ as an indicator of despair. Similarly, I identified as a marker of disillusionment the following way in which Ashiq recollected his experience in the camp: ‘But when I went there, I saw it was nothing like that (wahān aisī ko’ī bāt nahīn hai)’ – the word ‘that’ referring to his various expectations (that Rushna could accompany him, for instance). Non-verbal emotion markers describe how the body conveys an emotion, says Scheff (1988) – speakers feeling a sense of shame, for instance, might interject, avert their gaze, blush, or lower their voice so they can barely be heard.24 The treatment of this type of expressed emotion, which partakes of what Neuberg rightly calls a ‘diffuse affectivity’ (affectivité diffuse; Neuberg 1995: 102), is certainly the most problematic. Interpreting a non-verbal marker may or may not be easy. For instance, when I asked Ashiq, ‘Why did you decide to go [to the Lashkar office]?’, he looked slightly lost, hesitated, lowered his gaze, paused, and finally said, ‘I could not see any way out’. I understood these non-verbal markers as signs of how lost and confused he may have felt back then, and how desperate. But they may also have been in response to my point-blank question or seemingly accusatory tone – in 84

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which case, they could be indicators of unease or shame instead. Determining which of these two (even four) answers is the correct one depends on the connection made between non-verbal markers and other recorded emotions: in Ashiq’s case, between markers of confusion and the fuite en avant. This point can be further exemplified by my interview with the other former jihadist recruit who had raised his voice in response to (what he saw as) my lack of empathy: I could have easily misinterpreted it as a sign of his annoyance. What put me on the right analytical track – that his reaction expressed resentment instead – was that, at other points during the interview, he evoked with a bitter tone, ‘those parents letting their children leave to [carry out] jihad’. Deciphering non-verbal markers might, therefore, not be so much a matter of getting at the interviewee’s unconscious or at their ‘taboo emotions’, but rather of how to connect the dots with the narrative emotional scenario (type 3). If proven right, this hypothesis would support the view that the five ways of accessing emotions in autobiographical interviews cannot be manipulated in isolation from one another.

‘Temperament’: an intermediate category My interviews with former jihadist recruits disclosed another key dimension of the affectual dynamics of their political engagement: their ‘temperament’. Temperament (mizāj in Urdu) – the fifth and last category of accessed emotions – constitutes ‘a group of sensibilities or predispositions that favour certain ways of feeling and reacting’ previously and progressively forged in the individual’s own intimate and social history (Traïni 2010: 221, 232). The causal importance of temperament was clearly uttered in the case of the other former recruit who resented his father’s betrayal: he explained his radical trajectory as a result of having ‘the exact opposite of a mustaqil mizāj [strong or consistent temperament]’. This was reinforced when he said, ‘I have to admit, someone who is so easily influenced by others can easily be trapped’ by jihadists (Blom 2011: 43). While Ashiq never referred to his mizāj in so many words, it came across clearly in his romanticism and his assertiveness. Both personality traits surfaced in a range of indicators during the interview as well as in real life (and objective participation is, of course, an invaluable methodological addition). His use of the emotion term ‘love marriage’ (in English) signalled not only his romanticism but also the exogenous nature of this notion in the Pakistani social context, in which most people have arranged marriages or marry in accordance with their parents’ wishes.25 Moreover, the colloquial term used by Ashiq to qualify his ‘love marriage’ was ‘independently of [my] mother and father’, which reinforces the idea of a rupture in dominant social norms. This ‘love’ has an ambivalent place in Pakistani society: widely idealised in popular films (which nevertheless often illustrate the disastrous consequences of parental disapproval),26 it remains largely 85

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censured. His romanticism was also accessible through several verbal markers. For instance, his words, ‘I have only ever had one love and that was Rushna. All my life, I have always thought, “Either I will die or I will get her”’, conveyed the intensity of this feeling. There were also body markers as when Ashiq interjected into his conversation snatches of ghazal, poetic songs about doomed love. Finally, his very actions conveyed his romantic temperament: after all, he had run away from home and taken tremendous risks – such as joining a jihadist militia – to be with his lover. Ashiq was not just ‘a romantic’, he also had an acute sense of unfairness. Having faced social injustice and humiliation since he was a child, he had become (for personal and psychological reasons that are beyond the scope of this sociological inquiry) a defiant or assertive young man. The word that best expresses this aspect of his temperament comes to me in French: insoumission. Again, it has no perfect substitute in English and is translated roughly as ‘insubordination’ or ‘rebelliousness’. In the context of power and domination relationships, both terms have the negative connotation of being unruly or disobedient while insoumission indicates a (positive) refusal to give in to social injustice and its related humiliation. This was evoked in several recurring instances in Ashiq’s autobiographical narrative. He mentioned how poor his parents were (something he expressed by telling that his mother never wore shoes) and how powerless they were relative to his younger but richer paternal uncle. In Lahore, he had continued to endure all sorts of injustices: as a factory worker with no fixed hours or wage and as a domestic worker who could be rebuked (albeit subtly) in public and humiliated at will, as he resented his employer’s wife for doing.27 In telling these stories, Ashiq conveyed his sensitivity to power relations through verbal markers expressing colloquial relations of dominance based on size (barē/chotē [big/small or older/younger]) and scale (ūpar/nīchē [upper/ lower]). As he said: Of course, I often felt like beating up my uncle, but [in a place like my village] one man alone cannot do anything. . . . In Pakistan, there is a lot of inequality (Ūpar nīch bohat ziādā hai). The elders (barē) want to keep the chotē [younger or less powerful] at their feet. They will say to him, ‘Sit down, brother’ whenever what he wants is to stand up [for himself]. . . . But when an elder is not in the right, the young man needs to stand up for himself. As for me, I stand up [for myself] and I have stood up [for myself] many times (ka’ī dafā uthā hūn). Truly, ‘certain social experiences lead individuals to experience types of feelings that, when they are repeated, mold the sensibilities that make up their temperament’ (Traïni 2010: 222). Hence, the argument worth considering is this: it might not be humiliation per se that drives young men towards jihadist 86

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militias such as the LT – in some sort of compensation mechanism – but rather, the intricate path they come to take to cope with it. As Ashiq’s story forcefully demonstrates: once a young man has broken away from his family in Pakistan and lost all protection – and in the absence of a welfare state and of any personal economic capital – joining a jihadist tanzīm was (with emigration) one of the few available exit routes. As a matter of fact, jihadist groups count a disproportionately high number of runaway boys.

Conclusion Thanks to the 1990s’ ‘emotion turn’ in the study of politics and society, the challenge lies not anymore in convincing one’s peers that emotions are a legitimate object of political study, but in offering a persuasive, empirically grounded account of their exact functions. This chapter has tried to do so by exploring the role of emotions in the micro-foundations of jihadist militancy. This was done based on the exemplary narrative of a former Lashkar-e Taiba recruit in Pakistan. The first section detailed how various emotions direct the trajectory of radicalisation. In Ashiq’s case, love, hopelessness and fear triggered a perpetual fuite en avant in his attempt to protect himself, having lost his family support. Subsequently, disillusionment and (again) fear detached the apprentice jihadist from his initial emotional commitment to jihad. His emotional states at any given point modified his perception of reality, thus shaping new expectations and redirecting him towards his initial goal: to marry the love of his life. Based on this empirical description, the essay proposed a tentative methodology for documenting emotions. The rationale was this: if the young man’s emotions channelled his memory of high-risk activism to the present, then the way in which I comprehend these emotions becomes more complex and is affected directly by where and how they were accessed and documented. Taking the context into account helps fine-tune our understanding of the role of emotions without risking a mechanical or deterministic account. Accordingly, the chapter identified five ways of accessing emotions in interview-based narratives, depending on whether these emotions were expressed verbally, deduced or intuited. Emotional utterances and recorded emotions are broken down into: (i) the verbally expressed emotions used by actors to explain their own behaviour; (ii) the verbally expressed emotions employed as part of a discursive process of qualifying and disqualifying people, situations, relations, things, and even other people’s emotions; (iii) unuttered emotions ascribed to the respondent by the observer as part of a plausible emotional scenario; and (iv) unuttered emotions sensed by the observer through various ‘emotion markers’ that suggest what the respondent is feeling. Temperament (v) must also be taken into account not only because respondents may refer to it as a way of explaining their behaviour but also because it explains their sensibility to specific events and situations. 87

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There may be more ways of which I am unaware.28 The methodological map proposed in this essay certainly requires deeper engagement with the sociology and epistemology of emotions, with conversation analysis and even discursive psychology as well. It is still an exploratory work, the first aim of which was to demonstrate that accounting for the political role of emotions in militancy entails not only ‘forcing the usual research instruments, such as . . . interview . . . to adapt to new research questions so as to yield new “emotion data”’ (Flam 2015: 1) but also being mindful of the emotional experiences at play in the very activity of research. This is even more important given that, as this chapter has demonstrated, researchers are far more closely involved in sensing, feeling and reconstructing the emotional coherency of their respondents than they might want to admit.

Notes * This chapter has greatly benefited from the feedback offered by my EMOPOLIS colleagues at every stage: I would like to thank Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, Margrit Pernau, Imke Rajamani, Max Stille, and Martin Aranguren. Additionally, Phillipe Braud and Nida Kirmani, who discussed this essay at different conferences, have added immense value to the chapter. 1 The idea of using this image to illustrate the methodological problem was inspired by French historian Patrick Boucheron. 2 Proponents of the appraisal theory consider that an emotion is: ‘an episode of massive synchronous recruitment of mental and somatic resources to adapt to, or cope with, a stimulus event that is subjectively appraised as being highly pertinent to the needs, goals and values of the individual’ [italics mine] (Scherer 2005a: 312). For a more detailed discussion of how to define emotions, see Blom and Tawa Lama-Rewal (this volume). 3 The classist bias that pervades 19th-century sociology of the ‘crowd’ – among writers such as Le Bon and Tarde, for instance – tends to attribute the act of protest to excessive, irrational and contagious anger. 4 At the same time, these militias were free to launch their own recruitment drives and ideological training (Blom 2009). 5 The Spanish text reads: ‘Solo recuerdo la emocion de las cosas, y se me olvida todo lo demas. Muchas son las lagunas de mi memoria’. 6 ‘Jihadism’ emphasises the ideologisation of ‘jihad’, which the LT considers a ‘divine’ duty on par with prayer or fasting. The word ‘jihad’ implies making a conscious, tireless effort to achieve a certain goal – which, in the Qur‘an, may be military (offensive or defensive) or strictly personal (seeking moral perfection by fighting against the nafs [self] in its impulsive and physical sense). Jihadist militias play on this ambivalence. 7 Banned in Pakistan since 2002, the LT remains active in other denominations (such as the Jamaat-ud-Dawa) and factions (such as the group responsible for the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai). 8 Interestingly, ‘When your data make you cry’ is what Gould titled a subsequent self-reflexive essay on her work that I had not yet read when starting to write this chapter (see Gould 2015). 9 Examples include the 1946–54 Huk rebellion in the Philippines (Goodwin 1997), the civil rights movement in the US during the 1950s and 1960s and in East Germany in the late 1980s (Goodwin and Pfaff 2001), insurgents in 1980s El

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Salvador (Wood 2001), Spanish anarchists under Franco’s dictatorship (Romanos 2014), radical Left activists in 1950s France and late-1960s Italy (Sommier 2015), and pro-Kiev volunteer fighters in post-2013 Ukraine (Karagiannis 2016). 10 For a critical review of the literature on jihadist militancy in Pakistan, see Blom (2011). 11 ‘Frustration’ emerges as a prominent explanatory variable of individual radicalisation into Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in France (see Khosrokhavar 2009). 12 In this highly innovative volume, more than 20 researchers use first-person accounts to self-reflect on their various methods of exploring emotions (texts, surveys, interviews, visuals, etc.). 13 The frustration and humiliation of French jihadist recruits, for instance, are usually isolated from interviews with militants under arrest or jailed (Khosrokavar 2009: 196–204). Not surprisingly, this generates an acute sense of privation and dishonour. 14 And this, whether they are from rural Pakistan or inner cities in the US – a knack mastered by Al-Qaida and the Islamic State. A 2014 issue of Inspire – an English publication produced by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) – features a hooded young man, his face hidden, sitting in an airport shuttle in what is probably San Francisco. Masterfully crafted and communicated, the caption reads: ‘For how long will you live in tension? / Instead of just sitting, having no solution, / Simply stand up, pack your tools of destruction. / Assemble your bomb, ready for detonation’. 15 This criticism is based on Rorty’s thesis that ‘there is nothing to people except what has been socialized into them – their ability to use language, and thereby to exchange beliefs and desires with other people’ (quoted in Czarniawska 2015: 68). For a more detailed discussion of this, see Blom and Tawa Lama-Rewal (this volume). 16 Horgan’s (2009) use of life trajectories is invaluable in attempting to make sense of how individuals are radicalised into (and disengage from) terrorism. 17 For additional narratives by former jihadist recruits, see Blom (2011). During my Ph.D. research, I also collected testimonies on the lives of recruits from another militia, the Hizb-ul Mujahidin, but via their family members. 18 However, this bias was corrected by informal discussions and participant observation. 19 Another friend was present to help translate from Punjabi – a language that Ashiq was more comfortable using than Urdu, but which I understood very poorly. 20 In Pakistan, Sunni Islam is divided into different doctrines (firqa) or ‘sects’. The Barelwi sect, which represents the bulk of the population, emphasises the Prophet’s intercession as well as devotional practices inspired by Sufism. Such rituals are, however, condemned by the Ahl-e Hadith [the people of the hadith], who recognise only the Quran and the hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet) and argue that Islam must be purged of such ‘deviant’ practices. 21 The Urdu word could also mean ‘him’ because the personal pronoun is indefinite. 22 Barring some exceptions, most studies focus on defining or classifying emotions; very few look at the context in which these emotions were accessed. 23 While Ashiq did not mention this aspect, it emerged in several other interviews: another former LT jihadist recruit explained resentfully that the cadres ‘play with people’s emotions’. See also Blom (2017) on how some former born-again Muslims critically evaluate the emotion work of proselyte movements such as the Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan, which heavily underscores ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’. 24 Argyle ([1975] 2007) proposes a more complex list of non-verbal indicators of emotions: physical contact and proximity, bodily orientation, appearance (clothes, for instance), facial expressions, gestures and postures, eye movements,

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and non-verbal communication and vocalisations (volume, intonation, speed, language errors, etc.). 25 Marriage is seen, above all, as an alliance between families that establishes a relationship of precisely codified reciprocity and protection – hence the standard custom of arranged marriages (ideally between first cousins so that property rights remain within the family and the union has a better chance of lasting). Couples who have married against parental wishes may risk acid attacks or even murder. In any case, most such couples will be ostracised by the family unit and can no longer count on its financial support. 26 ‘Romance must fail’, as rightly put by Petievich (this volume). 27 I saw this when I accompanied Ashiq to an upper-middle-class neighbourhood where he was hoping to find domestic work (and felt that the company of a ‘French woman’ would help persuade prospective employers). At one house, we had not been there five minutes when the landlady pointed to one of their bathrooms and said to him in a contemptuous manner, ‘Don’t use this one. Go outside. Is that clear?’ Ashiq turned to me and muttered half-disheartened, halfangry, ‘See what these people are like?’ 28 Without mentioning the specific issues raised when emotions are accessed using visual materials (see Tawa Lama-Rewal, this volume).

References Aranguren, Martin and Jocelyne Arquembourg. 2015. ‘Introduction to the Special Issue’, in ‘Doing Things with Emotions/L’agir des émotions’, ed. Martin Aranguren and Jocelyne Arquembourg, special issue, Social Science Information, 54(4): 419–23. Argyle, Michael. (1975) 2007. Bodily Communication. Abingdon: Routledge. Blom, Amélie. 2008. ‘The 2006 Anti-“Danish Cartoons” Riot in Lahore: Outrage and the Emotional Landscape of Pakistani Politics’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2, http://samaj.revues.org/1652 (accessed on 30 June 2017). ———. 2009. ‘A Patron – Client Perspective on Militia – State Relations: The Case of the Hizb-ul-Mujahidin of Kashmir’, in Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds), Armed Militias of South Asia: Fundamentalists, Maoists and Separatists, pp. 135–56. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ———. 2011. ‘Do Jihadist “Martyrs” Really Want to Die? An Emic Approach to Self-Sacrificial Radicalization in Pakistan’, Revues française de science politique, 61(5): 27–52. ———. 2017. ‘Emotions and the Micro-Foundations of Religious Activism: The Bittersweet Experiences of “Born-Again” Muslims in Pakistan’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1): 123–45. Czarniawska, Barbara. 2015. ‘The Rhetoric of Emotions’, in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds), Methods of Exploring Emotions, pp. 67–78. Abingdon: Routledge. Flam, Helena. 2015. ‘Introduction: Methods of Exploring Emotions’, in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds), Methods of Exploring Emotions, pp. 1–21. Abingdon: Routledge. Flam, Helena and Jochen Kleres, eds. 2015. Methods of Exploring Emotions. Abingdon: Routledge. Gammerl, Benno. 2012. ‘Emotional Styles: Concepts and Challenges’, Rethinking History, 16(2): 161–75.

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———. 2015. ‘Can You Feel Your Research Results? How to Deal with and Gain Insights from Emotions Generated During Oral History Reviews’, in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds), Methods of Exploring Emotions, pp. 153–62. Abingdon: Routledge. Goodwin, Jeff. 1997. ‘The Libidinal Constitution of a High-Risk Social Movement: Affectual Ties and Solidarity in the Huk Rebellion, 1946 to 1954’, American Sociological Review, 62(1): 53–69. Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta, eds. 2001. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. ‘Emotional Dimensions of Social Movements’, in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, pp. 413–32. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Goodwin, Jeff and Steven Pfaff. 2001. ‘Emotion Work in High-Risk Social Movements: Managing Fear in the US and East German Civil Rights Movements’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 282–302. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2015. ‘When Your Data Make You Cry’, in Helena Flam and Jochen Kleres (eds), Methods of Exploring Emotions, pp. 163–71. Abingdon: Routledge. Heurtin, Jean-Philippe. 2009. ‘L’enthousiasme du Téléthon’, in Christophe Traïni (ed), Émotions . . . Mobilisation! pp. 97–117. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 85(3): 551–75. Holmes, Mary. 2004. ‘The Importance of Being Angry: Anger in Political Life’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 123–32. Horgan, John. 2009. Walking Away from Terrorism: Accounts of Disengagement from Radical and Extremist Movements. Abingdon: Routledge. Jalal, Ayesha. 2008. Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jasper, James M. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2011. ‘Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research’, Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 285–303. Jones, Jonathan. 2011. ‘The Meaning of 9/11’s Most Controversial Photo’, Guardian, 2 September, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/911-photothomas-hoepker-meaning (accessed on 4 July 2017). Karagiannis, Emmanuel. 2016. ‘Ukrainian Volunteer Fighters in the Eastern Front: Ideas, Political-Social Norms and Emotions as Mobilization Mechanisms’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 16(1): 139–53. Khosrokhavar, Farhad. 2009. Inside Jihadism: Understanding Jihadi Movements Worldwide. London: Routledge. Latté, Stéphane. 2015. ‘Des mouvements émotionnels à la mobilisation des émotions: Les associations de victimes comme objet électif de la sociologie des émotions protestataires’, Terrains/Théories, no. 2. doi:10.4000/teth.244. Lefranc, Sandrine. 2013. ‘Un tribunal des larmes: La Commission sud-africaine “Vérité et Réconciliation” [A Court of Tears: The Truth and Reconciliation

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Commission in South Africa]’, La Vie des Idées, 8 October, www.laviedesidees.fr/ Un-tribunal-des-larmes.html (accessed on 4 May 2015). Levy, Robert I. and Douglas Hollan. 1998. ‘Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation’, in H. Russell Bernard (ed), Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, pp. 333–64. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley. 1996. Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mauss, Iris B. and Michael D. Robinson. 2009. ‘Measures of Emotion: A Review’, Cognition and Emotion, 23(2): 209–37. Mitchell, Lisa. 2009. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Neuberg, Marc. 1995. ‘Contingence et responsabilité [Contingency and Responsibility]’, in Patricia Paperman and Ruwen Ogien (eds), La couleur des pensées: Sentiments, émotions, intentions: Raisons pratiques, vol. 6, pp. 101–17. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Paperman, Patricia. 1995. ‘L’absence d’émotion comme offense [The Offence of Being Emotionless]’, in Patricia Paperman and Ruwen Ogien (eds), La couleur des pensées: Sentiments, émotions, intentions: Raisons pratiques, vol. 6, pp. 175–96. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Romanos, Eduardo. 2014. ‘Emotions, Moral Batteries and High-Risk Activism: Understanding the Emotional Practices of the Spanish Anarchists Under Franco’s Dictatorship’, Contemporary European History, 23(4): 545–64. Scheff, Thomas J. 1988. ‘Shame and Conformity: The Deference-Emotion System’, American Sociological Review, 53(3): 395–406. Scherer, Klaus R. 2005a. ‘Unconscious Processes in Emotion: The Bulk of the Iceberg’, in Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal and Piotr Winkielman (eds), Emotion and Consciousness, pp. 312–34. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Silverman, David. 2017. ‘How Was It for You? The Interview Society and the Irresistible Rise of the (Poorly Analysed) Interview’, Qualitative Research, 17(2): 144–58. Solomon, Robert C. 2014. ‘Emotion’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, online ed., last modified 8 May 2014, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/185972/emotion. Sommier, Isabelle. 2015. ‘Sentiments, affects et émotions dans l’engagement à haut risquée [Feelings, Affects and Emotions in High-Risk Activism]’, Terrains/ Théories, no. 2, http://teth.revues.org/236 (accessed on 4 May 2016). Traïni, Christophe, ed. 2009. Émotions . . . Mobilisation! Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. ———. 2010. ‘From Feelings to Emotions (and back Again): How Does One Become an Animal Rights Activist?’ Revue française de science politique, 60(2): 219–40. Trawick, Margaret. 2007. Enemy Lines: Warfare, Childhood, and Play in Batticaloa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wood, Elisabeth Jean. 2001. ‘The Emotional Benefits of Insurgency in El Salvador’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 267–81. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Part II MAJOR HISTORICAL SHIFTS IN THE PUBLIC EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS

5 ANGER, HURT AND ENTHUSIASM Mobilising for violence, 1870–1920 Margrit Pernau

Riots are in the air. . . . Mahomedans and Hindoos, that dwell together on pacific terms throughout the rest of the year, feel constrained by some irresistible impulse to break each other’s heads in the month of October. To the scientist the fact affords additional evidence of man’s ascent from the animal kingdom. . . . It is a pity that authorities in this country do not recognise that Force is as necessary now to keep the peace as ever it was before colleges were invented. (Delhi Gazette, 6 October 1886)1

This article, written in the wake of the Delhi riots of 1886, neatly sums up what has long constituted widely shared knowledge of ‘crowd violence’. When people come together as a crowd, they act according to psychological laws that are notably different from those governing individuals. As part of a crowd, people draw not on rational decisions but on emotional contagion and on their universal and unchanging biological heritage. Riots ‘tell a drama which has been enacted over and over again on different stages’ (Delhi Gazette, 14 October 1886). To have seen one is to have seen them all. Since the 1990s, several brilliant works on communal conflict in India have historicised such riots, showing how they formed part of a larger narrative involving the colonial state and its role in creating new forms of religious communities. Studies such as Das (1994), Freitag (1990) and Pandey (1990) have brought seemingly irrational violence back into the world of cause and effect and of the pursuit of interests. In this chapter, I argue that this agenda must be taken further in two respects. First, what needs to be historicised are not only the causes and effects of violent action but also riots and violence themselves (Pandey 2006). If we no longer believe that individuals merge into a quasi-anthropomorphic ‘crowd’ once the riot begins, then what interactions take place during the 95

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encounter? What phases and micro-temporalities does a riot comprise, especially if it lasts several days? What forms of violence do the rioters resort to? This is linked to the book’s overall aim of placing emotional practices in a particular time and space. Second, the image of the crowd in the grip of passionate feelings has traditionally been used to exclude popular activities from the realm of the political (Ginneken 1992). While the attempt to construct crowd behaviour as driven by rational interests has restored its political character to violence, this has done little to question the dichotomy between rationality and emotions on one hand and the non-political character of emotions on the other (Mazzarella 2010; Mitchell 2014). Historicising emotions allows us to replace the general assumption of the emotional crowd with more detailed questions. What emotions were at play at what stage of the riot and for which actors? How were these emotions communicated? How have they changed over time? How did they relate to potentially contested ethics of emotions claiming that certain feelings were essential to a person’s humanity while others should be controlled? How was this, in turn, based on a socially available emotion knowledge of what an emotion was, how it arose, if and how it could be restrained, and by whom and with what consequences? It is these questions that must steer how we think about the role of emotions in political mobilisations and their political character. This chapter draws on a variety of historical sources on riots in North India, which – unlike the observation of micro-facial expressions or interviews – provide different levels of access to the actors’ emotions. These can be read at three levels (for more detail, see Pernau and Rajamani 2016). First, events provide actors with experiences. These are mediated through the body and the senses, which are both biological and social at the same time. Second, actors interpret these experiences and endow them with meaning, thus creating knowledge about the world. This plays back to the first level where it transforms what the body and the senses focus on and can perceive. The language of emotions does not determine the emotions; rather, it creates, delimits and structures a field for possible feelings. Third, the knowledge of how the world works makes certain practices, political as well as emotional, more plausible and more do-able than others. All three levels can be accessed through sources in English and Urdu, ranging from police records and correspondence between different levels of the colonial administration to journals, newspapers and pamphlets.

Emotion knowledge and emotion norms Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has deeply influenced Islamicate thinking about emotions since it was rewritten into Arabic in the 10th century and

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Persian in the 13th century. The Persian texts held an important place at the Mughal court and, until the end of the 19th century, formed a key part of the education of the North Indian Persianate elite, both Hindu and Muslim (Pernau 2015). Two aspects of this tradition are important to the argument this chapter makes. First, emotions and moral categories were not seen as clearly distinguishable from each other. Up until the 1870s, neither Urdu nor Persian had a word that translated directly into ‘emotions’ – one that encompasses all those movements of the soul we recognise as emotions and excludes those we do not (or no longer) see as emotions. Second, it is not an ‘emotion’ as such that can be classified as virtuous or dangerous, but only its excess or deficiency. For every emotion, there exists a state of balance in which it is virtuous. Balance, in turn, is linked closely to justice. It is an ideal that permeates everything from the bodily humours and tempers to the body politic and macrocosm. This state of balance does not occur naturally: instead, it must be learnt and practiced to achieve civility, which legitimises the elite’s social and political hegemony. This concept of emotional balance was increasingly contested from the 1870s onward – not least because it did not allow for political and social mobilisation. Journals and newspapers became the dominant medium through which contributors appealed to their readers’ emotions, exhorting them to come together as one community bound by love and compassion and asking for donations to different community projects. The genre also provided a space in which the appropriate emotions could be debated and new emotion knowledge created (Pernau 2016). If the will had been thought central to the ideal of balance, journalists were now less convinced of its power. Emotions could not be brought forth or reined in by the autonomous subject: rather, they were evoked by the object towards which they were directed. Emotions were described as tumult and uproar, which overwhelmed the person who experienced them. This idea was not necessarily new. The classical instance of the ideal lover was Majnūn, who was so overcome by passion for his beloved Laila that he sacrificed even his sanity to love and fled into the desert, a madman. Here, the loss of balance became proof of the admirable depth of his love. Until now, the space appropriate to such emotions had been poetry, not prose texts dealing with ethical subjects. While most contributors to these early journals (and their readers) would probably have recoiled from witnessing or participating in a riot, the point is that strong emotions as such were no longer seen as disqualifying a person from political action – quite on the contrary. As the introductory quotation shows, the Anglo-Indian press based its reportage on assumptions that drew partly on the nascent field of crowd

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psychology and partly on orientalist tropes. Indian crowds, so went the argument, were made up of the lower classes. As with lower and uneducated classes elsewhere, only more so, they were likely to be overwhelmed by their emotions, especially when coming together in large numbers. This not only excluded perceiving the actions of crowds as political, but it also excluded the possibility of responding politically to violence. The only language religious crowds understood, the argument continued, was that of guns and bayonets: if applied early enough, this could prevent any violence from escalating. The Anglo-Indian press, therefore, regularly backed those officers who resorted to violence in crowd control and sharply criticised those who were not ‘tough’ enough to fulfil their duties or who underestimated the power of visceral crowd emotions. Crowd psychology entered the Urdu debates with an interesting twist. Abdul Majid Daryabadi (1892–1977), a scholar from Lucknow, started writing on psychology just before the First World War (Pernau 2016), but where Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) and others had focused on crowd control, Daryabadi was more interested in the psychology of leadership as the art of influencing crowds. He suggested that human actions and the emotions that guided them were determined solely by environment, heritage and race interpreted as the result of experiences that had become so well entrenched in the body that they could be transmitted to later generations. Survival at the individual level and evolution at the collective level had become the ultimate goals. Emotions, more than the will or knowledge, provided both a direction and driving force along this path. This exposition left no space for the development of a system for managing emotions based on the idea of balance; to fulfil their task, emotions had to be as visceral and as close to an unmediated nature as possible.

New riots for new times The North Indian city of Bareilly had a history of violent communal clashes, especially during years in which Ram Nami and Muharram fell on the same day (this happened every 30 years due to shifts in the Islamic and Hindu calendars). After a particularly intense affray in 1837, the two communities reached a compromise: the Hindus agreed not to hold their procession during Muharram and the Muslims in turn forwent the slaughter of cows during Hindu festivals. In 1870, however, the Hindus argued that Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation guaranteeing religious liberties to all her subjects restored their right to hold processions and that the agreement was, therefore, no longer valid. The local government was sympathetic to this interpretation and allowed both processions to take place, but at different times of the day and along different routes. Although tensions rose, there was no violence in Bareilly itself. 98

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The following year, 1871, the friction escalated. Notables, fearing violence, asked the British to put a stop to the processions altogether. However, the local government was confident that it could handle the situation and allowed all the processions to be held (although barring them from the main street). A rumour that the Hindu procession had violated this agreement triggered a wave of violence, initially against the procession and the police who were trying to protect it and then erupting in smaller clashes across the city. A number of people known to have organised previous Hindu processions were killed. The local government interpreted these incidents in contradictory directions. On the one hand, the violence was seen as the work of hooligans in thrall to their passions. The Hindu community had called for a boycott of commercial transactions with Muslims and ‘aggravated the Mahomedans by a hundred and one little nasty ways and thus egged them on till the Mahomedans, furious with anger, could no longer contain themselves’.2 On the other hand, the reports pointed out that the violence appeared to be planned: once the rumour had given them an excuse to act, groups of armed Muslims had gathered quickly and attacked the procession in what looked like a deliberate strategy. While anger and exasperation may have applied in equal measure, it is important to distinguish between the different, albeit interdependent, emotions they encompassed: (i) the anger that had built up over a year or more and was expressed in a disturbance that was ‘admirably planned, the secret carefully kept, and its execution, although not complete, was, no doubt, satisfactory to the originators’;3 and (ii) the anger that was generated at the moment the violence took place. These emotions are not only distinct from one another, but they also work according to specific logics and have to be mobilised differently. Processions and riots have been read by historians as traditional means of negotiating control over significant public spaces (physical but also aural) and, hence, as a symbolic way of either challenging or reaffirming power structures in a local context. Such encounters were endowed with a new sense of urgency from the 1870s onwards. Now was the time for momentous decisions that would determine whether a community would take what was perceived as its rightful place among the world’s powers or be condemned to a life of servitude and ultimate decline and even extinction. With so much at stake, both the intensity and frequency of such incidents increased. Since Muharram and Ram Nami fell on the same day only once in a generation, these episodes of communal violence shifted to other occasions, such as the overlap between Muharram and Holi or Muharram and Dussehra. There was additional occasion for trouble when Muslim religious events or celebrations coincided with the Hindu wedding season; after the 1890s, this extended to the yearly fight over the slaughter of cows during Baqr ‘Id (Yang 1980). As in the case of Bareilly, the actual ‘riots’ were only a 99

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small part of a political contest that might be played out over several years, was specific to a locality and often occurred in response to reports and rumours of violence elsewhere. This reaction was amplified by the spread of pamphlets and newspapers. The contest for power could be resolved through negotiations before the occasion which was expected to generate communal tension, but infringements of the agreed rules and even threatened or actual violence often resulted in court cases or withdrawal strategies rather than in direct counter-violence. Such strategies might include a social or economic boycott, a hartāl [traders’ strike] or even refusal to celebrate a festival or hold a procession or complete either, leaving the tā‘zīas [representations of the tombs of Hasan and Husain] unburied or the effigies of Rawan unburnt for the rest of the year – a reminder that the problem remained unresolved. Violence, therefore, was seldom a surprise. Nor was it the result of a crowd being suddenly seized with furious and indomitable emotions. However, this does not imply that we should discard the role of emotions altogether. Rather than establishing a neat distinction between rational, interest-driven negotiations and riots in which emotions – irrational and/or manipulated – have the upper hand, emotions and interests need to be seen together at all stages. This ranges from the desire to protect one’s community from annihilation and thus fight for its future to the emotional upsurge that accompanies the act of hurling a stone or clubbing someone to death during the riot. To what extent can these riots in conclusion be seen as historically specific for the last third of the 19th century and thus engage with studies claiming that emotions must be historicised? The specificity is easy to show in this context, where the reform movements in Islam and Hinduism endowed both religious identification and public acts of piety with a new importance that illustrated several things: (i) the depth of feeling for one’s religion and community; (ii) the perception of it being a time of struggle that would decide the worldly fate of that religious community and (iii) the ways in which the colonial state produced certain forms of knowledge about Indian society, which influenced its policy at all stages down to the local level of conducting negotiations on procession routes. While the occasions for violence varied, almost all of them focused on asserting control over symbolic spaces. The aggression unleashed against members of another community was often deadly, but rarely involved the attempt to humiliate the other community through the manner of killing them (Appadurai 1998). Instead, the aim was to underscore that community’s inability to protect its sacred symbols. Finally, when we look at emotions in riots as a whole, crowds as depicted in crowd psychology played a smaller role than expected. Crowds are often cited as examples of the importance of affects (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). These, as affect studies have claimed, proceed directly from the body rather than as culturally

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shaped emotions: they are transmitted from body to body, do not have to be learnt and can only be controlled with great effort. The crowd behaviour we have looked at, however, is embedded in a wide array of strategies – all of which are marked by emotions, but not in the same way. Bodily interaction as a crowd played a minor part. Crowd behaviour was not guided by some inexplicable madness, but was related to memories of previous riots – both from experience and hearsay (on such ‘local imaginaires of riots’, see Blom 2008: paras. 71–5). It was also related to assumptions about the ‘other’ and about the state that was witnessing these scenes as well as expectations concerning which behaviour would produce what results. Rioting and its emotions, too, had to be learnt.

Kanpur, 1913 This becomes all the more obvious in the way debates around such conflicts shifted from being critiques of emotional excess to a means of reprimanding men for their lack of feeling. The events that led to the demolition of a section of the mosque in Kanpur’s Machli Bazar in 1913, how the incident was taken up by the Urdu press of northern India, the clash between Kanpur’s Muslims and its police, and the agitation of the Muslim public sphere, are well known (Freitag 1990). In the course of major town planning measures designed to relieve congestion in the old city, the municipality had decided to expand the A. B. Road, which would involve demolishing the mosque’s wuzū khānā [washing house]. Initially, having been offered compensation, the managers of the mosque agreed to this plan. However, over the next few months and especially after the beginning of 1913, this early acquiescence gave way to antagonism: the mosque became a symbol of ‘Islam-in-danger’. Despite increasing protests, the demolition took place on 1 July. This brought new leaders at the all-India level to the forefront, including Mohammed and Shaukat Ali, who represented the new generation from Aligarh, and Abul Kalam Azad and Khwaja Hasan Nizami, both of whom had a sufi heritage. The campaigns established their leadership and increased the print run of their newspapers. While this fact has been used to demonstrate either their rationality or their hypocrisy, it has, in any case, tended to discard their emotions as a screen for something more substantial: their interests. Leaving aside the question of whether even the pursuit of interests does not necessarily involve emotions, it is hard to read the imagery of the sermons and articles that emerged as merely the strategic deployment of emotions from which their orators and writers were removed. The question of the authenticity of sentiments was at the centre of a communiqué published by James Meston, the lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, on 26 July 1913. His aim was to provide ‘the true facts of the case’ and show that the increasing agitation had stemmed from a

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misapprehension of what had happened and, moreover, been driven entirely from the outside. ‘In Cawnpore itself there is comparatively little excitement among the Muhammadan community on the subject’, reported The Pioneer on 30 July 1913. Translating ‘excitement’ (which had a negative connotation in colonial parlance) as the positive and emotionally charged term josh, this communiqué was read in the Urdu press as denying Muslims the strength of their religious enthusiasm and their commitment to Islam. These taunts touched a raw nerve, especially since they followed weeks of lamenting that ‘the present generation of Muhammadans lacks religious fervour, which . . . is the cause of their degeneration’ (Rohilkand Gazette, 8 June 1913). ‘The martyrdom of the Machli Bazar mosque’, explained the newspaper Madina, was a humiliation of the worst kind imaginable in this world. . . . Have the Muslims of Kanpur distanced themselves so far from their religion and does the house of God concern them so little, that even these events do not raise their passions? (15 July 1913) This negation of josh by the colonial government led to a flurry of articles claiming the intensity of Muslim emotions, exhorting their readers to feel the pain even more deeply and, most important, to express their feelings in a way that no one might overlook the ‘grief, desperation, restlessness and discontent caused by the demolition’ any longer (Tauhid, 16 July 1913). This was the situation on the morning of 3 August 1913, when a meeting was called at the ‘īdgāh [public space in which the ‘Id prayer is held]. All the shops were closed and processions had formed in different neighbourhoods. Men of all ages and all social classes walked on, barefoot and bareheaded, carrying black flags inscribed with the kalima [the Muslim profession of faith]. The groups stopped at intervals, ‘and at every halt a man recited an elegy on the demolition of the portion of the Machli Bazaar mosque, which would bring tears to the eyes of the audience and fill their hearts with passion and zeal’ (Muslim Gazette, 6 August 1913). What was already clear was the extent to which this public performance of grief drew on the symbolism of the events at Karbala and on elegies depicting the suffering and death of members of the Prophet’s family on the battlefield (Pinault 2001). Between 10,000 and 15,000 men converged at the ‘īdgāh. The interval leading up to the sermons was filled with repeated recitation of the words ‘“O God help us, oppressed Muhammadans, (regarding the) demolition of the mosque of the helpless” [which brought] tears to the eyes of hundreds of Muhammadans, many of whom wept so bitterly that they remained speechless for a long time’ (Muslim Gazette, 6 August 1913). Several speeches

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followed, slowly gathering pace, until Maulana Azad Subhani, the Arabic teacher at the local madrasa [seminary], took the pulpit: The fact that . . . every house in this city has been emptied, that all its children, old men, youth, educated men, cultured men, working men, high and low are present is evidence that the enthusiasm of the Muhammadans deserves to be called enthusiasm.4 The translated version of the sermon adds that, ‘at this point one of the audience becoming excited lost control of himself and tore away the black flag. This was followed by shrieks and lamentations’. However, continued Subhani, this very real enthusiasm was called a lie by the government: It was most cruelly stated . . . that, even now there is no enthusiasm among the Muhammadans of Cawnpore. They are false, their ulama are false, their common people are false, their religion is false, their mosque is false and their everything is absolutely false.5 What was at stake in this moment thus went far beyond the demolition of a wuzū khānā: for the audience, it was nothing less than the truth of everything they believed in that seemed challenged and disparaged by the British. These challenges did not dampen the fire of their emotions, but rather served to rekindle them, Subhani explained to this audience. In the vocabulary of Karbala, the speaker and the audience became the bridegroom, the lover ready to sacrifice everything, even his sanity, in the cause of love: ‘You might never before have seen such a bridegroom as is standing before you, bare-headed, dressed in the sheet of intoxication, distressed with (the heat) of the sun’.6 What this made possible was the transition to a full-fledged evocation of Karbala, of the battle between good and evil in which the slaughter of the weaker side implied their ultimate moral triumph: ‘Today is the scene of Karbala. Today I am standing (before you) in the capacity of Hasan and Husain. . . . Until the time our blood is shed on the ground, it is nothing’.7 This call for martyrdom drew for its effectiveness on emotions that had been rehearsed year after year during Muharram. The repetitive structure of the emotional reactions to the poetry and sermons evoking the suffering of Husain and his family allowed for a growing identification with their pain as well as a longing to share in it, a longing which could be satisfied only vicariously. Subhani’s ‘Today is the scene of Karbala’ claim collapsed the temporal distance between the original Karbala and its re-enactment and gave his audience a chance to become part of the martyrdom, not only in their imagination but also in reality. As at Karbala, there was no place for weighing the chances of victory

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in worldly categories – so long as the audience remembered their duty to God and the Prophet, their cause would ultimately triumph, even if it meant marching to their certain death. At the close of the meeting, around 500 men proceeded to the mosque. Their precise intention was not clear. They might simply have wanted to pray; they might also have planned to start rebuilding the destroyed portion of the mosque – a task helped by the fact that the debris of bricks still lay there. The crowd soon swelled to several thousand. When the police appeared, they were greeted with a hail of bricks. The violence had no concrete objective: even in the heat of the moment, everyone was aware that, barring divine intervention, their stones were no match for the guns of the police force. However, the desire to go down fighting and invite martyrdom modelled on the battle of Karbala led to a violence that disregarded any worldly consequences. It became the ultimate expression of the strength of the rioters’ emotions, which were valued more the less they could be restrained. Attempting to negotiate their dispersal, Tyler, the district magistrate, moved towards the crowd but could not make himself heard. Instead, the rioters hurled bricks at him: ‘The advancing rioters numbered several thousands; they were obviously mad with rage and excitement, and the lives of the officials were unquestionably in danger’.8 Thereupon, he ordered the police to open fire. Once the crowd had dispersed, Tyler instructed the police to arrest as many rioters as possible. Calm was soon restored to the city and no further violent clashes occurred. If riots can, and should, be historicised, in what respect did these events point to changes and to what extent were they different from the earlier instances we have looked at? How do emotions lead to political mobilisation? Leaving aside the obvious, that this violence was no longer directed against another community but against the colonial state, what is striking is the extent to which emotions took centre-stage. The struggle, which was played out over several months, undoubtedly involved interests and the renegotiation of power relations between Muslims and the colonial government. This struggle, however, claimed the sermons and newspapers, could be won only if the Muslims felt strongly enough about their religion – collective protest in this situation was no longer possible without an accompanying passion. Evoking intense emotions and displaying them for everyone to see thus became the most important goal. The riot, one might claim with only seeming contradiction, had become emotionalised to an entirely new extent.

Swarāj: self-discipline as the way to self-rule At first glance, there could be no stronger counter-position to the arguments founding political action on strong emotions than Gandhi’s ideas.

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If the struggle for Indian independence was to succeed, he explained repeatedly, material force had to be overcome by the power of nonviolence. Swarāj, as political self-rule, needed the ability of the individual to rule himself and his emotions. To become a soul force capable of surmounting all obstacles, non-violence had to be based on the ability to control not only one’s actions but also one’s senses and passions. This involved the entire lifestyle of the disciple, asking him or her to forgo sensual gratification and opt for a life of poverty and chastity. Only through this constant training in self-discipline was it possible to develop the fearlessness needed to court pain and remain prepared for self-sacrifice (Devji 2012; Howard 2013). The only emotions to which Gandhi accorded some space were mild feelings of sympathy, compassion and goodwill, which presented no danger of overwhelming the subject. Rather than asking which emotions were needed to galvanise people into collective action, Gandhi devoted his attention to bringing together mobilisation and the disciplining of the passions. However, he remained equivocal on whether this ideal of extreme self-discipline held only for the leaders of the movement – sometimes he suggested that, if only a few individuals were able to live up to these standards, the soul force they would generate would be enough to overcome the British Empire – or whether he asked it of everyone wanting to join the movement. Certainly, Gandhi evoked a strong emotional response in his followers. The more he took up the role of the heroic renouncer, the more he became an exceptional figure who could move his followers enough to make large sacrifices – sacrifices that were by no means devoid of passion, but rather based on devotion and fervour (Amin 1984). Almost from the beginning, Gandhi supplemented his call for self-discipline in the autonomous truth-seeker with military metaphors, transforming the many individuals into one disciplined army. The extent of autonomy was in choosing to join or leave the struggle. So long as his followers were part of it, they were bound to strict obedience, which prevented them from giving in to their passions (Misra 2014). However, this should by no means be constructed as an opposition between violent, unbridled Muslim passions and Hindu ascetic restraint. Doing so not only makes it virtually impossible to explain why the two came together in the noncooperation movement after the war, but it also overlooks how both discourses were linked by the call for self-sacrifice as the way to salvation, which brought together the ultimate defeat and ultimate victory. Gandhi, too, was no stranger to the appeal of the imagery of Karbala (Hyder 2006). Wartime saw an unprecedented revival of violence. Besides the rising incidence of individual violence against the state and its representatives, clashes between religious communities became a regular feature,

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flaring up every year on the occasion of Baqr ‘Id. Patna district saw widespread violence in 1916 that was no longer limited to one locality, but brought together inhabitants from 49 villages from over 20 miles away.9 The Shahabad riots of 1917 involved unprecedented numbers: the colonial reports spoke of about 50,000 to 60,000 people being involved in a single incident. The overall numbers must have been even higher. The British read this as indicating that the violence had been carefully planned in a way that involved not only the lower classes – mainly the Ahir, ‘well-known for their turbulent character’ and ‘whose propensity for crimes of violence is proverbial’ – but also the larger Hindu landlords of the region, who were as interested in stopping cow sacrifice to test the strength of the government and its willingness to curb them.10 The following year, there was large-scale violence in Katarpur, leading to the death of 30 Muslims, the commitment to trial of almost 2,000 persons and 8 death sentences, 4 of which were commuted to lifelong transportation.11 All these cases received extensive press coverage and comment. Increasingly, this blurred the lines between local and national causes and raised the emotional tone across the country, raising expectations that momentous change (for better or worse) was imminent. It was against this backdrop that Gandhi initiated the first non-cooperation campaign in collaboration with Muslim leaders and their aim to support the Turkish caliph and his continued influence over the sacred spaces of the Hijaz. The campaign was to start officially with a day of fasting and prayer, which also involved closing all shops and ceasing all trade. As shown previously, this was a strategy of withdrawal: it was widely understood to mark publicly a sense of injustice and was to be collectively agreed on and enforced. A misunderstanding as to the precise date meant that Delhi was the first and only city to enact the hartāl on 30 March 1919. Even from the beginning, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the interests and emotions involved. The events might be read convincingly as the struggle of different groups to enhance their local and trans-local influence: Gandhi accessing the Muslim masses through the mediation of Mohamed and Shaukat Ali and the ulema; Muslim traders consolidating their economic rise by positing as the defenders of the faith and thus challenging the traditional leaders of the community in Delhi; young and radical Hindus standing up against the old generation and the notables represented in the municipality (Pernau 2013). However, these interests were neither dispassionately pursued nor can one credibly argue that the ‘real’ goal was solely self-interest (see Blom and Jaoul 2008: paras. 10–24). Theoretically, we cannot exclude the assumption of an emotional manipulator who remains removed from the emotions themselves, but the sources point to a climate in which emotional mobilisation of groups by a leader and his self-mobilisation went hand in hand.

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While fasting and mourning provided the religious undertone that was to have distinguished the hartāl from the secular show of force involved in a general strike, any public display of mourning and humiliation and of the willingness to suffer required that all shops be closed. On this, Gandhi’s policy remained ambivalent. Only a handful of individuals trained in self-discipline and self-sacrifice, he pointed out, could offer satyāgrahā [non-violent resistance]. It had to be a profoundly deliberate act, not only because it meant eschewing any form of violence, but even more so because only voluntary self-suffering, accompanied by the right emotions and the right management of these emotions, would yield the soul force needed to overcome the power of the British Empire. At the same time, the impact of a mass movement was built on the show of support of large numbers. Emotions had to find expression if they were to become politically relevant. Picketing and attempting to convince those who remained uninvolved were thus considered legitimate means by Gandhi and his followers. In the end, whether a certain approach was seen as navigating the thin line between a loving and brotherly admonition and psychological coercion, or even physical threats, remained ambivalent. The same situation might look quite different from the perspectives of the satyāgrahī [practitioner of satyāgrahā] and the shopkeeper. In Delhi, it was the attempt to enforce the hartāl that led the tension to escalate and give way to violence on 30 March. Most of the shops in the city had remained closed that morning, leaving large crowds roaming the streets, when the news spread that the sweetmeat sellers at the Delhi railway station were still supplying third-class passengers. A concerted attempt to assertively persuade them to close their shop led to the arrest of two demonstrators and a crowd assembled in front of the railway station, demanding they be released. When efforts to disperse the crowd proved unsuccessful and demonstrators started hurling bricks and stones at the police, the latter were ordered to open fire, resulting in the first set of deaths. These scenes were repeated throughout the day before the military as well as the leaders of the movement succeeded in quelling the violence.12 The next day saw the victims’ burial. The emotional high point, however, occurred on 4 April when the Friday prayer at the Jama‘ Masjid ended with a special meeting to commemorate the victims. For the first time, Hindus were invited to participate in a religious function at the Jama‘ Masjid – a move that did not go uncontested among the Muslim community, but in which the new leaders prevailed against the establishment. Munshi Ram addressed an audience of 25,000 to 30,000 people from the pulpit and described ‘the event as one that he had hitherto regarded as an impossible dream, but it proved the unity of the Hindus and Muhammadans, now sealed in blood’.13 The more important this unity within the movement – and through it a sense of national

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unity – became, the harsher the feeling against those who stood apart. As expressed in The Vijaya (1 April 1919): Unity was prevailing all over the people, with the exception of some ‘traitors’ and ‘yes-sirs’. Each and everybody was plunging into the same stream of thought. No work . . . no fire in the hearths, no man in the shops. Patriotism was flowing out of the sincere hearts. The emotional intensity of this patriotism already contained the possibility of an equally intense anger against the government and also against the ‘traitors’ if these high hopes were not met: ‘India is a living country now. Her anger must not be overlooked and her deserving sons must be respected now. . . . The subjects know their good and bad, can express their wrath, and understand their rights’.14 Despite the asceticism for which Gandhi aimed – for himself and for his close collaborators, but ideally also for the public, and in which fasting was only a sign of, and preparation for, controlling all one’s senses and passions – his mobilisation could not forgo such strong emotions and the belief that India had reached a decisive moment, the promise of a new era and the ardent hope that it would bring peace and justice. It was this hope that rendered even death meaningful for them. When, therefore, he telegraphed to congratulate Munshi Ram and the people of Delhi and claimed, ‘It is no easy task. We may have to give much more of such innocent blood as Delhi gave on Sunday last’ (The Independent, 5 April 1919), his appeal was met with a wave of enthusiasm for self-sacrifice. Subsequent events showed, however, that it was easier to arouse intensity than to steer it in a specific direction and convert it into distinct emotions.

Conclusion At first glance, linking violent collective practices to emotions may look like a re-endorsement of the colonial discourse on mad and fanatic crowds. The close reading of a number of violent incidents that took place between 1870 and 1919 has shown, however, that it is possible to bring emotions back into the picture without losing focus of agency or of the political character of these events. First, emotions and interests are neither mutually exclusive nor do they work as a zero-sum game. The pursuit of interests can be accompanied by strong emotions – certainly, greed, ambition or lust for power would rarely be qualified as behaviours guided uniquely by rational deliberation. On the other hand, emotions can contribute to the identification

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of interests as well as their realisation through collective action and mobilisation. Second, we must distinguish more clearly between the ‘crowds’ and communities that constitute the subject of emotions. As the case studies here show, emotions work in notably different ways at three levels: (i) in the immediate and bodily encounters that occur during scenes of violence; (ii) in the local community, which negotiates the rules for an upcoming festival or occasion over a long period and which organises or prevents any violence before and during the event and (iii) in the larger community, which provides an audience for the riots and for whose sake the intensity of hurt and love are played out. Though different, these levels are closely interlinked: the actors at the first two levels are often the same or at least in immediate contact with each other; the larger community is made up of local communities, which can and do change roles between spectator and actor. Third, this implies that we must consider more carefully the temporalities of the riot. Rarely was a riot a surprise. It had usually begun long before the crowd collected and, apart from exceptionally brief instances, the crowd did not stay together throughout the event. More often, a riot consisted of a series of clashes played out over several days during which the actors left the scene of violence, went home, pursued other activities, and returned in different groupings. Crowd psychology and affect studies, by emphasising contagion, bodily transmission and mimesis, thus capture only part of what is needed to understand such events and emotions in all their complexity. Finally, like all other emotions, those involved in a riot need to be historicised. There is no universal anger or fervour that is evoked in the same way, has the same results and feels the same throughout history. If violence starts as everyday routine violence, as Pandey (2006) reminds us, the emotions experienced and enacted during the violence, too, have their foundation in a learnt, everyday emotional regime that values or devalues balance or excess and teaches a historically specific way of controlling certain emotions and enhancing others. If this does not determine the behaviour of a crowd per se, it would be hard to explain such behaviour without taking it into consideration.

Notes 1 The major Hindu festivals took place in October. The Muslim festivals and events followed the lunar calendar, which meant they overlapped with the latter at regular intervals. 2 F. O. Mayne to the officiating secretary, Government of the North-Western Provinces, 27 April 1871, Proceedings of the Government of the North-Western Provinces Judicial (Criminal) Department 1871, P/92, British Library.

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3 Ibid. 4 ‘Text of the Speech at Cawnpore for which Abdul Qadir Azad Subhani has been committed for trial’, L/P&J/6/1273, file 3672, Public and Judicial Department Records, Asian and African Collections, British Library. Unfortunately, a complete Urdu version of this sermon could not be traced. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Minutes by the Lieutenant-Governor on the Cawnpore Mosque and Riot, 21 August 1913, L/P&J/6/1256, file 2826, Public and Judicial Department Records, Asian and African Collections, British Library. 9 Chief secretary, Government of Bihar, to the secretary, Government of India, Home Department, 2 November 1916, ‘Bakr Id Riots in the Patna District’, L/P&J/6/1466, file 5039, Public and Judicial Department Records, Asian and African Collections, British Library. 10 Chief secretary, Government of Bihar and Orissa, to the secretary, Government of India, Home Department, 11 March 1918, ‘Bakr Id, Bihar and Orissa’, L/P&J/6/1507, file 4521, Public and Judicial Department Records, Asian and African Collections, British Library. 11 ‘Katarpur Riot Case’, L/P&J/6/1557, file 5456, Public and Judicial Department Records, Asian and African Collections, British Library. 12 C. A. Barron, chief commissioner of Delhi, 31 March 1919, ‘Recent Riots in Delhi’, Home Political Series B, 141–7/May 1919, National Archives of India. 13 ‘Weekly Report of the Director Criminal Intelligence for 5 May 1919’, Home Political Series B, 494–7/June 1919, National Archives of India. 14 The Vijaya, 1 April 1919, ‘Recent Riots in Delhi’, Home Political Deposit 34, October 1919, National Archives of India.

References Primary sources Delhi Gazette, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. Home Department, Proceedings, Political: 1870–1920. National Archives of India, New Delhi. Independent, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. Madina, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. The Pioneer, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. Proceedings and Consultations: 1870–1871. Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections), the British Library, London. Proceedings Home, Political: 1919. Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections), the British Library, London. Public and Judicial Department Records: 1886–1919. Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections), the British Library, London. United Provinces Native Newspaper Reports, Record Department Papers: 1913. Asian and African Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections), the British Library, London.

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Secondary sources Amin, Shahid. 1984. ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921– 22’, in Ranajit Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, pp. 1–61. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1998. ‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization’, Public Culture, 10(2): 225–47. Blom, Amélie. 2008. ‘The 2006 Anti-“Danish Cartoons” Riot in Lahore: Outrage and the Emotional Landscape of Pakistani Politics’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2, http://samaj.revues.org/1652 (accessed on 26 May 2017). Blom, Amélie and Nicolas Jaoul. 2008. ‘Introduction: The Moral and Affectual Dimension of Collective Action in South Asia’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2, http://samaj.revues.org/1912 (accessed on 26 May 2017). Das, Veena, ed. 1994. Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Devji, Faisal. 2012. The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freitag, Sandria B. 1990. Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ginneken, Jaap van. 1992. Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–1899. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Howard, Veena R. 2013. Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hyder, Syed Akbar. 2006. Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mazzarella, William. 2010. ‘The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?’ Critical Inquiry, 36(4): 697–727. Misra, Maria. 2014. ‘Sergeant-Major Gandhi: Indian Nationalism and Nonviolent “Martiality”’, Journal of Asian Studies, 73(3): 689–709. Mitchell, Lisa. 2014. ‘Staging the Political: Public Space and Emotion in the History of Indian Democracy’. Paper presented at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, 11 November. Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pernau, Margrit. 2013. Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. ‘The Virtuous Individual and Social Reform: Debates Among North Indian Urdu Speakers’, in Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim et al. (eds), Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, pp. 169–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. ‘From Morality to Psychology: Emotion Concepts in Urdu, 1870– 1920’, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 11(1): 38–58.

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Pernau, Margrit and Imke Rajamani. 2016. ‘Emotional Translations: Conceptual History Beyond Language’, History and Theory, 55(1): 46–65. Pinault, David. 2001. Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Yang, Anand A. 1980. ‘Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the “Anti-Cow Killing” Riots of 1893’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22(4): 576–96.

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6 FROM COURT TO PUBLIC SPHERE How Urdu poetry’s language of romance shaped the language of protest Carla Petievich

In this essay, I reconstruct a history of emotional expression in Pakistan imbibed through exposure to the Urdu poetic tradition. People learn from childhood to identify with the suffering hero of literary romance, especially of the ghazal genre, which, while a lyric, refers tacitly to more narrative genres in which legend is passed down. The audience takes on this suffering lover (‘āshiq) persona as possibly the only legitimate avenue of emotional expression for a political individual. While this transference is not necessarily learnt or reproduced in explicit fashion, it is widespread and constitutes a social norm. By substituting the suffering lover’s unequal relationship with ‘his’ beloved for the citizen-subject’s unequal relationship with the state, entire populations can access a voice, a vocabulary and a grammar for expressing dissent. As politics and society evolve, so do modes of expression. Even in the more ‘classical’ fixed genres of traditional expression, change occurs because traditions that survive as vigorously as has Urdu poetry necessarily have a flexibility built into their otherwise tight structures. The grammar may change incrementally, genres may develop and recede in accordance with their political or social ‘usefulness’, and new vocabulary will be introduced with developments in the world outside literature’s bounded universe, but the structural integrity of this expressive mode allows it to adapt and adjust. The example I offer here is that of the 20th century poetic genre known as the nazm. I suggest that 20th century Urdu poets latched onto the new genre precisely because it allowed them to use poetry for more explicitly hortatory purposes than had pertained earlier; and this was useful because it could address an emergent Urdu public sphere. This new role was played out initially in the context of the anticolonial Independence movement and, later, in the context of dissent against the postcolonial state. 113

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If the question here is, ‘how can a learnt response to Urdu poetry’s emotional world be productive for political mobilisation and expression?’, then collecting data in the mode of social science will not achieve a viable answer. Instead, it relies on resonating with the audience’s intuitive experience. So, how is this resonance achieved? Rather than attempt to measure the evocation or empathy between poetic words and their human audience, I attempt to offer sufficient explication de texte to demonstrate how the poetry works and to speculate that a learnt response to its grammar and worldview induces an emotional state that can be productive for political mobilisation.

The social role of poetic discourse It is difficult to speak about expressive culture in contemporary South Asia – or at least in that part once known as Hindustan – without extensive reference to the classical literary tradition of Urdu. This is especially so in the case of Pakistan because of its conscious originary identification with Indo-Muslim civilisation.1 Whether we speak of films driven by song or of the great mushā’iras [forums for the recitation of poetry] in open spaces that help constitute and reiterate the Urdu public, poetry provides many of the models and channels through which public ideas and sentiments are expressed and shared. A child can matriculate from a government high school without having read a novel, viewed a painting or sculpture, or heard a classical music composition. Yet it is impossible for this same child to have escaped exposure to poetry in classical Arabic, Urdu or even Persian – no matter what the cultural consumption patterns of her home. Most likely, of course, if her home has electricity, she will have been exposed to television and films and the commercial culture they disseminate. Of more traditional art forms, however, there is no guaranteed exposure other than to poetry. This lack of exposure is partly the result of Pakistan’s official rejection of Indo-Muslim culture’s darbārī [courtly] past. Much has been written about the contortions that were required of political elites in the 19th and 20th centuries during their course of rejecting Western colonialism and many of its discourses, and I need not elaborate on them here. The Pakistani nation has carried the extra burden of rejecting its Indian ‘past’ too, and this burden has been heavy indeed. Much expressive Indo-Muslim culture was associated with the darbār [court], which the Victorian colonials and modern political Islamists view(ed) as decadent. Art forms elaborated so exquisitely at Indo-Muslim courts were too ‘oriental’ and too despotic for colonialists’ comfort, and too secular or too (dare we say) ‘Hindu’ for the comfort of postcolonial Pakistan’s nation-building needs. Why, then, wasn’t poetry – patronised and developed in the darbār – relinquished along with so many of the visual arts and Hindustani music? After all, it is the voice of transgressive romance, and conservative societies tend to discourage transgression. One reason is that poetry is also the 114

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authorised voice of aspiration – Islam’s originary text, agreed to be a miracle of poetic expression, is the primary case in point. The Qur‘an expresses nothing more than it expresses aspiration. The country’s compulsory, standardised national curriculum privileges state and religious authority and encourages conformity of thought and action. Yet this one art form, promoted so actively, also bears the potential to undermine both state and religious authority (not to mention conformity of thought).2 Thus, poetry is as established in the political arena as it was in that ‘decadent’ darbār, and political dissent is often expressed through the very darbārī tropes that elaborate the emotions of romance. Well, what are romance and politics, after all, but facets of human aspiration? So, how did perhaps the most prominent courtly art form of all manage to escape the axe that fell on the rest of Indo-Muslim culture’s darbārī past? For one thing, there remains the enduring cultural love of elevated expression. For another, the founders of Pakistan chose Urdu as the national language for their culturally and ethnically disparate territory. Identified with Islam and known for its proud literary tradition, Urdu symbolically unified a new nation and harkened back to a glorious past. Moreover, poetry – disseminated mostly orally – is an excellent form of propaganda in a country with very low literacy levels. Quite simply, the political leaders who worked to build a unified Pakistani national identity required Urdu poetry despite it being a double-edged sword.

The problem with ‘ishq To recap some basic literary history and poetics: a great deal of IndoMuslim poetry centres on a heterosexual love story that would be completely familiar to most modern audiences. The story tells of human beings caught in the throes of a love both passionate and complicated by the pull and tug of social and familial obligations. This kind of romance, ‘ishq, when conflated with the Erotic, threatens the social order and is unwelcome in official public space. This ‘problem’ with ‘ishq has been ingeniously neutralised in various contexts and times. The most obvious instance in pre-modern and early-modern Islamicate culture came with the sufi poets. By reattributing ‘ishq’s sought-after beloved as the Divine, the poetics of romance were elasticised and legitimised, and passionate emotional expression could always take refuge in claims of piety. Some sufi poetry, of course, was passionate piety, but even when it wasn’t, the lyric’s conventional ambiguities could disguise who the actual ‘āshiq and beloved were, so that poets could write with relative impunity from political and religious authority. Because Urdu poetry is so heavily conventionalised, in the case of the freedom struggle against European colonialism and in post-Independence South Asia, it provided a perfect language of political protest, even under strictly enforced censorship. My goal here is to demonstrate ways in which 115

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the tropes and personae of classical romance poetry remained largely intact. Passionate political expression succeeds by channelling the voice of the Urdu ghazal’s suffering ‘āshiq (and citizen) as ‘he’ faces off against the tyrannical and elusive beloved who is the object of ‘his’ desire. Such conceptual terms as sanam [sweetheart, idol] and visāl [union] become referents to justice. Nothing new need be introduced because the vocabulary of aspiration and struggle is already inscribed in the discourse of poetic ‘ishq. We begin with an almost stereotypical example.

Poetry, protest and aspiration: Faiz’s romantic anthem Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal, one a politician and the other a poet-philosopher, are surely the most ubiquitous heroes of Pakistani nationalism. Yet other poets also tug at Pakistani heartstrings at least as much. No airports are named after them, but Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84) and Habib Jalib (1928–93) are known to just about every Pakistani whether or not s/he is lettered. In terms of accessibility and emotionality, Faiz is much more a poet of the people and their aspirations than Iqbal. On the other hand, Iqbal (d. 1938) never lived to see the birth of the nation with whose conception he is credited. This makes him a far less complicated political icon than poets such as Faiz and Jalib, both of whom lived for many decades to critique the nation and its leadership in their verse. People impute to all three poets remarkable intentions and meanings, some of which are more plausible than others, but all of which serve various agendas of nation-building. There is no doubt that far more people know Faiz as a poet of revolution than as a great modern poet in the classical style. This does great injustice to the breadth and depth of Faiz’s poetic genius, but his mastery of classical poetics proves to be less useful to a certain stream of nationalism than does his profile as a poet of protest. Put succinctly by one scholar: ‘It was the disillusionment and despair suffered by Faiz following the creation of Pakistan which fuelled his nationalistic fervour, urging him to utilise his poetry as a weapon against what he saw as successive, reactionary, religio-political regimes’ (Dryland 1992). The most famous event in Faiz’s biography, by far, is his prolonged imprisonment in the early 1950s in connection with what became known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy. He was convicted in the case; the conviction was then overturned; yet Faiz spent the better part of the years 1951–58 behind bars. All this is voluminously documented, though it must be said that little clarity has resulted from the documentation.3 Perhaps the second most famous element of Faiz’s biography is that he was the recipient of the 1962 Lenin Peace Prize in recognition of his artistic work in the service of internationalism and against colonial imperialism. In short, the poet’s politics were at great odds with those of the Pakistani state during most of Faiz’s lifetime.

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To illustrate how the Urdu poetic tradition can serve political aspiration, we examine an iconic modern nazm by Faiz. ‘Subh-e āzādī [Freedom’s Dawn]: August 1947’(Faiz 1986: 91–2) is neither entirely narrative nor entirely lyrical, but a combination of both. It is composed in a more open metrical structure than the romantic genres on which it draws so heavily for its emotional impact: the ghazal and the masnavī. ‘Freedom’s Dawn: August 1947’ This wounded, scarred daybreak, this night-bitten dawn – this is not the dawn for which we strove; not that dawn which we carried with us as we set out in our ardour to find the beloved – somewhere or other – certain that somewhere, in their vast expanse, the heavens’ wilderness lodged the stars’ final resting place. The dilatory wave of night, finally hitting its shore, would halt. The heart, that vessel of young blood’s pain and sorrow, would find its way to port. When we set out, friends, how many hands clutched at our skirts, cried out from sleepless bedchambers, extending their bodies, their beautiful arms, beckoning [us to stay]? But more compelling than they was the call of Dawn’s countenance: how alluring were the robes of her light! how lightly that desire danced, suppressing our fatigue. It’s been told that the gap between darkness and light has now been closed. We’ve heard, too, that path and footstep are united. The rules for those of us in pain have greatly changed. Endorsed now is the triumph of union, forbidden is Separation’s torment. Heart’s flame, liver’s fire, the intoxication of a glance –

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on none of these has Separation had the least effect. Whence came the alluring Morning Breeze and where did she then fly off to? The streetlamps haven’t a clue; Night’s darkness hasn’t faded. The hour of respite for heart and eye hasn’t yet arrived. Come on! Let’s go – it still lies ahead, that Final Destination.4 This poem relies for its emotional impact on the heavy use of conventional images. It is expressed by a narrator inhabiting the role of the lyric ghazal’s ‘āshiq narrator – the perennial aspiring Lover. The audience identifies with ‘him’ and ‘he’ comes to represent the aspiring citizen. The Nation in this nazm is conventionally represented by the Beloved, with whom an elusive destiny is sought. All of this is understood by the poem’s audience because they are steeped in the tradition Faiz reworks here. Explication of this process follows, but first let us look at another example of poetry designed to inspire protest – indeed, it expresses a protest even more explicit than ‘Freedom’s Dawn’ and comes from Faiz’s younger contemporary, Habib Jalib.

Habib Jalib and the beloved slogan Jalib is another immensely popular 20th century poet regularly invoked in Pakistan’s contemporary political discourse. Like Faiz, he is celebrated for his political poetry no matter what else he wrote. Like Faiz and many other of his contemporaries, Jalib was associated with the Progressive Writers Association and Marxist politics. He, too, drew on familiar courtly tropes to fire up his audiences at public mushā’iras. His best-known nazm, ‘Dastūr’,5 exhorts us to demand more from the Beloved Nation (or state), just as did ‘Freedom’s Dawn’, the poem by Faiz.6 Jalib wrote some rabble-rousing lyrics and spoke out strongly and explicitly against the tyranny of martial law. For this, he was imprisoned more than once. In a country ruled increasingly by dictators, however, he often disarmed his (potentially hostile or punitive audience) by chanting his poetry in a sweet, melodic voice (in a recitative style known as tarannum).7 In ‘Dastūr’, Jalib’s narrator echoes some of the refrain in Faiz’s ‘Freedom’s Dawn’. Consider Jalib’s third stanza: Phūl shākhon peh khilnē lagē tum kaho Jām rindon ko milnē lagē tum kaho Chāk sīnon kē silnē lagē tum kaho Is khulē jhūth ko, zehn kī lūt ko 118

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Main nahīn mānta, main nahīn mānta. You say that branches are blooming once more, that the wine cup now passes around ’mongst the Damned. You say that they’re starting to stitch back rent hearts. Such blatant lies that ravage credulity! I don’t believe them, I won’t accept them.8 Now, consider Faiz’s verses in ‘Freedom’s Dawn’ (from ‘It’s been told that the gap . . . / on none of these has Separation / had the least effect’).

Re-invoking tradition In my judgment Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a great poet, while Habib Jalib was a beloved sloganeer. Much has been written about Faiz and what he represents to this and previous generations of Pakistanis striving towards national becoming (Khan 2012). Some might even argue that too much has been written about what Faiz means for us to retain any critical rigor. Still, his poetic mastery is crucial to his popularity and is easily demonstrated here: it becomes apparent as we return to the text of ‘Freedom’s Dawn’. That requires more cultural history. If the ghazal is Urdu poetry’s iconic genre, equally important to this discussion is the genre of romance poetry known as masnavī.9 It deserves attention because the story it typically narrates is clearly replicated in visual media and in the great folk romances (qissas) that are widely disseminated orally.10 The narrative genre of masnavī came to Urdu from Persian, with roots in Turkish and Arabic. It told the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers, along with their respective sidekicks, who provided a secondary storyline. Perhaps the best known such tale is that of Laila and Majnūn, which came into Urdu through its Persian version, authored by the 12th century poet Nizami Ganjavi. In South Asia, the story of Laila and Majnūn spread widely and versions of it in various genres are probably numberless. Following the generic schema, love is sparked in the focal couple when they exchange a glance, by chance, and immediately fall permanently in love. In Nizami Ganjavi’s narration, the moment of recognition comes in school; in other stories, the lover happens to see his beloved, perhaps across a rooftop or at a large gathering such as the wedding of a mutual friend or relation. The fateful moment occurs almost always from a distance, and by accident, and plays itself out by moving through the lovers’ search for one another, through illicit meetings followed by family interventions, then follows on to separations and ultimately death or madness. The story necessarily culminates in tragedy.11 Majnūn [the Crazed] started out as Qays [Moon], a handsome, promising youth whose father – in the Arabic version of the tale – is a Bedouin chief. Over the course of his love for Laila, Qays, once beautiful, is rendered 119

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beastly. He gives up human company, bathing and eating, as he wanders the desert, crying out for his elusive Laila. Eventually, he dies with Laila’s name on his lips. Romance must end in tragedy,12 but it always begins with that moment of hopeful recognition. As in folk romances, accidental meetings also set the stage for love in television dramas and films. We even see it in television ads when the ‘hero’ dons a spruce Raymond’s shirt or the ‘heroine’ applies Fair and Lovely skin cream and is then ‘recognised’ as an object of desire by others. If the masnavī provides our background or narrative frame, the lyric ghazal provides our foreground. Ghazal expression takes place in moments out of narrative time, during which the ‘āshiq reflects on ‘his’ situation. Such moments of reflection assume that the narrative is known to the audience, whom the ‘āshiq implicitly addresses in lyric utterance, as though he were Woody Allen looking directly into the camera in the midst of the narrative of his Annie Hall. The ghazal audience, in other words, already knows the masnavī on which its narrator pauses to reflect. The earliest Urdu ghazals I know of were embedded into the text of longer narrative poems, as in the case of the masnavī ‘Qutb Mushtarī’, which was composed by the Dakani master, Mulla Vajhi, in 1609 (see Vajhi 1990). During one of those separations that are imposed on every couple in a masnavī, Princess Mushtarī cries out for her Beloved, Qutb, to come to her: Tāqat nahīn ab dūrī kī ab tūn beg ā mil rē pīyā Tuj bin munjē jīvnā bahut hotā hai mushkil rē piyā I haven’t the strength now for the long stretch; come to me quickly, Beloved: Without you, living is to me a troubled existence, Beloved. While a masnavī’s plot is recounted in the third person, the ghazal’s ’āshiqnarrator always speaks in the first person. This lyric expression is highly distilled, making only implicit reference to the narrative we already know – and because the setting and plot are already known, the ghazal’s distilled expression has the capacity to be highly intense, as in the previous lines. Nobody need fill in the gaps in action or explain where the ‘āshiq is while Mushtarī speaks, because her reflections on her state reveal all, both implicitly and explicitly. Intensity is also achieved through the tight poetic structure of the ghazal. In addition to its highly conventionalised language, both its lines bear the same metre and rhyme scheme. A single word can evoke an entire universe of associations. For example, in the first line of the second verse, the word ‘birhā’ [dwelling in separation] already leads us to expect expressions of extreme suffering. A birhinī – a woman dwelling in separation from her 120

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beloved – is so distressed that she loses her appetite and all that had made her robust. She grows weak and sickly, and in ‘Qutb Mushtarī’, she recounts her symptoms to impress upon her beloved the urgency of his returning to restore her to health. Though birhā is an Indic word and the birhinī can be traced back to Sanskrit lyric poetry,13 when she came into Indo-Muslim poetry, the layers of association she bore happened to resemble those of firāq-i yār, or Separation from the Beloved, as it is known in Islamicate lyric poetry. They were, therefore, easily accommodated.

More on poetic conventions For all the suffering of ‘ishq’s aspirations, the ‘āshiq holds no regrets. In what is for me an iconic ghazal verse, the ‘āshiq looks back in affirmation on a life of unfulfilled desire: Yih nah thī hamārī qismat kih visāl-i yār hotā Agar aur jītē rahtē yahī intizār hotā (From Diwan-e Ghalib) It was not my fate to unite with the Beloved, yet had I gone on living, I’d have kept up this same waiting. Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869) assumes his audience knows those associations and that the words and images he employs will resonate with their collective memory. These resonating evocations are what give the ghazal much of its emotional power. Listening to ‘Qutb Mushtarī’, we identify with the birhinī – with her starvation, melancholy and salty tears. We know what it is to dwell in fitful separation, if only because our consumption of poetry has taught us this. Listening to Ghalib (previous poem), we can also identify with the commitment of the dead lover: there is no life more worth living than the one he refers to as having passed. These were two fairly standard ways of depicting Love’s central struggle of Separation (firāq) – through the birhinī and through the ‘āshiq who sacrificed himself. In the second scenario, waiting for the Beloved is described as a long, dark, seemingly endless night. When morning comes, if it comes, it brings the end of waiting – release from suffering – and, thus, Death. Not all ghazal poetry is narrated from beyond the grave, but the value of doing so here is that it enables the ‘āshiq to deliver ‘his’ message about the life worth living. The hyperbole of these verses merely follows convention, but the exaggeration is necessary, as normal expression is understood to be insufficient to the depths of a true ‘ashiq’s love, to the degree of ‘his’ noble suffering. We, the audience, do not therefore think of the ‘āshiq’s exaggerated claims as either arrogant or inappropriate; rather, they intensify our respect and compassion for him/her. 121

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Insights from rasa theory The process of transition from poetry expressed to the audience responding emotionally began to be theorised in India more than 1,000 years ago and is key to the process of audience reception and response being discussed here (see also Petievich and Stille 2017). In Dhvanyaloka by the 9th-century aesthetician Anandavardhana, and in other texts of the large body of rasa literature such as Abhnavagupta’s commentary on Dhvanyaloka two centuries later, the central element of successfully inducing a desired emotional state in an audience relies on various conditions. The most important here are dhvanī [the power of suggestion and association] and the notion of a rasika [enthusiast, connoisseur] or sahridaya [one whose heart is at one with the utterer of an expression]. The taxonomic genius of Sanskrit literati is well demonstrated by the various categories of emotion (bhava) and emotional effect (rasa), and need not be recounted here. The concept is, however, crucial. There are established, if not always articulated, protocols by which a poet or artist invokes emotion – bhava through signs, symbols and tropes to ‘push the appropriate buttons’ in the rasika-audience and achieve an emotional effect in them. This, in turn, creates an aesthetic pleasure in the rasika and signals a successful performance, or achieves rasa. The following section demonstrates the trove of associations carried by a rasika – in this case, the ghazal audience – and evoked by the poet.14 As mentioned earlier, at some time in the 20th century the elusive Beloved came to represent the Nation, or Freedom or Justice. This symbolism still works because the goal of freedom – and certainly of justice – continues to elude. Khan (2012) has argued that Pakistanis are always striving to become the sort of Muslim imagined by the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal.15 If Pakistan is to be a realised Muslim state, then Pakistanis must become fully realised Muslims; and that process or struggle is as demanding and elusive as the attainment of visāl-i yār [union with the beloved]. When poets declaim public aspirations or call for justice, they are providing a voice for that struggle, that journey of national becoming. Both kinds of becoming are romantic ideals in process – the striving of ‘ishq and that of the (inherently romantic) nationalist struggle.16 Faiz takes up the celebration of striving to become in ‘Freedom’s Dawn’ as follows (please refer to the text of the poem in an earlier section). The first stanza comments on arrival, success, visāl-i yār after the struggle of the long, dark night that was the freedom struggle against colonialism. The second stanza reminds the audience that this struggle anticipated the kind of reward forever promised, and withheld, by the Beloved (‘the dilatory wave of night. . . ’). In the third stanza, ‘the call of Dawn’s countenance’ was different, something other than the familiarity of carnal love (‘ishq-e majāzī), but as yet unrevealed (‘When we set out. . . ’). In the next set of lines, the 122

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narrator contradicts the visāl that the Beloved nation (or its leaders) claim to have effected (‘It’s been told that the gap . . .’). The conditions claimed for this success are invoked and then denied: the ‘closing the gap between darkness and light’ has not occurred; the feet that have allegedly united with their path are not embarked on a glorious road; pain is not at an end (rather, it continues beyond the grave). Not one of these ‘cures’ for firāq/Separation/ being colonised has had the least effect. In fact, asserts Faiz’s narrator in ‘Freedom’s Dawn’, it is still dark outside; we are still suffering the long night of firāq-i yār; we still haven’t achieved the goal we’ve been fighting for. With the ‘āshiq’s eternal optimism, Faiz’s narrator closes by exhorting us: ‘Come on! Let’s go – it still lies ahead, / that Final Destination!’ An audience steeped in classical ghazal, on hearing this, will likely recall Ghalib’s reaffirmation that the struggle is always worth it, always to be taken up again, for ‘. . . had I gone on living, / I’d have kept up this same waiting’. This intizār [vigil] is active, not passive; it is aspirational. Faiz evokes in his audience the intensity of his narrator-citizen’s despair; his sense of betrayal; and, finally, his renewed determination to keep up the vigil for freedom, democracy, justice. The poet’s use of these conventions allows his audience to transition from the gentility of the darbār into the public sphere with a sense of purpose and a heightened sense of the nobility of its cause. In an earlier manifesto, Faiz had announced this new purpose for poetry, declaring: Ab bhī dilkash hai tirā husn magar kyā kījīyē? Aur bhī dukh hain zamān muhabbat ke sivā Rāhaten aur bhī hain vasl kī rāhat ke sivā Mujh se pahlī-sī muhabbat mirī mahbūb nah māng Your beauty’s still alluring, but what am I to do? There are other sorrows in these times than just those of loving you; there are other comforts, too, than just that of being with you. Do not ask me, my Beloved for that former kind of love. When Faiz introduced this poem, it was unquestionably a manifesto for the freedom struggle. When his narrator exhorts us to be consumed no longer with beseeching the Beloved to unite with us, he is admonishing us, the beloved nation, to let the ‘āshiq shift from passive to active, from awaiting union to another kind of striving, to using ‘ishq as a kinetic force. When, in ‘Freedom’s Dawn’, he wrote ‘This wounded, scarred daybreak. . .’, Faiz was assessing the outcome of that struggle and declaring it not good enough. He was complementing Ghalib’s assertion that, as long as we go on living, we must keep on waiting, striving. While Faiz doesn’t say, ‘Even if we had to 123

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do it all over again, we would wait exactly for this’, he agrees with Ghalib’s ‘āshiq about keeping on the path of struggle when he says, ‘Come on! Let’s go – it still lies ahead’.

The moment of mobilisation Jalib did the same kind of work to similar purpose in invoking the ghazal scenario – especially that of the Beloved’s unreliability. He evoked the mahfil, the gathering of rivals for her/his affections. There s/he entertains ‘herself’ by playing them off against one another while entertaining them, in turn, by plying them with wine and song. When the wine cup circulates ‘’mongst the Damned’, the allusion is to this assembly of rivals/aspirants/’āshiqs. In this case, Jalib suggests that, whilst the wine cup is circulated, favour is being shown; though wine is not an opiate, it is but a short stretch to see that circulating cup as the opiate of the masses. This is one of the ‘blatant lies’ of the penultimate line in Jalib’s verse. Before the narrator transitions from the ‘rosy’ view put forward by unjust leaders, ‘he’ fires up his audience. Lulled, perhaps, by the notion of branches in bloom and companionable imbibing in the Beloved’s company, the ‘āshiqs need to be stirred to action. This is accomplished by employing a motif from the ghazal that speaks of a moment of acute despair, even insanity: the chāk-e girībān or tearing of one’s shirt collar right above the breast, near the neck. The ‘āshiq can be driven to distraction by suffering, so much so that s/ he feels suffocated. In desolation, seeking even momentary relief, s/he tears at his/her shirt-collar, rending it completely. Jalib takes this image and uses it to fire up his audience. When suffering citizens/‘āshiqs are told that their torn hearts are being stitched back together, that they are being cured of their suffering although they know they are not, it is perhaps the ultimate insult. The moment when the collar tears – perhaps one’s heart with it – a cry escapes. This can be a catalytic moment: the audience is feeling the pain of the torn heart and Jalib is saying that those who claim to be stitching it back together are telling ‘blatant lies that ravage credulity’. They are claiming to be physicians, bringers of cures (chārahgars) that ultimately prove false. When Jalib’s ‘āshiq cries out in defiance, ‘Some may accept you as such, but I never will, I never will!’, the audience is meant to rise up and roar, catalysed into action. Once, reciting at a large mushā’ira, Jalib told his audience that, on a previous occasion, his recitation of ‘Dastūr’ had ended the musha’ira (presumably with that evening’s audience taking to the streets). He was not apologising: he was reporting success. I believe he was claiming to have invoked in his sahridaya/rasika audience the pleasure of pity (karuna), anger (raudra) and heroism (virya), which are among the classical Sanskrit rasas, whether or not Jalib was aware of that process and its mechanics.

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The one part of the whole mobilisation process that is not easily adapted from rasa theory is the mobilisation itself, since rasa’s desired end is aesthetic pleasure and not political action. However, I do see here a role offered by Urdu poetic convention that begins to address how the suffering ‘āshiq or citizen can push beyond the moment of aesthetic pleasure into action. This role is that of the nāsih [counsellor, friend], which both Jalib and Faiz use their authorial voice to fulfil, if somewhat differently.

The nāsih and different kinds of exhortation Faiz has been embraced as a public poet, but he was not, at heart, a public declaimer of political verse. He was, rather, a shy, quiet, intellectual man who often seemed to endure, rather than revel in, the attention that his poetry attracted to his person. His inward look and thoughtfulness were consistent with the introspective nature of much classical ghazal poetry (although not necessarily with its performance practices, which we understand to have revolved largely around declamation in the context of mushā’iras). As one translator wrote: ‘Whatever the depth of his feeling or the intensity of commitment, the “lehja” (tone, modulation) of Faiz was invariably mild and gentle. . .’ (Hashmi and Hashmi 2009: foreword). In recordings, he recites potentially (even intentionally) incendiary lines (such as from Bol, cited in a moment) in a sweet, soft voice. Even the numerous recordings we have of people singing this manifesto to the importance of freedom of speech are overwhelmingly melodic. The softness associated with his recitation reflects the poem’s clear, simple truth: Bol kih lab āzād hain terē Bol zubān ab tak terī hai. Speak! For your lips are yours Speak – your tongue is still yours. Some would say that this poem can be nothing but hortatory and the message is in no way muted; its imagery of an ironsmith’s workshop, the forge, the ‘firing’ of iron into an energy that breaks open locks and chains all reinforce this. There is an urgency, too, in this poem, as the narrator acknowledges a body and soul under attack. This is where the transition occurs: in classical poetry, the ‘āshiq is weakened, unable to give voice to all that s/he has to say. But Faiz turns a corner in poetic tradition by assuming the voice of the nāsih and encouraging him/her to speak out. These two verses remind us of just how beaten down and hopeless the ‘āshiq can grow. Yet the ironsmith’s inferno in ‘Bol’ is a productive agitation. The nāsih in the ghazal usually tries to get the ‘āshiq to ‘man up’, letting go of his hopeless pursuit of the beloved, but here Faiz’s narrator reminds the suffering ‘āshiq of that

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productive possibility. Your body may be stripped bare, your tongue stuck, your breath shallow. You may be on the brink of death, but still ‘this short time left is plenty’ to raise your voice and say what must be said. This signals the moment when Faiz’s poetry travels an established trajectory to bring the tradition to a new point. It is not a matter of the ‘āshiq lying there, struck dumb by the futility of it all, lamenting that he has failed to attain the still-distant goal. By putting words into the nāsih’s mouth, Faiz takes the opportunity to re-cast the ghazal’s characters with the nāsih as catalyst – the character who, in ‘Freedom’s Dawn’, says, ‘Come on! Let’s go – it still lies ahead’. Furthermore, ‘yih thorā waqt bahut hai’: there is still plenty of time, short though it may be. One might argue that the ‘āshiq requires this exhortation because, historically, personal (intimate) expression has been forbidden the Indo-Muslim individual. One can, and should, talk to the beloved, but such speech is not for public consumption, and requires special encouragement. In ‘Bol’, the role is meant to change: the ‘āshiq is no longer surrounded by rivals or hoping to advance her/his own position. Now, s/he is a citizen, raising his/her voice to represent others whose plight s/he shares. Just as Faiz has converted the nāsih to a political animal, he has taken the role of the poet and made his function political too. Now, the nāsih reminds the ‘āshiq of ‘his’ responsibility to the nation, the qaum, and not just ‘his’ individual self. Rather than cede the field, s/he should go once more into the breach, as long as there is some life left in her/his body and tongue. While pre-modern ‘āshiqs were not particularly encouraged to speak their feelings, this was not entirely the case for poets. Those at the darbār are reported to have enjoyed more freedom of expression than the average subject, enjoying the company and friendship of kings.17 Certainly, the secondary literature on Urdu poets is rife with reports of debates, feuds and frank exchanges of view among leading poetic masters and their followers.18 Poets, whose métier was sukhan [expression], not only enjoyed the prestige and opportunity to express themselves, but were also known to speak on behalf of others. Indeed, in 17th century Deccan, the court poet Mulla Ghavvasi was sent from Golkunda to Bijapur as a royal emissary. This was clearly a political undertaking even if layered over with khush-sukhan or ‘beautiful utterance’ (Asar 1977). In other words, poets claim a long history as public figures. They could be deployed by patrons. But poetic characters, especially ‘āshiqs, would have (and have had) a very difficult transition to the physical world. After all, the human characters in the ghazal are largely de-territorialised beings. Except for the assembly (bazm), the garden (bāgh, chaman, gulistān), the graveyard (qabristān), the beloved’s lane (kū-i yār), these characters exist in relationship to one another rather than to time and place. This is why tropes incorporated into Urdu from a timeless Persia or Arabia remained so potent to Urdu’s audience over the centuries, much to the puzzlement of colonialist 126

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Victorians, who could not understand their relevance to India’s late-19th century elites.19 Some argue that certain classical ghazals were political in intention, but this is nearly impossible to establish or defend because of the structural deterritorialisation of the literature itself.20 Nevertheless, it is consistent with the historical role of poet-emissary that the Progressive Writers’ mid-century call to put art to political purposes should have inspired the poet’s narrative voice into that of a nāsih; and that ‘his’ relationship to the ‘āshiq should become more explicitly directive. The tradition takes another turn when the ambiguity of the narrator’s expression is diminished and his/her purpose made more explicit. This is where a poet like Jalib comes in. For those unsatisfied by the prized and conventional ambiguity and indirection of lyrical poetry, Jalib’s poetic voice offers clear and direct protest. Although, as mentioned before, he tended to recite in dulcet tones, it is notable that the numerous YouTube clips of others reciting his poetry rely not on the lyrics so much as orchestration and arrangement to build intensity. I think this is probably consistent with his intention. Other reworking occurs in such nazms as well. Shikayat [complaint] finds ample place in Urdu poetry, most notably in genres like shahr ashob [literally, ‘city in tumult’], which proved popular among darbārī poets during the politically unstable 18th century in northern India.21 Those poems describe and decry contemporary conditions, evoking a sense of tragedy/karuna/pity in their audience. This function is replicated, I think, in the graphic passages where modern poets describe unjust conditions (as does Faiz in ‘Mujh sē pahlī-sī muhabbat’).22 If Partition, bloody and tragic, was a masnavī, then the nazm, ‘Freedom’s Dawn’, also did the work of a ghazal. Faiz used traditional aesthetics to create a mourning space with melancholic tropes, evoking loss and grief without having to literally recount Partition’s horrors. He did not have to point fingers at craven leaders or murdering neighbours: instead, he invoked the wounds and scars of a bitter dawn (‘dāgh ujālā’), harkening back to the old emotional universe of ‘ishq. Dawn should have been joyous, but it wasn’t because it wasn’t the new dawn; it was still the old intizār, the promised visāl that never occurs. The dawn was to have been a beloved, approaching clothed in light, rather than by wounded, scarred daylight. The ongoing quest for that new dawn is an ārzū, a desire, creating gham-i dil [melancholy] . . . and so on. Then, Faiz makes his nazm a poem of the 20th century – by urging his fellow ‘āshiqs not to ‘settle for less than what we had imagined for ourselves’. Furthermore, the ‘āshiqs, once rivals, are now comrades, seeking the Beloved in solidarity with one another for the benefit of all. Unfortunately, as with traditional romance, the role of the new, modern, reformed poetic narrator is complicated. What should the fired-up citizen-‘āshiq do once ‘he’ hits the streets? Whom is ‘he’ to emulate? Iqbal’s 127

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perfect ‘Muslim Man’ [sic]? Faiz’s one-lover-among-many, pulling together to achieve a just society? Or should s/he follow another guideline, which is set out by the state for the purpose of nation-building? Pakistan’s Urdulanguage school curriculum offers its own iteration – and reiteration – as to what it supposedly means to be a Pakistani Muslim. Heavily and increasingly Islamicised, the model has moved from poetry to scripture. The focus of individual aspiration shifts now from identifying with the aspiring ‘āshiq to emulating that perfect human, the Prophet Muhammad. No more Majnūn, wandering and decompensating in the desert of Arabia. Now, we have the perfect model from 7th century Arabia to inform correct behaviour in all aspects of 21st century Pakistani life. Even though the manner is far more didactic than when people learned about that noble human being through love poetry, borrowing from Iqbal still privileges poetry as an authoritative genre. With the wide circulation of visual media, it is possible that things will change. The public sphere is no longer the large mushā’ira, but increasingly an Internet audience who will be handed a more blatantly packaged product. As ‘Dastūr’ is recited audially, images of military dictators occupy the screen and an English translation appears in subtitles. It is impossible for an English translation to be both accurate and hold all the possible layers of association that the original Urdu would have evoked. The immediacy of identifying as an ‘āshiq may be compromised and, therefore, the emotional impact muted. We can think of this process of motivating protestors as perhaps akin to that described by Blom (2008: para. 3) writing on the anti-Danish cartoon riot in Lahore: Although emotions alone cannot tell us why an individual joins a protest, they do have an explanatory power. First, and as tautological as it might seem, no organisation can mobilize potential protestors if these were not initially affected and moved, or ‘emotionally disturbed’ (as one [of] the participant[s] [of] the Lahore demonstration put it). In other words, the poet has worked to affect, to move, to ‘emotionally disturb’ his audience into action. We do not know what happens after Faiz’s narrator urges his cohort to keep to the path towards that Final Destination or when Jalib’s recitation broke up the mushā’ira and sent his audience spilling onto the streets. I would suggest that their ‘disturbed emotions’ were both similar to, and different from, those of the young men who rampaged in protection of, and out of love for, the Prophet, as Blom (2008) recounts. Their ‘ishq-e rasūl [love of the Prophet] feels qualitatively different to me from the ‘ishq-e mahbūb, be that the Divine Beloved or the Nation. As mentioned at the outset, this kind of ‘ishq cannot be measured. Nevertheless, it 128

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can be felt, even recognised – and that makes thinking about poetry in the context of emotions and political mobilisation worthwhile.

Notes 1 I refer here to Jinnah’s declaration about ‘two civilisations’, Hindu and Muslim, which could never be reconciled – although there is much historical evidence to the contrary. 2 It is easier to find anti-religious sentiment expressed in older, rather than contemporary, poetry – just as it is, arguably, easier to find anti-state rhetoric in contemporary poetry than to find overt expression of anti-religious sentiment. 3 For a lucid and recent summary discussion of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case, see Ali (2015), especially pp. 130–40 and passim. 4 Translations, unless indicated otherwise, are the author’s. 5 This term translates as ‘prime minister, councillor, senator, ruler’. 6 Both Jalib and Faiz critiqued state and society from the left and both were associated with the Progressive Writers Association as well as with trade unions. Jalib wrote for the Pakistan Times and Imroz, of which Faiz served as editor before being jailed in the early 1950s, accused in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case. 7 This style – still a staple at contemporary mushā’irās – is often used by younger or less accomplished poets to mask weaknesses in the formal poetics of their compositions. 8 Jalib, Habib [1986], 2010. 9 The best-known examples of this genre in northern India and Pakistan are from 18th century Delhi – Mir Taqi Mir’s Zahr-e ‘ishq [The Poison of Love] and Mir Hasan Dihlavi’s Sihrul bayān [Enchanting Tale] – and from 19th century Lucknow, that is, Rajab Ali Beg Saroor’s Fasānā-i ‘ajā’ib [Wondrous Tale]. There was a rich tradition of masnavī writing in Dakani literature too, especially in 17th century Bijapur and Golkunda, which saw the composition of Vajhi’s Qutb Mushtarī (1609) and Nusrati’s Gulshan-i ‘ishq [Garden of Love] (1657) (see Asar 1988; Suvorova 2000). 10 The most famous of these by far is the Punjabi tale of Hīr–Rānjhā (see Matringe 1988a; Mir 2010; Usborne [1905] 1966). See also the iconic qissās of Sohnī– Māhiwāl and Sassī–Punnūn. See also Petievich (2009) for translations of Punjabi sufi poetry inspired by the tale of Hīr–Rānjhā. 11 A second variety of masnavī romance – involving royalty, the magical realm and happy endings – does exist. I have discussed this variety elsewhere in connection with Dakani literature (see Petievich 2007). 12 Romance must end in tragedy. If tales of romance are to survive and be sanctioned, they must qualify as socially normative texts. ‘Ishq, because it is inherently transgressive, cannot be allowed to succeed over the social imperatives of marriage, family, kin, and clan. Even ‘ishq felt for the Divine is socially transgressive. 13 In Sanskrit’s kavya [lyric genre] poetry, the virahinī [formal use of birihini] is as central a figure as the ‘āshiq is to the Urdu ghazal (see Petievich 1992). 14 For a more contextualised discussion of this phenomenon, see Pollock (2003). 15 I do not follow Khan’s (2012) arguments closely here, but I find very useful her idea of the continuous process of becoming that which we aspire to, especially as a nation. 16 I speak with no authority on poetry in Pakistan’s regional languages, though I am very much aware of Punjabi literature’s nationalist aspirations – if we are to use

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Benedict Anderson’s framing of nations as language-based cultural communities. Of course, this Punjabi aspiration is pitched against the nation-state of Pakistan, as I imagine may be the case in the poetry of other regional languages. Since they all borrow heavily from Islamicate conventions, the romantic aesthetic of Urdu poetry likely bears striking resemblance to those in Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto, and so on. To compare regional political poetry with that in Urdu is a project that I am not equipped to undertake. 17 The limits to this freedom could be overstepped, as in the famous case of Insha Allah Khan ‘Insha’, who was obliged from time to time to absent himself from the court at Awadh while the ruler, Sa’adat Ali Khan, cooled off after having been subjected to Insha’s rapier wit. 18 See, for example, Amir (1982); Khwaja (1972); the introduction to Nasir ([1846] 1972); Salam (1977). 19 S. R. Faruqi has written about the irrelevance of time and place to the poetic tradition. Both Azad ([1880] 1980) and Hali ([1893] 1981) have railed against this lack of ‘realism’ under the tutelage of the colonial literary project. It went against the grain of Hali’s much-touted ‘natural poetry’. 20 Hali’s Chup kī dād and Musaddas were exceptions and were not lyrical poems. However, an oft-cited example of the so-called political ghazal is Mir Taqi Mir’s ‘Pattā pattā būtā būtā hāl hamārā jānē hai / Jānē nah jānē gul hī nah jānē, bāgh to sārā jānē hai’ [Every leaf and every shrub knows of our poor state / Who knows whether the rose knows or not, but the rest of the garden knows]. Argued this way, the bushes, shrubs and flowers are all conscious of the political climate – only the monarch (the rose) seems to be oblivious. While this is an ex post facto interpretation and could aptly describe a political or social situation (or indeed many kinds of situation), there is no evidence that Mir composed the verse to critique the wilful oblivion of a particular monarch. 21 The genre dates back much earlier in Persian poetry (see Sharma 2000). 22 I refer here to lines such as ‘Interwoven with silk and satin and gold lace, / Men’s bodies sold in street and marketplace / Bodies that caked grime fouls and thick blood smears / Flesh issuing from the cauldrons of disease / With festered sores dripping corruption. . . ’ (Kiernan 1971: 67).

References Ali, Kamran Asdar. 2015. Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947–1972. London: I. B. Taurus. Amir, Muhammad Yaqub. 1982. Urdu kē adabī mā’rikē: Insha sē Ghalib tak [Urdu’s Literary Rivalries: From Insha to Ghalib]. New Delhi: Taraqqi Urdu Bureau. Asar, Muhammad Ali. 1977. Ghavvāsī. Hyderabad: Ilyas Traders. ———. 1988. Dakani Shā’irī. Hyderabad: Ilyas Traders. Azad, Muhammad Husain. (1880) 1980. Āb-e hayāt [The Elixir of Life]. Allahabad: Ram Narayan Lal Beni Madho. Blom, Amélie. 2008. ‘The 2006 Anti-“Danish-Cartoons” Riot in Lahore: Outrage and the Emotional Landscape of Pakistani Politics’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2, https://samaj.revues.org/1652 (accessed on 30 June 2017). Dihlavi, Mir Hasan. 1941. Masnavī sihr ul-bayān [Enchanted Tale], ed. Abdul Bari Asi. Lucknow: Nawal Kishore. Dryland, Estelle. 1992. ‘Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case’, Journal of South Asian Literature, 27(2): 175–85.

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Faiz, Faiz Ahmed. 1986. Nuskhahā-e wafā. Lahore: Maktabah-e Karawan. Hali, Altaf Husain. (1893) 1981. Muqaddmah-e shē‘r-o shā‘irī [Prolegomena on Poetry and Verse]. Delhi: Maktabah-e Jam‘iah. Hashmi, Shoaib and Salima Hashmi. 2009. Āj kē nām: A Song for This Day; 52 Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel. Jalib, Habib. 2010. Kulliyāt-e Habib Jalib, shā‘ir-e inqilāb [The Collected Works of Habib Jalib, a Revolutionary Poet]. Lahore: Mavra, pp. 140–1. Khan, Naveeda. 2012. Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Khwaja, Mushfiq, ed. 1972. Muqaddmah [Prologue]. Lahore: Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Adab. Kiernan, Victor, trans. 1971. Poems by Faiz. London: George Allen and Unwin. Matringe, Denis, trans. 1988a. Hīr Vāris Śāh: poème Panjabi du XVIIIe siècle [Waris Shah’s Hīr: A Punjabi Poem of the 18th Century]. Pondicherry: Institut français. Mir, Farina. 2010. The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nasir, Saadat Ali Khan. (1846) 1972. Khush mā‘rikah-e zēbā, ed. Mushfiq Khwaja. Lahore: Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Adab. Petievich, Carla. 1992. Assembly of Rivals: Delhi, Lucknow, and the Urdu Ghazal. New Delhi: Manohar. ———. 2007. When Men Speak as Women: Vocal Masquerade in Indo-Muslim Poetry. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. ‘The World Changes and It Doesn’t: A Note on Pakistani Culture’, in Salima Hashmi (ed), Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, pp. 59–66. New York, NY: Asia Society Museum. Petievich, Carla and Max Stille. 2017. ‘Emotions in Performance: Poetry and Preaching’, in ‘Feeling Communities’, ed. Margrit Pernau, special issue, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1): 67–102. Pollack, Sheldon. 2003. Literary Cultures in History – Reconstructions from South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Passim. Salam, Shah Abdus. 1977. Dabistān-e Atish [The School of Atish]. New Delhi: Maktabah-e Jami’ah. Sharma, Sunil. 2000. Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier: Mas‘ūd Sa‘d Salmān of Lahore. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Suroor, Rajab Ali Beg. 1981. Fasānā-e ‘ajā’ib [Wondrous Tale]. Lucknow: UP Urdu Akademi. Suvorova, Anna. 2000. Masnavi: A Study of Urdu Romance, trans. M. Osama Faruqi. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Usborne, Charles Frederick, trans. (1905) 1966. The Adventures of Hir and Ranjha. Karachi: Lion Art Press. Vajhi, Mulla. [1609] 1990. Qutb Mushtarī. Gulbargah Sharīf: Maktabah-i Rifāh-i ‘Ām.

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Part III SUBVERTING AND CEMENTING POWER RELATIONS WITH EMOTIONS

7 EMOTIONS AS FUEL The passage of anti-sexual harassment legislation in Pakistan Sadaf Ahmad

In early 2010, the Government of Pakistan passed two pieces of anti-sexual harassment legislation. The first was an amendment to Section 509 (Chapter XXII) of the Pakistan Penal Code. This replaced the latter’s vague original directive – to punish anyone who ‘insult[s] the modesty of a woman’ – with a comprehensive definition of sexual harassment. The amendment also widened the legislative scope to include both the public and private spheres and increased the maximum penalty carried. The second piece of legislation was the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act 2010. This covered the workplace comprehensively and included a clause that made it mandatory for all organisations, public and private, to develop self-regulatory mechanisms for dealing with instances of sexual harassment by instituting specific steps as laid out in the law. Any organisation that failed to institute the law and follow its directives could be taken to court and fined.1 Both of these laws were the culmination of 10 years’ activism by the Alliance Against Sexual Harassment (AASHA), a group comprising like-minded individuals affiliated with different organisations, who had come together to work on the development, legislation and implementation of these laws. I have been aware of AASHA’s activities since its inception, but my personal engagement with the group began only after the bills were passed. This took the form of research for AASHA (see Ahmad 2010) and studying the movement from an academic perspective. I was particularly interested in identifying why it had succeeded in a larger context in which other movements, also pushing for women-friendly legislation, had proven less successful (Ahmad 2012; Saeed et al. 2011). My primary analytical framework was a cognitive model that emphasised the rational, predetermined intellectual strategies AASHA members had developed consciously through their analysis of prior movements as well as

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their experience of, and research on, this issue. My work did not entirely reflect the theoretical cognitive models of collective organisation that were developed in the 1970s, which highlighted rationality as a resource of mobilisation, ‘equated emotions with irrationality and assumed that emotions and rationality [were] incompatible’ (Aminzade and McAdam 2002: 1; see also Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2001; Jasper 1998). The role of emotions, however, remained in the background. This chapter lets emotions take centre-stage. It identifies which emotions appeared in the course of AASHA’s work and explores how these emotions motivated people and hence propelled a movement that, in the absence of street politics or fiery encounters between state and civil society actors, often comes across as largely cerebral. This is not to ‘flush out some supposed variable to explain collective mobilisation’ because there is no one variable (Traïni 2010: 219). However, the exercise is critical to a more comprehensive understanding of the process and is in line with other work carried out on collective mobilisations and social movements since the 1990s, which began to bring emotions back into the equation by exploring how they fuelled social movements (Aminzade and McAdam 2002; Gould n.d.; Traïni 2010).

Methods This work is based on a re-examination of my initial data and the data I gathered when conducting further research in 2013/14. The initial data was based on interviews with Dr Fouzia Saeed, who had begun the AASHA movement, and with personnel in different organisations that had adopted the workplace bill before it became a law. This data also included: (i) regular emails from Fouzia to AASHA supporters over a 10-year period, explaining the steps AASHA was taking and the challenges it faced as the group formulated the bills and fought to have them legislated; (ii) a video in which several core AASHA members narrate their experience of formulating the bills and lobbying for legislation and (iii) television programmes recorded between 2008 and 2010 in which AASHA members or other stakeholders spoke about the bills. My subsequent research included semi-structured interviews with a selection of AASHA members and its supporters. The latter included media-persons, parliamentarians, senators, and staff at the Senate and National Assembly (NA) in Islamabad. I also examined other sources of data, such as video footage of AASHA events and the published transcripts of Senate and NA session proceedings when the bills were presented for voting. In some cases, the emotions I discuss in this chapter – pain, anger, moral shock, admiration, respect, compassion, pity, sympathy, and a sense of ghairat [the desire to protect one’s honour] – were named by people with reference to themselves and/or to what they believed others felt. I found I had to ‘read’ some of these emotions through the speaker’s tone and 136

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expression of emotions in different contexts. The process of trying to access and identify emotions certainly underscores the methodological difficulties of engaging in the study of emotions. The literature in this area suggests that labelling one’s emotion captures only some of the elements that are felt and that can subsequently alter the experience of that emotion. Trying to understand which emotions were felt can become even more difficult when the recollection takes place years later; time can alter our perception of what was felt, as can the events in between. Interviewing as a source of data generation is also fraught with challenges, I learnt, when interviewees do not or cannot articulate their emotions or if the desire to project oneself in a certain light alters what is or is not emphasised during the interview. It is in this context that alternative sources of data – especially the video footage that allowed me to see people cry, laugh or raise their voices in anger or frustration – became valuable. This visual material gave me insight into people’s emotional states as they lived out those moments, proving valuable despite the interpretation involved in the ‘reading’ process. The data that was generated, and my understanding of it, must be placed within this larger context. I use my understanding of the data to suggest that different emotions gave AASHA members and those they turned to for support the motivation needed for long-term commitment and/or short-term activism. Sometimes, these emotions surfaced in response to a person or situation. At other times, they had to be evoked deliberately through ‘emotion work’, i.e., the act of instilling or heightening different emotions in others. The point here is that all these emotions facilitated the movement’s goals and did so irrespective of how they arose. I provide an overview of the AASHA movement below and use the remainder of the chapter to illustrate how these emotions fuelled and sustained the movement. I do so by placing them in a larger cultural context that gives rise to culturally specific ‘feeling rules’ – the cultural rules that determine which feelings are desirable or appropriate in different contexts (Hochschild 1979). This not only sheds some light on why different emotions arose at certain moments but also helps complicate the relationship between emotions and mobilisation.

AASHA Sexual harassment is a global phenomenon that prevails across a range of spaces in Pakistan (see AASHA 2002; Brohi 1998; Malik 2009). AASHA’s inception is rooted in a case of sexual harassment at the workplace. Its story began officially on 22 December 1997 when 11 women working at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Islamabad drew on the organisation’s sexual harassment policy to file a complaint against a senior male colleague.2 The management’s negative reaction, combined 137

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with the harassment itself, made for an intimidating, humiliating experience (Ahmad 2001; Saeed 2012). These women persevered, however, and it was only after two years’ struggle – after many women had left the organisation in response to the management’s harassment and after they had pushed the case to the highest levels within the United Nations system in New York – that they won the case and the man was fired. Fouzia Saeed was one of the 11 complainants. As we chatted at her home in Islamabad in August 2013, she explained how her experience at UNDP had led her to form AASHA in 2001: ‘It doesn’t matter how much courage victims of sexual harassment are willing to display. They cannot fight the behaviour unless and until there are policies and an awareness of those policies in place.’ AASHA, she said, was thus created to ensure that all organisations in Pakistan had such a policy. Volunteer-based and non-hierarchical, AASHA was an alliance of likeminded individuals affiliated with different organisations that worked on women’s issues in specific or human rights in general.3 It took close to 10 years for their vision to become reality. The process entailed a number of steps.4 The first stage included drafting the two bills and obtaining feedback from a variety of regional players through provincial consultations and from international players such as the International Labour Organization. Once the bills were drafted, the second stage involved having them approved by the relevant ministries, the Cabinet, the NA and finally the Senate. Realising, however, that the government was not yet ready to discuss the bills seriously, AASHA members changed their strategy and spent the next few years getting the workplace bill (termed the Code of Conduct for Gender Justice at the Workplace) passed in the private sector. This gave them a chance to test it, build networks and garner support. By February 2008, more than 300 organisations had adopted the Code. With the national elections then taking place, AASHA members agreed that it was now the right time to approach the government again. The bills were passed into law two years later. AASHA’s success was the result of a bottom-up, multi-pronged strategy based on inclusive politics. Its core members believed that building ownership of the issue among different stakeholders – working women, state actors, law enforcement agencies, labour and trade unions, and the media – and their combined efforts were necessary for the bills to be legislated and subsequently implemented. The flexibility with which they framed their arguments when approaching different stakeholders enabled greater inclusivity, as did their commitment to a non-confrontational approach, which sometimes required members to control their expression of anger and frustration. The group’s strategy also included their willingness to cross what I call the ‘glass wall’ – an invisible line between the state and civil society that demarcates the fundamentally different roles that each is meant to play in society, with the state serving the public and the latter holding the state 138

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accountable. AASHA members crossed this wall by frequently carrying out the state actors’ work for them (Ahmad 2012). Aqsa Khan, a core AASHA member, explained that the system began working the other way around. We would be the ones giving them [the politicians] the information. We would say, you have to sign this and send this off to. . . . This is what’s coming on the agenda on Tuesday. . . . These are the people who are likely to raise these objections, this is what you need to say to counter their points. (video recording, AASHA) These are some examples of the key elements of a larger strategy that was designed deliberately to circumvent the weaknesses of the radical, and frequently anti-state, approaches civil society activists had used in lobbying for women-friendly legislation in the past (Ahmad 2012).

The role of pain, frustration and anger in fuelling and sustaining the movement It is erroneous to assume that certain emotions such as anger translate automatically into action – and this is particularly true for Pakistani women who experience acts of violence such as sexual harassment. Women who have been sexually harassed often report a range of emotions: pain, depression and frustration (Ahmad 2001; Brohi 1998). These do not stem solely from the experience itself but also from additional cultural elements that determine how women interpret this act of violence and how they choose to deal with it. The latter often involves remaining silent about the abuse (AASHA 2002; Brohi 1998; Malik 2009). There are a range of sociocultural reasons explaining women’s silence. Malik (2009) finds that young Pakistani women often remain silent because they feel their parents will blame them or because they wonder if they are not partly to blame for the experience. Many women do not report sexual harassment because they fear that making it public will leave them socially stigmatised. All these fears are rooted in a cultural context where the victim is often blamed for the act on the grounds that she ‘must have asked for it’, having behaved or dressed in a certain way (Ahmad 2001; Malik 2009). Women are held responsible for maintaining moral order in society, which then scrutinises the woman’s character and not that of the perpetrator. Furthermore, a woman’s reputation is often inseparable from that of her family and the fear of bringing them ‘dishonour’. Pakistani women are generally believed to embody their family’s honour. Any slight against their ‘honour’, which is usually tied to their ability to uphold the hegemonic moral gendered expectations that society has of ‘good women’, can thus dishonour their 139

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families. A culture of victim blaming in which a woman is made responsible for other people’s behaviour, in which she is afraid her moral character will be questioned and in which she fears stigma and dishonour can, therefore, deter her from speaking out (Malik 2009). Other fears may also contribute to women’s silence. One of these is the fear that family members will pressure or even force them to leave their workplace or educational institution on finding out that they are being harassed. This is often in keeping with a desire to ‘protect’ women. ‘Boys will be boys’, they are told, and the onus of protection, therefore, falls on the women and their families (Malik 2009). Added to the mix is women’s concern that employers will label them ‘troublemakers’ if the harassment takes place in a work environment and the fear that reporting such behaviour will have job-related repercussions (Ahmad 2001; Saeed 2012). Individual sensibilities The culturally grounded ideas mentioned earlier can shape women’s fears and concerns and may also explain why emotions do not automatically translate into action that would challenge such behaviour. Fouzia Saeed, however, chose to act: first, as one of the 11 women who filed a sexual harassment complaint at UNDP in 1997 and then, by establishing AASHA and spearheading the movement. Her life underlines the importance of paying attention to a person’s social history to understand why some people develop certain sensibilities over time and why they are more inclined to act on particular issues, especially in the long term (see Traïni 2010). Fouzia’s experiences had a strong emotional dimension and her book on the UNDP case (see Saeed 2012) is rooted in the residual pain of these experiences. This is clear from her choice of verses by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which preface the book: The truth that pains me in my heart like a thorn Should be expressed today so the pain vanishes. It would be erroneous, however, to focus solely on the humiliation, anger, frustration, and pain that Fouzia experienced at UNDP and to isolate this as the defining event that led to action. Her formal activism goes back to the 1970s, when she stood for and was elected president of Peshawar University’s student council. Since then, she has worked on a range of social issues, but her lifelong experience of injustice as a woman – and witnessing the same among those close to her – has made her particularly passionate about working on women’s issues. As she narrates: Some say my struggle started ten years ago when I founded AASHA. Some say my struggle started when I registered the first major sexual 140

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harassment case in my organization . . . but I knew that this struggle started as far back as I could remember. It started with the first time I felt humiliated by the touch of a man, by the ogling . . . that made me feel naked, by advances that I could not even comprehend at the time. I was too young to articulate what I felt, but I knew I wanted it to stop. (Saeed 2012: 20) Fouzia’s life illustrates that ‘repetitive affective experiences and significant traumas end up endowing individuals with a temperament – a group of sensibilities or predispositions that favour certain ways of feeling and reacting’ (Traïni 2010: 221). Her work on women’s issues appears to stem from this sensibility which, when combined with her activist bent and a supportive family, helps explain a lifetime’s work on gender issues.5 Arguably, therefore, Fouzia’s sensibility to gender issues and her longstanding activist approach to tackling issues that concerned her, combined with the anger, frustration and pain she had experienced at UNDP, motivated her to confront sexual harassment at a larger, institutional level. However, these emotions also contributed to, and sustained, the movement in other ways, as I show in what follows. A shared emotion-based experience While Pakistani women’s position makes them vulnerable to different kinds of sexual harassment (AASHA 2002; Brohi 1998; Malik 2009), it is not an exaggeration to say that most women have faced some harassment in some context of their lives. While they may have chosen to deal with it in different ways, research suggests that the emotions mentioned thus far are ones that many women will feel to different degrees. The experience of harassment, therefore, creates a shared emotional experience among women, and it was this that fuelled and sustained the AASHA movement, regardless of individual differences in the nature or degree of the experience itself. For AASHA, the shared experience aided the lobbying process. The literature on social movements shows that well-thought-out diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framing – convincing people that a problem exists, showing them how it might be resolved and encouraging them to join the movement, respectively – can lead to successful recruitment. Lobbying among women parliamentarians and senators, however, AASHA members found they did not need to convince them the problem existed. As parliamentarian Yasmeen Rehman (of the Pakistan People’s Party) pointed out, as we sat in her living room in Lahore in September 2013, ‘You can discuss the details of the bills, the process and offer criticisms on it, but what’s to be understood about the issue itself?’ These women already understood the issue. Given that ‘frames are more likely to be accepted if they fit well with 141

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the beliefs of potential recruits’ and ‘are compatible with the life experiences of the audience’ (Jasper 1998: 413), AASHA members did not have to provide any empirical evidence of the problem or evoke sympathy among women, as they did when lobbying many of their male counterparts or other men. This element of ‘sharedness’ also emerged at the annual ‘assemblies’ that AASHA began holding every 22 December, starting in 2001. Here, it helped sustain the movement in a different way. Hundreds of working women from across the country and from diverse occupations would come together and (as the video footage of these events repeatedly shows) share their experiences, providing mutual support and encouragement. Having a safe space in which to do so was significant, given the cultural context described earlier. As Aqsa Khan explained, as we sat at a cafe in Islamabad in October 2013: We were all dealing with sexual harassment individually but the AASHA assemblies gave us a platform through which we could speak up about our experiences, break our silence. . . . Such a space was unprecedented. Women connected with each other on the basis of their shared experiences. Shared experience, rituals and speeches all combined to create a powerful atmosphere that was marked by unity and solidarity. Theatre played a very important role. The audience engaged continuously with the performance, hooting, cheering and roaring with laughter when, for instance, an audience member climbed onstage to participate in an interactive play by Muhammad Waseem, a core AASHA member. ‘Jūta abhī utārūn ya bād mēn?’ (Should I take off my shoe [to hit you] now or later?), she mocked the perpetrator’s character amid resounding laughter (video recording, AASHA, December 2002, Islamabad). The bonding in such spaces and the positive emotions it can generate, such as a sense of solidarity, hope and enthusiasm, both facilitate and sustain political action. Emotions are, after all, communicative acts, and their expression ‘often produces effects on the subjective experience of other spectators in attendance’ (Traïni 2010: 224). Fouzia told me that it was the passion and emotion-laden energy in this space that gave her ‘the strength to fight for oneself and others when the need arose’ (August 2013, Islamabad). Indeed, the social movement literature brims with examples illustrating how such spaces and the activities that take place within them play a critical role in ‘dramatizing injustice, building solidarities and affirming identities, and generating the emotional energy necessary for high-risk activism and sustained commitment to the cause’ (Aminzade and McAdam 2002: 3; see also Gould n.d.; Jasper 1998; Whittier 2001). Fouzia alluded to this idea in

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her welcome address at the AASHA assembly held in 2008: ‘Yahān jo yak jehtī kī spirit generate hotī hai, woh hamārē pūrē sāl kā fuel hotī hai’ [The spirit of unity that is generated here is what fuels our whole year] (video recording, AASHA, December 2008, Islamabad). The connectedness she felt sprang from their shared emotional experiences and is what sustained her energy and strength in dealing with the process. Examples such as these are a reminder of the dialectic relationship that exists between emotions and movements, whereby movements generate emotional energy that, in turn, energise movements.

Moral shock and mobilisation Moral shock, ‘an unexpected event or piece of information [that] raises such a sense of outrage in a person that she becomes inclined toward political action’ (Jasper 1997: 106), made an appearance, albeit infrequently, in the process. Some supporters felt outrage when, for instance, someone made a misogynist remark or ridiculed the bills, and this feeling certainly facilitated their activism. Fouzia Saeed was a member of the government’s National Committee on the Status of Women when AASHA began lobbying state actors in 2008. Another committee member, Misbah Momin, showed an interest in helping AASHA have the bills legislated and became a supporter. It was in this context that she found herself in a Senate committee room with five other AASHA members and about 40 senators, one of whom (Nilofar Bakhtiar) had arranged the meeting so that AASHA members could speak to them about the bill before it was presented in the Senate. In an AASHA video recording, Fouzia narrates how the meeting incensed all the AASHA members present. She says that the most vocal senators recited sleazy verses, made crude comments about the character of women who had been harassed, and deemed the bills little more than part of a larger Western agenda to bring obscenity to the country. Furthermore, even though they had strong opinions on the issue as well as the bills, their comments demonstrated that they had neither read the bills nor had any interest in doing so. This was Misbah’s first experience of overt misogynist hostility, Fouzia told me, when I interviewed her in August 2013 in Islamabad. She said that Misbah had left the meeting, outraged. That she immediately used her political connections and brought the prime minister, then Yousaf Raza Gilani, and his wife on board, suggests that her outrage was a ‘righteous anger’ rooted in her belief that she had ‘the moral high ground’ (Blom and Jaoul 2008: para. 27). Both Gilani and his wife played a brief but timely role as they vocalised their support for these bills and informed any troublemaking party members that the bills had their backing. Misbah’s story illustrates how outrage can transform into effective political action.

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Respect, pity and sympathy/compassion for the other as motives for mobilisation The emotions others provoke in one, and that form the basis of affective ties, can play a very important role in building networks and generating action (Jasper 1998). Love, affection, admiration, trust, and respect are among these emotions, many of which emerged as strongly motivational factors in this case study. One example is that of Huma Shah, then a television anchor on a morning programme broadcast on Express 24/7. Fouzia Saeed, who knew her professionally, asked if she would use the programme to publicise both the issue and the bills. I visited Huma at home in Lahore in September 2013 and learnt why she had chosen to support the movement: It wasn’t about AASHA per se. Or even the issue. Yes, my own experiences and those of others I knew – all the women I know have been sexually harassed in one way or another at some point in their life – made me want me to support the issue. But I lent it the support I did because I recognised Fouzia’s sincerity and the effort she was putting in. And I wanted to support her in this endeavour. She had passion for her work. I recognised that and that made me want to support her. In addition, Huma said she respected Fouzia’s approach to the issue, which drew on clear arguments and solutions rather than relying on rhetoric. This, she explained, stood out against the confrontational and occasionally sensationalist styles adopted by some prominent women’s rights activists she had interviewed. Her account illustrates the importance of trust and respect as ‘affects with an enormous impact on political action’ (Jasper 1998: 402). This is because ‘we have deep tendencies to trust certain individuals, groups and institutions but not others, and many of our allegiances, alliances and choices follow from this pattern’ (ibid.). Sympathy and compassion are also recognised as ‘emotions potentially relevant to protest’ (Jasper 1998: 406). Both these, along with pity (taras), emerged during the AASHA movement and seemed to combine with a sense of protectiveness (discussed in the next section) among the male staff at the NA and Senate, who could see that Fouzia and other AASHA members were visibly engaged in tireless efforts to lobby parliamentarians and senators. The sympathy or pity this generated then translated into active support. The security guards on duty in the Parliament buildings, for instance, saw ‘us through thick and thin’, Fouzia explained to me (August 2013, Islamabad). They watched as AASHA members waited hours for parliamentarians and senators; as they ran from one office to the next, lobbying people or trying to have their files moved up the bureaucratic chain of command; and even as they broke down in moments of dejection. 144

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Over time, the security staff became a key source of help. They were not concerned with the specifics of the bill, I was told. ‘They were motivated to help because they believed that we were doing good work and because they felt sorry for us’, smiled Fouzia. In addition to the peons and clerks, the security staff went out of their way to help. They kept AASHA members apprised of the status of their files, told them when the next NA or Senate session would be held and what the agenda was likely to be, arranged passes, suggested where they might accost politicians leaving a meeting, and helped track down senators when they were needed in session to vote for the bills. These are just some examples of their support in this process.

Emotion work The AASHA narrative suggests that, while many state actors and supporters in the public agreed the bill was important, their cognitive agreement did not translate automatically into action. Other strategies had to be used to motivate and mobilise them. One of these was consistent ‘emotion work’, ‘the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling’ in oneself or others (Hochschild 1979: 561). The hope was to induce people to act in ways that were essential to move the process forward. Much of AASHA’s emotion work relied on ‘sensitising devices’ or what Traïni (2010: 233) refers to as ‘the material support, the arrangement of objects, and the staging that activists deploy in order to inspire the affective reactions that predispose those who experience them to support the proposed cause’. AASHA members consciously used this approach, for instance, when building on state actors’ desire to ‘do something’ for the ‘awām [public]. They did so by arranging passes for working women such as nurses (whose uniforms would immediately mark them as working women) to attend the NA and Senate deliberations as observers from the gallery. The collective presence of working women was supposed to remind parliamentarians and senators that they were the people’s elected representatives, and to amplify their desire to act in the best interests of a constituency that was counting on their support. Some of these individuals had already expressed (both to me and to Fouzia Saeed) the moral satisfaction they gained from working on meaningful issues: they wanted to make a difference. AASHA members hoped to heighten these pre-existing affects and motivate these individuals further by bringing them face to face with the people for whom they were working in this context. In certain moments, AASHA members provoked outrage to motivate people to act in certain ways. This emerged clearly when the first bill, the amendment to Section 509 of the Pakistan Penal Code, was presented in the Senate on 19–20 January 2010, after being passed unanimously by the NA. The transcript of the session’s proceedings reveals that members of various religious parties attacked the bill on various fronts as soon as it was introduced. When I interviewed them in Islamabad in 2013, Fouzia Saeed 145

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and Aqsa Khan told me that these state actors had created pandemonium in the Senate, leaving their seats to gather in front of the chairperson with vociferous objections. ‘The attack continued relentlessly’, noted Fouzia, and ‘before one stopped speaking, another began. . . . It was clearly a planned assault’ (Saeed 2012: 14). Some senators’ display of righteous moral indignation and their rhetorical arguments within a religious framework made them difficult to challenge, especially given the unexpectedness of the attack. Very few people thus spoke up to support the bill that day. The AASHA members present were caught between outrage at the senators’ comments and fear that the bill would not get through the last stage of the process. Fouzia recalls ‘sitting in the gallery, helpless and voiceless’ (Saeed 2012: 14), adding, ‘My body felt heavy and I had a hard time controlling my tears. We had gone through so much in the past two years, but the last few steps seemed to be the most difficult’ (ibid.: 16). Their supporters, such as Senator Raza Rabbani, however, managed to have the debate deferred to the next day and she and Aqsa Khan kept lobbying other supporters until 1 a.m. They engaged in emotional labour by highlighting the range of challenges women underwent when they left their homes to earn a living, and the multiple ways in which harassment hurt them. They talked about the importance of improving social conditions for the next generation of women, for their daughters, their sisters. Fouzia says she deliberately made her pitch emotional because ‘we wanted to give them [AASHA’s supporters] courage to stand up to the religious Senators’ (Saeed 2012: 18). By evoking and/or heightening the senators’ sympathy for women and expressing their own moral shock and anger towards those denying women protection, the idea was to ‘encourage politicized emotional responses’ (Whittier 2001: 240). This discourse tapped into many state actors’ desire to work for the ‘awām in a meaningful sense, especially those who were disenfranchised or oppressed. Equally, if not more importantly, what AASHA members said fed into the popular understanding of women as ‘the weaker sex’ who embodied the honour or ‘izzat of their households and their nation. Unlike men who have honour, ‘women represent honor; they symbolize honor; they are honor’ (Haeri 2002: 36). As such, even though AASHA had never framed women as being weak or embodying a larger collective honour, what its members said could (and did) evoke the feeling rule dictating that men should feel protective towards women; this stirred a sense of ghairat among the senators that AASHA lobbied.6 Ghairat has been defined as ‘the spirit that motivates people to protect their ‘izzat’ (Murphy 1996: 106, quoted in Haeri 2002: 35). A man’s ghairat can reside in many things. Protecting ‘his’ women – not just those in his family but also the country’s daughters and sisters, all of who embody his honour – is, therefore, the mark of a ghairatmand or honourable man. Thus, when AASHA activists posed rhetorical questions to the senators that night (such as ‘See what they [members of the religious parties] did today?’), we can place these in the context of the culturally informed feeling rules to understand how 146

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such sentences are transformed into moral judgments that can stir or reinforce specific conventions of feeling and thus rile listeners. As Fouzia Saeed observed, when I spoke to her in Islamabad in August 2013, she and Aqsa Khan were repeatedly assured, ‘Let them [members of the religious parties] come tomorrow. See what kind of answer we’ll give them!’ The senators from the religious parties continued attacking the bill the next day. Senator Muhammad Khan Sherani, for instance, said that this law would apply only to women who remained within sharaʻī (legitimate under the sharia) limits.7 He added the caveat that, ‘those women who do not even follow the Quran and the Sunnah . . . and who display themselves and their beauty, they want others to pay attention to them’.8 Others, such as Senator Sajid Mir, raised similar points. As he put it: ‘How can there be a crime against modesty when there is no modesty to begin with?’.9 The language used here makes it clear that not all women are worthy of protection. The hegemonic gendered ideology in Pakistan popularly divides women into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories. The latter are portrayed as immodest and immoral sexual aggressors who threaten the social order by inviting sexual attention. Accordingly, they do not deserve protection. The former, however, who are often perceived in relational terms, are deemed worthy of respect. Other senators built on the idea that women were responsible for any acts of violence against them and often ended their speeches, as Senator Abdul Ghafoor Haideri did that day, with the verdict that ‘the bill was against the constitution and the Quran and Sunnah. It is against our society and Islamic culture’.10 The emotion work AASHA had engaged in the night before, however, meant that every attack was countered. The pro-bill speeches in the Senate that day were an amalgam of factual rebuttals and emotional language that drew on and portrayed women as weak, passive and in desperate need of protection. Many senators’ narratives reorganised these ideas within a framework that manifested the feeling rules described earlier as they engaged in their own emotional labour. To illustrate, Senator Mir Hasil Khan Bizenjo said: Our sisters are asking for this, our daughters are asking for this . . . the poor woman, who wants to protect her ‘izzat, who wants to feed her children twice a day is asking for this . . . and we are refusing them this protection? They’re asking us for so little and you’re crying about the five hundred thousand rupee fine? Forget Pakistan, the entire wealth of this world is an insufficient price for . . . their ‘izzat. . . . The Senate has got a great opportunity to not let them down. . . . This is not just about protecting our mother, which is our obligation; this is not just about protecting our daughters, who are our ghairat. Every woman in Pakistan is saying: ‘My honour is my life, both grow within me. Take away my honour and my life is ruined. . .’. So, we will see who will display their ghairat by voting for their right today.11 147

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Such narratives tend to depict those using this discourse as ‘honourable’. They also underscore culturally informed conventions of feeling that can compel others to act in a certain way by arousing in them either a similar sense of ghairat or a sense of shame at not feeling what they should: protectiveness towards women. Most senators who had spoken against the bill walked out during these speeches. Subsequently, the bill was voted on and passed.

Bringing emotions back into the conversation Whether felt individually or as a collective; deliberately heightened, evoked or felt otherwise; arising in response to an individual or a situation; the emotion play that occurs in a particular cultural context and which surfaces in the AASHA case study helps us understand how a range of emotions fuel and sustain a movement. Moreover, unlike previous work on AASHA, this chapter focuses on emotions systematically and yields a more comprehensive understanding of the movement itself. The chapter also offers insights into the relationship between emotions and mobilisation in a larger academic context, in which the study of this relationship has re-emerged. My earlier point – one identified by others writing on emotions (see Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2001) – was that cognitive agreement alone may not be enough to mobilise people and that emotions can play an important role in facilitating action. The case study, however, tells us that experiencing an emotion – even one such as anger, which is often equated with mobilisation (Jasper 1998) – does not translate automatically into action either. This is an important observation and one that others writing on collective mobilisation have also underlined (see Blom and Jaoul 2008). Different emotions can have a different impact on people (Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2001; Hooge, Zeelenberg and Breugelmans 2007). Furthermore, constraints, often culturally informed, may prevent people from challenging a given behaviour at any level, as we have seen in every case where harassed women remained silent despite feeling an array of emotions. A causal relationship between emotion and action can, therefore, never be assumed. On the flip side, the AASHA case study also shows that the cultural context, in the form of culturally informed ‘feeling rules’, can be used to help meet one’s goals. Both scenarios underline the importance of thinking about how a certain cultural context informs the relationship between emotions and mobilisation. My data suggests that different emotions play a relative role in motivating people at different moments. Huma Shah’s frustration and anger drove her to tackle the workplace harassment she had faced, but her respect, trust and admiration for Fouzia Saeed – as emotions directed towards an individual – played a far greater role in compelling her support for the larger issue. It

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would be wrong, therefore, to associate any one emotion with a specific or standard capacity to motivate or mobilise. Finally, this study offers additional avenues of investigation for the future. For instance, in what spaces did AASHA members control the expression of their emotions? Was their decision ever informed by the popular negative gendered association between emotions and women that is often used to undermine women’s authority? On what occasions did men manifest their emotions? How was this perceived? Why did the senators from the religious parties ultimately fail in their emotional labour during the session discussed earlier? What makes emotion work more or less effective? Answers to such questions would increase our understanding of the complex and multifaceted relationship between emotions, gender and mobilisation within a particular cultural context.

Notes 1 See www.sexualharassmentwatch.org for the full text of these laws. 2 In 2010, the Government of Pakistan declared 22 December ‘National Working Women’s Day’. 3 See Saeed et al. (2011: annex 18) for a list of organisations that were part of this alliance from 2001 to 2011. 4 See Saeed et al. (2011) for a detailed account of how the bills were legislated. 5 Notably, this includes Saeed’s (2001) well-known ethnography, Taboo! The Hidden Culture of a Red Light Area, which challenges the double standards and façade of morality that surround women’s sexuality in Pakistan. 6 This feeling rule may help explain why the title of the law uses the words ‘Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace’. Contrary to what its name suggests, the law enables all individuals to seek legal recourse; it is not limited to women. However, framing this achievement in a gendered way falls in line with the social narrative that ‘women are weak and need to be protected’, which allows state actors or parties to portray themselves as benevolent protectors and score political points in this larger context. 7 All quotations from the Senate sessions have been taken directly from the printed transcripts of these sessions and translated, where appropriate, by the author. 8 177 Parl. Deb. Sen. (20 January 2010), p. 86. 9 Ibid., p. 92. 10 Ibid., p. 98. 11 Ibid., pp. 96–97.

References AASHA (Alliance Against Sexual Harassment). 2002. Situational Analysis on Sexual Harassment at the Work Place. Islamabad: AASHA. Ahmad, Sadaf. 2001. ‘Sexual Harassment in the Work Place: A Case in Pakistan’, Review of Women’s Studies, 11(1–2): 80–101. ———. 2010. Leaders of Change: Drawing Lessons from Case Studies of Organizations with Anti-Sexual Harassment Policies. Islamabad: Mehergarh.

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———. 2012. ‘AASHA’s Approach to Instituting Sexual Harassment Legislation in Pakistan’, in Srila Roy (ed), New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities, pp. 44–65. London: Zed Books. Aminzade, Ron and Doug McAdam. 2002. ‘Emotions and Contentious Politics’, Mobilization, 7(2): 107–9. Blom, Amélie and Nicolas Jaoul. 2008. ‘Introduction: The Moral and Affectual Dimension of Collective Action in South Asia’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2. doi:10.4000/samaj.1912. Brohi, Nazish. 1998. Summary Report on Harassment of Women at the Workplace. Karachi: Working Women’s Support Centre. Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta. 2001. ‘Introduction: Why Emotions Matter’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 1–24. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gould, Deborah B. n.d. ‘Life During Wartime: Emotions and the Development of ACT UP’, www.actupny.org/indexfolder/gould_s02.pdf (accessed on 1 January 2016). Haeri, Shahla. 2002. No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 85(3): 551–75. Hooge, Ilona E. de, Marcel Zeelenberg and Seger N. Breugelmans. 2007. ‘Moral Sentiments and Cooperation: Differential Influences of Shame and Guilt’, Cognition and Emotion, 21(5): 1025–42. Jasper, James M. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1998. ‘The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and Around Social Movements’, Sociological Forum, 13(3): 397–424. Malik, Lalarukh. 2009. ‘Justice versus Honor: Social Constraints Disempowering Sexually Harassed Upper-Class Pakistani Women’. Unpublished senior project, Lahore University of Management Sciences. Murphy, Richard. 1996. ‘Space, Class, and Rhetoric in Lahore’. Ph.D. dissertation. Oxford University. Saeed, Fouzia. 2001. Taboo! The Hidden Culture of a Red Light Area. Karachi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Working with Sharks: Countering Sexual Harassment in Our Lives. Lahore: Sanjh Publications. Saeed, Fouzia, Rafiq Jaffer, Sadaf Ahmad and Renate Frech. 2011. The AASHA Experience: A Decade of Struggle Against Sexual Harassment in Pakistan. Islamabad: Mehergarh. Traïni, Christophe. 2010. ‘From Feelings to Emotions (and back Again): How Does One Become an Animal Rights Activist?’ trans. James Terry, Revue française de science politique, 60(2): 335–58. Whittier, Nancy. 2001. ‘Emotional Strategies: The Collective Reconstruction and Display of Oppositional Emotions in the Movement Against Child Sexual Abuse’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, pp. 233–50. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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8 IT’S EFFECTIVE BECAUSE IT’S AFFECTIVE The dynamics and significance of emotions in a Delhi Jan Sunwai Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal*

Cole states, concerning the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, that ‘[its] live hearings were affective, and consequently they were effective in facilitating . . . a transition from a racist, totalitarian state to a non-racial democracy’ (2007: 179). The same could be said about a different, but related, type of dispositive, the jan sunwai: it’s effective because it’s affective.1 I began observing jan sunwais (which, in Hindi, translates as ‘public hearings’ or, more precisely, ‘people’s hearings’) because I was interested in the participatory dimension of Indian democracy, especially in large cities. This has led me to investigate various participatory practices or dispositives2 used in contemporary urban India – looking at their genealogy, their relationship with state authorities, their public, how they function, the issues with which they deal and, most importantly, their outcomes. The jan sunwai is a new, highly original and increasingly popular form of collective action in that it is a mode of participatory control of public action as well as a mobilisation forum. It was reinvented3 in the mid-1990s by the Rajasthan-based Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a civil society organisation (CSO) working to empower ‘workers and farmers’.4 Over the years, the procedure has evolved and it has become a common form of collective action. Indeed, one hears of jan sunwais in connection with different causes and different publics across India. Essentially, it is a public meeting organised around a social issue, in which the ‘public’ – that is, local citizens – is both audience and speaker. More precisely, the jan sunwai enables the intended beneficiaries of a given policy or scheme and its implementing functionaries to interact face to face at a forum moderated by a small group of ‘eminent persons’.5 Given its confrontational nature, and because it often deals with vital issues such as access to work, education or 151

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healthcare, the jan sunwai is characterised by what I will call, for now, a specific emotional intensity. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that a situational analysis of the emotional dynamics characterising the jan sunwai offers crucial insights into the political efficacy of this form of collective action. The focus on emotions is not meant to replace attention paid to other aspects – such as the social characteristics of the actors involved, their resources and interests, and the structure of political opportunities – but it does add a dimension that is essential, I argue, to understanding the transformative potential, if any, of democratic procedures. I will try to show that the jan sunwai’s emotional dynamics play a central role in its capacity to empower the local citizens who form the bulk of its participants. The chapter’s first section describes a jan sunwai that took place in New Delhi in April 2011, on the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, also referred to as the Right to Education Act (RTE). This jan sunwai is interesting on two counts. First, it serves as a model in more ways than one. Second, it was exceptionally observable – my analysis draws on a rich and diverse set of resources, including six interviews, a report produced by the facilitating organisation, a series of press articles on the event and, most importantly, 14 videotapes that provide an exhaustive, if imperfect, record of the day.6 The second section reflects on both the value and limitations that such video footage brings to an analysis of publicly expressed emotions. The third section describes the ‘emotion work’ (Hochschild 1979) or management of emotions carried out by jan sunwai organisers. Based on these observations, the fourth section argues that the jan sunwai is a ‘sensitising device’ (Traïni 2009) that helps control, display and/or evoke specific emotions to mobilise different categories of participants in different ways. But in addition to this emotion work, the jan sunwai also demonstrates the less controlled ‘work of emotions’ (Quéré 2013). These parallel phenomena have different political effects. The conclusion underscores how my analysis of the Delhi jan sunwai illustrates these two distinct, but complementary, approaches to emotions and reflects on how useful they are to the study of participatory democracy.

A model jan sunwai The jan sunwai I use as a case study is exemplary in two ways. First, it typifies a canonical version of the jan sunwai – one very close to the MKSS rural model. This form is not the most common today, in part because it is very demanding in terms of time and commitment. As the practice became increasingly popular in the late 1990s and onwards, it was appropriated by various organisations, for different issues and different publics. As a result, it has morphed to some extent, relying less on confrontation and more on expression. Second, the Delhi jan sunwai was successful as a public meeting 152

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to the extent that it brought about some change in the lives of its participants – which is not true of all jan sunwais. Typically, a jan sunwai involves three types of participants: (i) the public, that is, local citizens or the jan from among whom a number of aggrieved persons will narrate their story; (ii) the jury or panel, comprising half a dozen ‘experts’ (often including retired judges and bureaucrats, lawyers, academics, journalists, and senior activists) and (iii) representatives of state authorities, frequently a handful of (junior) bureaucrats. The largest group of participants comprises people who have suffered directly as a result of the policy in question (or non-implementation thereof), commonly accompanied by their relatives and neighbours. Generally, the jan sunwai is not an isolated event; it is the emerging, visible part of an entire process that spans the period leading up to the event itself – or D-day, as I refer to it here – as well as its aftermath. All three components require substantial work by the organisers, which may be one or more CSOs or (more rarely) a political party. Today, some jan sunwais are part of an officially mandated social audit – an audit of social policies carried out by members of the public – as provided under legislation such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, the RTE 2009 and the Food Security Act 2013. Thus, our jan sunwai was part of a series of such events organised by the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), an autonomous public institution charged with monitoring the implementation of the RTE. The RTE was adopted in 2009 and its implementation began in April 2010. Briefly, the Act is a milestone in Indian legislation to the extent that it makes it compulsory for all children aged 6–14 to be enrolled in a neighbourhood school. Under the RTE, it is illegal to ask children or their parents to pay a tuition fee or to bear other related expenses. It is meant to guarantee a minimum standard of elementary education. The Act sets schooling standards in terms of infrastructure, teacher–pupil ratios and teaching time, and prohibits physical punishment and mental harassment. It seeks to better integrate marginalised groups with the national education system through (i) a quota (25 percent) of seats reserved in private schools and (ii) the formation of school management committees, where two thirds of each committee must be composed of parents, including those from marginalised groups. Finally, the Act assigns responsibility for children’s enrolment and attendance not to their parents, but to the state.7 About a year after the RTE began being implemented, the NCPCR was mandated to hold a jan sunwai in this context. It asked a Delhi-based organisation, Joint Operation for Social Help, better known as JOSH, to organise a public meeting with the help of several other CSOs. JOSH was chosen to facilitate the event based on its experience of working with young people in two areas of Delhi.8 The process started, typically, about three months before the date scheduled for the hearing. Having worked for several years 153

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with local communities and particularly with young people in the lowincome areas of Trilokpuri and Kalyanpuri, the organisers were familiar with several problems concerning local schools. They selected a series of cases that they felt best represented different aspects of violations of the RTE, such as students being denied admission, absenteeism among teachers and poor-quality school meals. A factsheet was prepared for each case, containing the relevant information (details of each ‘victim’, the wrongdoings or malpractices observed and the status of official complaints, had any been lodged). Then, aggrieved persons had to be prepared for the hearing. This involved explaining the process, its objectives, what one could expect of it, and the specific role their testimony would play. Moreover, JOSH activists had to help people prepare to speak about their ordeal in public within the allotted time of 5 to 10 minutes on the day of the jan sunwai. Simultaneously, the organisers put together the jury, inviting representatives of the Education departments under the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the Delhi government as well as principals and teachers from the schools concerned. Finally, they were also responsible for organising the logistics of the meeting. D-day (20 April 2011) arrived and the jan sunwai unfolded in a typical manner.9 Once everybody was seated under the shāmyānah [canopy], Saurabh, a founding member of JOSH, explained the issue at stake, introduced the jury (acknowledging the presence of the local elected representative) and outlined the day’s schedule. The jury, in this case, comprised the ubiquitous ‘eminent persons’, but it must be noted that four of the five jury members were also affiliated with state institutions at the time. Shanta Sinha, Yogesh Dubey and Kiran Bhatty were members of the NCPCR10 and Farah Naqvi was on the National Advisory Council (NAC).11 The fifth jury member was Vinod Raina, an academic-cum-activist who had founded the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti and Eklavya, two CSOs that were widely acclaimed for their contribution to education for all. Raina was also one of the architects of the RTE. As is often the case, the jan sunwai opened with a song written and performed by local young JOSH volunteers, highlighting the problems they faced at school, but in a humorous vein (described later in this chapter). This was followed by a series of testimonies: in each case, the victim (whether a child, parent or both) was called to the dais and asked to recount his or her story. Periodically, the jury would ask the victim and/or the state representatives present to clarify a point. Once the victim had finished, he or she would return to sit among the audience and the next case would follow. Each case took 10–20 minutes to present. The meeting broke up briefly for lunch (provided by the facilitating organisations) and then resumed the testimonies. At the end of the day, the jury presented its recommendations, which were directed at both the ‘public’ as well as the state representatives

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attending. The meeting closed with another song, the audience left and the jury members gave a small press conference. A JOSH activist I interviewed said that the pamphlets they had distributed to publicise the jan sunwai declared its goal was ‘that truth may prevail’ (4 March 2012, New Delhi). The handbill referred to was distributed among village residents and authorities to let them know a public hearing was being organised. Ironically, a defining feature of this jan sunwai was the frequency with which victims were accused of lying – by teachers, school principals and officials representing the Municipal Corporation of Delhi or Education Directorate. The meeting eventually became a repeated confrontation of the word of two individuals; the tension this generated was palpable from the video recording of the event.

Schools, lies and videotapes At this point, it is useful to reflect on the advantages and limitations of using video recordings as research material. The JOSH team was kind enough to give me access to the raw footage of this jan sunwai, which provided the purest possible record of it. The event was filmed by two cameras over the course of the entire day, yielding 14 DVDs of footage. This material comes closest to offering an integral view of the event, both in terms of real time (from the beginning to the end, with very few cuts in between) and focus (the cameras were directed at the dais as well as the audience). Yet the chief limitation of video recordings as research material is partial capture. Video recordings, including raw footage, are partial in a double sense: they capture only part of the event and they reflect the partiality or point of view of the cameraperson, video editor or organisation that commissioned the video, towards certain actors and certain moments of the public hearing. The subjectivity of the cameraperson is apparent from the extent to which the camera focuses on the jury members, who tend to be the ‘stars’ of the public hearing. Most often, the jury comprises barēlog – literally, ‘big people’ in the sense that they hold positions of power or influence. Having them participate in the jan sunwai is the result of hard work on the part of the organisers, who will want to emphasise this achievement. To a lesser extent, the camera will focus on the public – a large crowd is another indicator of successful mobilisation on the part of the jan sunwai organisers. Fortunately, the audio track may compensate for inadequate footage of the public, whose reactions to a speaker, for instance, can be heard even if they cannot be seen. Overall, video recordings offer a more restricted definition of the situation than direct observation and do not necessarily capture subtle shifts in the atmosphere of the event. That said, as with direct observation, video recordings provide the researcher with a wealth of information that is crucial to

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understanding how any participatory event functions – information that is much harder to come by through interviews and written documentation. For instance, what is the composition of the public in terms of gender, age and class? Which language tends to dominate the event: is it mostly the local Indian language or English? Most importantly, video recordings capture information that is essential to analysing the emotional dynamics of the event: (i) the expression of emotions and (ii) the management of emotions, (iii) in a form that makes it possible to objectify the emotional dynamics. First, video recordings make the expression of emotions visible and/or audible. They give us access to what is expressed, which might or might not be distinct from what is felt. With all their limitations, image and (more importantly) sound capture how different actors at the jan sunwai express their emotions – through their choice of words and language, facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. The public might laugh, applaud or jeer; audience members might stay in one place or move about. The victims or testifiers may be overcome by shyness, distress or anger; they might break down or raise their voices. Jury members often adapt their tone to the person(s) they are addressing: the testifier, the public or the state representatives. The softness of harshness of their tone strongly suggests compassion, anger or irritation. Finally, the tone adopted by the state representatives can range from conciliatory to indignant. Their tendency to lapse into English is very interesting. Video recordings also show which issues or cases provoke public agitation. Unfortunately, they fail to convey what periods of silence might imply: silence is strongly equivocal in that it may indicate a rapt audience, but equally, a deeply bored one. Second, video recordings make emotion work visible (and audible). They help identify organisational elements of the public hearing that pertain to the management of emotions – elements that are rarely mentioned in written reports or interviews because (i) the organisers do not think these worth mentioning and (ii) much of their emotion work is not done self-consciously. For instance, video recordings capture the spatial disposition of various actors. At some jan sunwais, the state representatives stand facing the jury, while the latter remain seated, as do the testifiers. At others, they sit in front, facing the jury, but with their backs to the public. Finally, video footage offers a sense of the ‘rhythm’ of the event, produced by the succession of testimonies alternating with elements of popular culture such as songs, dances, skits, or video shows; they also reveal the nature and tone of these elements. Third, video recordings objectify the situation under study. With reference to public hearings, this objectification works in two ways, with different advantages in terms of accessing and documenting emotions. First, there is a ‘technical objectification’: a video recording makes it possible to freezeframe an essentially volatile situation. One can view the same sequence several times over, share it with others and discuss each other’s interpretation. This allows one to analyse the words, tone and body language of jan sunwai 156

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participants with more precision and less arbitrariness than would be the case with direct observation. Second, there is an ‘affective objectification’ that works through the distance, inherent in a video recording, between the medium and the observer. As I mentioned earlier, public hearings are characterised by an emotional intensity that can hamper detached observation and analysis. Watching the event on video allows one to see how this emotional intensity is produced and managed, instead of merely experiencing it. Arguably, therefore, video recordings are a valuable tool in studying emotional situations. As I will show, they enable a finer understanding of emotion work and also provide substantial evidence of the work of emotions. And they work best, of course, in combination with interviews.

The management of emotions: emotion work We know that all collective rituals produce some ‘emotional energy’ (Jasper 2011: 3). I would argue that such emotional energy is particularly visible and effective at public hearings as a result of the elaborate ‘emotion work’ (Hochschild 1979) that characterises this form of mobilisation. In her seminal article, Hochschild defines emotion work as ‘trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling’ and explains that there are ‘two broad types: evocation or suppression’ (1979: 561). Jan sunwais illustrate how issue entrepreneurs (the organisers) attempt to suppress emotions such as fear, resentment and anger, which might hamper the discussion, while stoking emotions such as confidence, courage and hope, which are likely to stimulate the exchange. A first explanation for the emotional intensity that characterises public hearings relates to the didactic process whereby individual testimonies are used to exemplify violations and abuses that concern millions of people. The ‘cases’ presented, while symptomatic of a wider problem, remain real (and often horrifying) stories that are narrated by the protagonist in question. Thus, every case captures participants’ attention, partly out of empathy and partly out of voyeurism. At times, the atmosphere is fraught with tension as, for instance, when a young girl recounted how the neglect and incompetence of the school authorities let her younger brother’s injured hand become a permanent disability; when a jury member publicly humiliated a state representative by mocking her ignorance of the law; when a school principal angrily defended her position. At other times, the succession of cases – no matter how perturbing the details – becomes tedious: people lose focus, turn to chat with their neighbours or even get up to leave. My observation, both direct and indirect (through video footage), of a series of jan sunwais and my interviews with the organisers12 suggest that the latter seek an optimum level of emotional intensity. This is achieved through different means that collectively represent a rich example of emotion work, including, among others, the organisation of space, the timing 157

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and nature of songs and other elements of popular culture, and the order in which different themes and cases are presented. A key element is the solemnity of the occasion, in which the organisation of physical space plays a large part. The jan sunwai is held in a shāmyānah or public hall and the space is usually distributed in the following manner. The jury sits at tables on a dais, facing the audience (chiefly the aggrieved persons and their local community). The state functionaries are seated in the first row, with their back to the audience, but facing the jury. For each case, the victim comes onstage and stands next to the jury, thus facing both the audience and the state representatives. He or she speaks into the microphone and may be assisted by a relative or activist – if, for example, a translator is required, if the speaker needs emotional support (should he or she break down) or if the narrative needs to be conveyed more clearly in case the speaker is not terribly articulate or is too long-winded. Thus, the spatial organisation of a public hearing strongly evokes that of a court of law – indeed in our case, Saurabh introduced the jan sunwai as a jan ‘adālat or ‘people’s court’. In contrast to this gravitas is the more relaxed environment provided by cultural elements such as songs and dances, which constitute the second tool of emotion work. Indeed, public hearings are halfway between the court and the street, the trial and the community meeting.13 With the latter, they have in common the presence and role of different forms of popular culture, which are essential to the didactic dimension of public hearings aimed at raising awareness. As a JOSH activist explained to me: ‘We found it a little difficult to make the community understand the education system . . . so we needed theatre. . . . We created some songs about schools to make the community understand [the issue at stake] more easily’ (24 December 2012, New Delhi). Public hearings often start and end with a song, while dances, skits or short videos may be presented at the beginning. These elements of popular culture, which help the jan sunwai unfold, have two main functions, the first being to define, in a critical sense, the issue in question – whether it is poor schooling, corruption or caste prejudice. Often, this is done in a humorous, ironic vein. Humour is a valuable tool because it dilutes the socioeconomic difference among participants, making it easier for those located further down the social hierarchy to express themselves. The second function of cultural elements is that of assertion or celebration – of the community, its strength and solidarity. Thus, a group of young JOSH volunteers, clad alike in jeans and black t-shirts, broke vigorously into a song that started like this: All children [fists raised]: Shikshā kā adhikār hamārā hai [The right to education is our right]. Hamārā hai, hamārā hai! [It is ours, it is ours!]. Khēlo, kūdo, karo parhā’ī [Play, jump, run, study]. 158

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Apnē hāth kī laro larā’ī! [Stand up for yourself!]. All children [clapping]: Main to gayā skūl mēn [I went to school], Magar main parh nahīn pāyā rē [But couldn’t study]. Halalalalalal! Group leader: Arē, kyūn nahīn parh pā’ē skūl mēn? [Really? Why weren’t you able to study at school?]. First child: Arē, bhā’ī sāhab, kaisē parhēn? [Oh, come on, brother. How can we study?]. Hamārē skūl mēn shauchalē nahīn hain [Our school has no toilets]. Group leader: Kyā? Skūl mēn shauchalē nahīn hain? [What? The school has no toilets?]. All children: Nahīn! [No!]. Second child: Yā shauchalē mēn tālā lagā rehtā hai [Or the toilets are always locked]. Aur mērē skūl mēn shauchalē kī safā’ī kabhī nahīn hotī! [And the toilets at my school are never cleaned!]. Mērī class mēn itnī badbū ātī hai [There is such a stench in my classroom]. All children: Hān! [Yes!]. Third child: Yeh hāl hai, shauchalē itnē gandhē hain . . . [Things are so bad: the toilets are so dirty . . .] Ki bachē ghus bhī nahīn pātē [that children can’t bear to step inside]. All children: Main to gayā skūl mēn [I went to school], Magar main parh nahīn pāyā rē [But couldn’t study]. The song went on to underscore other problems such as the shortage of classroom desks and the poor quality of school meals. It communicated in a powerful way not only the spiritedness of young people in a poor settlement but also the fact that they expected decent schooling and were determined to get it. Their performance spelt out the issues at stake even as it asserted the legitimacy of young citizens claiming their right to education. As a JOSH volunteer explained: When the jan sunwai started, for the first hour and a half, no parents said anything. Even when people reached the tent, came to the jan sunwai, they had this fear of the principal. We also had two cases who, at the last moment, refused to go to the stage. (interview with the author, 24 December 2012, New Delhi) The song was necessary to embolden participants: it helped suppress their fear of speaking up and stimulated the confidence required to publicly denounce the wrongdoings of ‘big people’. The third element of emotion work involves sequencing cases in a way that steers clear of two symmetric pitfalls: an emotional atmosphere that is 159

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too intense (when people are overwhelmed by grief or anger) or borders on the indifferent (when people lose interest in the cases being presented). In the sequence of cases presented at the Delhi jan sunwai, the testimonies started with the harrowing story of Hemant, who had injured his hand badly while running a school race and received such poor care that he was now handicapped for life. A case such as this immediately conveys the importance of the issue at stake: in this instance, children’s safety at school. The cases that followed pertained to child labour and physical punishment – again, stories that are as likely to evoke strong emotions among the assembled parents. The long morning ended with another crucial issue: that of children from minority groups, Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, who had been awarded scholarships, but not received (or received only part of) the scholarship money itself. Again, this is the sort of dispute that is likely to hold people’s interest and ensure that they sit through the proceedings. An efficient jan sunwai organiser will ensure that the optimum level of emotional intensity prevails. This involves manoeuvring between apathy and unbridled emotion, between excessive distance and excessive empathy. Here, the jury plays a major role: it must effect the shift from the specifics of the case being narrated to a more general, but practical, discussion of what should have been done, what must be done now and how to prevent the problem from recurring. Finally, the whole dramaturgy of the jan sunwai begets an inversion of roles, which is a key source of its emotional intensity. At the Delhi jan sunwai, this was also linked to the nature of the issue in question (elementary education) and to the vulnerability of the victims who spoke in turn (children from marginalised communities). Above all, it was an outcome of the specific situation created: at the jan sunwai, unlike in daily life, interaction between poor and/or marginalised people and state functionaries was not dominated by the latter. Indeed, they had to explain, justify or apologise; they were more likely to find themselves at the receiving end of the jury’s derision. This inversion of places was also literal, with state functionaries occasionally speaking from the floor, below the dais where the jury was seated and the victims came to make their case.

Beyond emotion work, the work of emotions Jasper (2011: 13) writes that ‘many movements aim to transform feeling rules’ – a notion defined by Hochschild as ‘the social guidelines that direct how we want to try to feel’ in various situations (1979: 563). Even though the jan sunwai is not a movement, but a mode of mobilisation, much of its political efficacy lies in its ability to convert fear, grief or anger into confidence, hope and determination. Indeed, this emotional impact might well be the main outcome of most public hearings. While public hearings are often perceived as a forum for grievance redressal, the organisers I interviewed all 160

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expressed their dissatisfaction on that count; it seems that, on average, no more than 20 percent of cases progress any further consequent to a public hearing. As we have seen, the social issues raised at a jan sunwai are embodied in real people; their human incarnation in each case is the ‘victim’ who comes forward to testify. But the state, too, has a face. This personification is vital to the capacity of public hearings to sensitise their audience – not only the public and jury members present but also (through the media) wider public opinion. Traïni’s concept of ‘sensitising devices’ helps us understand the political efficacy of public hearings and the central role of emotions in this context. A sensitising device, as he explains, includes ‘the material support, the arrangement of objects, and the staging that activists deploy in order to inspire the affective reactions that predispose those who experience them to support the proposed cause’ (Traïni 2009: 13). My interviews and observations suggest that public hearings are organised with a view to generating emotional states that induce people to ‘topple into mobilisation’ (Boltanski 2007: 69). Given that a jan sunwai will sensitise different categories of participants in different ways and with different objectives, it is a ‘doubleedged’ sensitising device. ‘Victims’ (in this case, the people of Trilokpuri and Kalyanpuri) and the larger community of aggrieved persons (parents living in poor neighbourhoods in general) are clearly an important target. From their perspective, the public hearing effects a ‘de-singularisation of cases’ or what the sociologist Luc Boltanski refers to as ‘the condition of politicisation’ (Paperman 2008).14 By connecting one person’s case to all the other cases presented that day, the public hearing (i) highlights the systemic nature of the problem, (ii) shows that collective action is required (over and above individual court cases) and (iii) denounces the public authorities concerned for having failed to deliver.15 For local residents, ‘toppling into mobilisation’ might take the form of joining the facilitating organisation. Indeed, for the jan sunwai organisers, what is at stake at every public hearing is their credibility and reputation. That the state subsequently takes some measure of action – even if it is relatively minor – goes a long way towards strengthening the legitimacy of facilitating organisations as mobilising structures. Somewhat counterintuitively, the jury may be another target of the jan sunwai. Where jury members are concerned, my observations suggest that public hearings deliberately effect what I would call a ‘re-singularisation’ (to paraphrase Boltanski) of cases that is not intended to politicise as much as to re-mobilise. In a country such as India, beleaguered by a vast population, sharp socioeconomic disparities and a media that tends to underreport issues affecting the poor, the elite’s indifference – even obliviousness – is a critical factor in public apathy towards problems such as malnutrition and lack of access to healthcare and education. Public hearings, by putting a face to these problems, deprive them of their abstract quality and make them far 161

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more difficult to ignore. Jury members are often influential people who agree to assume this role because they are sympathetic to the cause being defended by the public hearing. On D-day, listening to an interminable succession of harrowing stories produces (or reproduces) the ‘moral shock’ (Jasper 1999) needed to revive their lobbying capacity.16 Indeed, people expect a great deal of jury members and their ability to convey the need for action at a general level to those higher decision making circles to which they have access. In this sense, the public hearing uses emotions as a lobbying tool.17 Speaking to me about the numerous jan sunwais in which she had participated, a CSO activist said that many things happen in this place: some are visible, some are invisible. . . . The satisfaction that [people] get from raising [their] voice, airing [their] grievance . . . is not visible, but . . . is so important [because] it gives a sort of courage, of confidence, especially to women. (interview with the author, 22 February 2014, New Delhi) She underscores what arguably constitutes the main political significance of the jan sunwai – its capacity to evoke in the audience emotions (such as courage and confidence) that are essential to claiming one’s rights. In this sense, the jan sunwai is a form of collective action that gives meaning to democratic rights such as the right to information, to work and to education. Its dramaturgy gives the abstract notion of ‘rights’ a tangible, emotional meaning. The jan sunwai, therefore, provides what Sircar (2012: 570) calls ‘an understanding of rights as embodied practices of resistance’. In so doing, it gives perceptible form to the idea of citizenship – an idea that, too often, remains a remote abstraction for the Indian poor. If citizenship is understood not only as a status but also as a set of practices, then it is likely that such practices will be associated with distinct feeling rules. To feel entitled to one’s rights and worthy of consideration by the state’s agents, to feel that one’s anger is justified when these rights are denied, are essential to a subjective understanding of one’s citizenship. In other words, these are elements of the feeling rules of citizenship – feeling rules asserted and nurtured by the jan sunwai through its powerful emotion work. Of course, the limitations inherent in the available data make it impossible to prove that most of the local people participating in the jan sunwai under study emerged with new, let alone durable, emotions. The fact that it proved far more difficult to interview local citizens than activists has constrained me to centre the analysis on the latter’s emotion work, that is, on what they intended to achieve. However, in this case, two facts might be considered evidence that feelings were indeed transformed, and with tangible consequences. The first, which is what the organisers had hoped, is that

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parents felt themselves capable of taking on the school authorities. Thus, as one activist told me: For the first time, people felt the power of citizenship on that day. . . . Before that, parents [had] feared the [school] principal. They were scared to go to the school, [thinking] ‘we’re uneducated people; we can’t know how to speak to the principal.’ It’s like a myth. On the day of the jan sunwai, the barriers were broken and after the jan sunwai, lots of parents started going to the schools. (interview with the author, 24 December 2012, New Delhi) The second piece of evidence is more negative, but just as telling. After the jan sunwai, teachers’ unions complained about the treatment meted out to some of their members. In the backlash, the Delhi chief minister asked the NCPCR to refrain from humiliating teachers – given their role in the elections and her impending electoral campaign, she certainly did not want to take the risk of antagonising them (interview with the author, 4 November 2011, New Delhi). Yet if the capacity of the jan sunwai to transform feeling rules points to its subversive potential, a closer look at the public expression of emotions suggests that this subversive dimension is, in fact, limited. As I have mentioned, video recordings make it possible to observe – magnified several-fold – the public expression of emotions over the course of the day, allowing one to compare, for instance, the extent to which different categories of participants express their emotions and which emotions are being expressed. While not all emotions expressed in this context are necessarily controlled, some (pride, hope, compassion, anger, sadness) are more visible/audible than others (hate, shame), presumably because they are more legitimate. What emerges clearly is that some people consistently express their emotions more than others. Thus, at the Delhi jan sunwai, the audience tended to express its emotions collectively and the jury members, individually. The audience expressed its satisfaction at regular intervals by clapping and cheering loudly. By contrast, victims tended to remain impassive throughout their testimonies, even when state functionaries accused them of lying. As I have said, in the preparatory phase of the jan sunwai, victims are not encouraged to express their emotions: they are told to narrate their stories quickly and succinctly – which they often do blank-faced. The bureaucrats, teachers and principals generally maintained a calm, conciliatory tone, even when belittled by the jury. The jury members alone repeatedly expressed their indignation, outrage or satisfaction loudly and articulately. Their interpolations highlight the idea of the jan sunwai as a ‘moral arena’ (Fischer 2012: 692) – the site of a confrontation between competing values that are expressed, among other means, through moral emotions such as, precisely, indignation

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(i.e. accusing or righteous anger),18 outrage (i.e. righteous anger) and satisfaction (i.e. righteous joy). According to William Reddy, an historian of emotions, ‘emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power’ (1997: 335). A correlated assumption is that the expression of emotions tells us who really exercises this power. At the Delhi jan sunwai, it was the jury that erupted in anger or indignation at regular intervals – unlike the state functionaries, who might be rude to the victims, but whose position forbade them from expressing anger or resentment, and unlike the victims, who had been advised to remain calm and brief. What this indicates is that the jury dominated the proceedings. Its dominance pertained to (i) its role in the discussions; (ii) the social class to which its members belonged – all of whom were highly educated and had prestigious professions and (iii) in this case, their status – the fact that four jury members were affiliated with state institutions made them de facto state representatives. There is, therefore, a limit to the inversion of places effected by the dramaturgy of the jan sunwai. The unequal distribution of emotional control I observed hints at the fact that the bureaucrats and jury members respectively represent two faces of the state: the ‘bad’ face of incompetent, prejudiced and corrupt bābūs [bureaucrats] and the ‘good’ face of enlightened, benevolent and morally righteous senior officers. Even as it exposes and criticises the former, the jan sunwai also highlights the ‘good’ face of the state and reinforces the prestige of ‘eminent persons’.

What emotions do and what they say The jan sunwai directly addresses a fundamental problem of Indian democracy, namely, the poor implementation of laws. Observers know very well that the Indian state has a Janus face: its laws and policies are among the most progressive in the world, but when it comes to implementing these, the state is often corrupt, complicit with the powerful and apt to abuse the weak. In this context, the jan sunwai attempts to bridge the enormous gap between policies on paper and their implementation on the ground – not through technocratic ways, but through an innovative participatory procedure that is halfway between the community meeting and the court hearing. What, then, are the outcomes of this procedure? This is the difficult, but essential, question that Williams (2000) raises: can the procedures of deliberative (and participative) democracy – often characterised by their disconnection from decision making – go beyond the status quo? With regard to the jan sunwai, analysing the public expression of emotions can help answer at least part of this question. Indeed, my analysis suggests that the jan sunwai is a participatory dispositive whose transformative potential lies in the emotional dynamics that characterise it. Such emotional dynamics result

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both from the management of emotions by skilled mobilisation entrepreneurs and from the less controlled work of emotions. Accordingly, this chapter builds on two distinct, but overlapping and complementary, approaches to the study of emotions. The first is an instrumentalist-functionalist approach that examines what emotions do and how they are made to do it. This involves, on the one hand, looking at the numerous ways in which emotions are evoked, controlled and directed to achieve a specific outcome – here, the politicisation or mobilisation of jan sunwai participants. The focus is then on what Blom and Tawa LamaRewal call ‘mobilised emotions’ (this volume). On the other hand, this first approach also looks at what emotions do in a process or movement, and whether they do so at the behest of mobilisation entrepreneurs or without them being aware of it. Here the focus is on ‘mobilising emotions’. The second approach is more deductive: it sees emotions as symptoms that indicate something beyond themselves; it looks at what emotions say about a given situation. This approach is particularly useful for political analysis if we consider emotions as a ‘sign of power relationships’ (Déchaux 2015). Combining these two approaches thus allows us understand the political efficacy of the jan sunwai, its originality as well as its limitations.

Notes * I am deeply grateful to Amélie Blom, Martin Aranguren, Amita Baviskar, Nandini Sundar, and Margrit Pernau for their comments on successive drafts of this chapter. 1 For a comparison between jan sunwais and truth commissions, see Tawa LamaRewal (2018). 2 The notion of ‘dispositive’, drawing on Foucault’s work, can be defined as a set of heterogeneous elements, both material and immaterial (discourse, images, rules, architecture. . .) that have a specific objective. The literature on participatory democracy pays much attention to the various dispositives (such as, in the Indian context, ward committees or gram sabhas) through which participation is supposed to take place. 3 The notion of jan sunwai has been part of the Indian lexicon of collective action for a long time, but its meaning was quite vague until the MKSS gave it a new meaning and relevance in the early 1990s. 4 On the use of the jan sunwai by the MKSS, see Goetz and Jenkins (2005); and Mander and Joshi (1999). 5 The phrase ‘eminent persons’ was common among the activists and jan sunwai lay participants I interviewed. 6 I am much indebted to the members of JOSH (the organisation that facilitated this public hearing) for sharing with me their views as well as the organisation’s resources, including documents and video footage. 7 For a critical description of the RTE by Vinod Raina, who played a key role in drafting the Act (and in the jan sunwai under study), see Raina (2009). 8 JOSH (literally, ‘enthusiasm’ in Hindi) was established in 2006 as a right-toinformation campaign. Its objective was to create awareness of the Right to

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Information Act 2005 among young people in marginalised areas, showing them how they might take advantage of the rights it conferred. 9 According to one of the organisers, the turnout (about 1,200 people) was far higher than they had expected (interview with the author, 4 November 2011, New Delhi). 10 Shanta Sinha was the NCPCR’s first chairperson when the institution was set up in 2007. 11 Established in 2004, the NAC was rather like a ‘council of the wise’ comprising senior bureaucrats, academics and activists. Its mandate was to monitor the implementation of the National Common Minimum Programme of the United Progressive Alliance – a coalition led by the Indian National Congress. Although the NAC was denounced by the opposition as being extra-constitutional and had no legal power, the fact that it was chaired by Sonia Gandhi, the highly influential president of the Congress party, gave it considerable weight in policymaking. Indeed, a series of important welfare policies – drawing on a human rights framework – stemmed from work carried out by the NAC. 12 I was able to (directly) observe three public hearings in Delhi (in 2004, 2009 and 2014), I collected and analysed the video recordings of seven others (organised in Delhi, Rajasthan and Karnataka) and I conducted 33 semi-directed interviews with organisers (members of CSOs, political parties or trade unions) and other participants in public hearings. 13 On the essential hybridity of public hearings, see Tawa Lama-Rewal (2015). 14 Paperman (2008: 6) cites Boltanski: ‘ . . . la désingularisation des cas, condition de la politisation’. 15 ‘Beyond individual cases, [a] public hearing is a tool, a vehicle, to show the outside world, to show the state forces that are supposed to implement this [Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities)] Act that they have failed’ (Diwakar 2006). 16 More work is needed to assess whether the jan sunwai also functions as a sensitising device vis-à-vis bureaucrats; this is certainly one of the objectives as far as the organisers are concerned. As an activist (who often serves as a jan sunwai jury member) put it: ‘The problem with middle-class activism is the way you cushion the government and other middle-class functionaries. . . . Government officials don’t come face to face with the horror, the anger, the frustration. So that’s part of the jan sunwai: to bring things face to face’ (interview with the author, 6 March 2012, New Delhi). 17 The presence of the media is crucial to the success of a public hearing, which its organisers measure partly by the number and visibility of press reports that follow. Some public hearings (organised in collaboration with a state agency) conclude with a press conference at which the jury members give their views and recommendations to journalists. 18 I have borrowed this definition from Boltanski (2007).

References Boltanski, Luc. 2007. La souffrance à distance. Paris: Gallimard. Cole, Catherine M. 2007. ‘Performance, Transitional Justice, and the Law: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Theatre Journal, 59(2): 167–87. Déchaux, Jean-Hugues. 2015. ‘Intégrer l’émotion à l’analyse sociologique de l’action’, Terrains/Théories, no. 2. doi:10.4000/teth.208.

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Diwakar, Paul. 2006. ‘Public Hearing on Atrocities Against Dalits’. Unpublished manuscript, Bangalore. Fischer, Nicolas. 2012. ‘Protéger les mineurs, contrôler les migrants’, Revue française de sociologie, 53(4): 689–717. Goetz, Anne Marie and Rob Jenkins. 2005. Reinventing Accountability: Making Democracy Work for the Poor. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 85(3): 551–75. Jasper, James M. 1999. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2011. ‘Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research’, Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 285–303. Mander, Harsh and Abha Joshi. 1999. ‘The Movement for Right to Information in India: People’s Power for the Control of Corruption’. Paper presented at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative Conference on Pan-Commonwealth Advocacy, Harare, 21–24 January, www.humanrightsinitiative.org/programs/ai/rti/ india/articles/The%20Movement%20for%20RTI%20in%20India.pdf (accessed on 12 July 2017). Paperman, Patricia. 2008. ‘Pour un monde sans pitié’, Revue du MAUSS, 32(2): 267–83. Quéré, Louis. 2013. Note sur la conception pragmatiste des émotions. CEMS Occasional Papers, No. 11. Paris: Institut Marcel Mauss. Raina, Vinod. 2009. ‘Right to Education’, Seminar, 593: 87–91. Reddy, William M. 1997. ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, Current Anthropology, 38(3): 327–51. Sircar, Oishik. 2012. ‘Spectacles of Emancipation: Reading Rights Differently in India’s Legal Discourse’, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 49(3): 527–73. Tawa Lama-Rewal, Stéphanie. 2015. ‘Les audiences publiques en Inde: Mobilisation de la rue et enrôlement des experts’, in Christophe Traïni (ed), Emotions et expertises: Les modes de coordination des actions collectives, pp. 115–25. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. ———. 2018. ‘Public Hearings as Social Performance: Addressing the Courts, Restoring Citizenship’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 17, http:// journals.openedition.org/samaj/4413. Traïni, Christophe, ed. 2009. Émotions . . . Mobilisation! Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Williams, Melissa S. 2000. ‘The Uneasy Alliance of Group Representation and Deliberative Democracy’, in Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (eds), Citizenship in Diverse Societies, pp. 124–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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9 THE DEPLOYMENT OF RESENTMENT IN COUNTERINSURGENCY The case of Chhattisgarh Nandini Sundar

This chapter engages with the cultivation, enactment and enablement of resentment and how it is mobilised in counterinsurgency. The context is the Indian government’s war on Maoist guerrillas belonging to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI-M) in the state of Chhattisgarh in Central India (see Sundar 2016a). Resentment includes several other emotions in varying degrees or combinations: indignation, anger, anxiety, fear, hate, shame, disgust, bitterness, rancour, frustration, envy, and a sense of victimisation as well as injustice. Resentment may develop in response to real or imagined injury and can be seen as a positive or negative emotion. On the one hand, as Barbalet writes in his discussion of T. H. Marshall’s analysis of ‘class resentment’, ‘indignation against inequality’ is necessary for people to come together and seek changes in the class structure (1992: 153). Barbalet defines resentment as ‘a feeling experienced by social actors when an external agent denies them opportunities or valued resources (including status) that otherwise would be available to them’ (1992: 153). On the other hand, class resentment is not a ‘one-way feeling’, that is, ‘there is no reason why the superordinate class should not feel resentment against the opportunities it forgoes through action by the subordinate class’ (1992: 155). Several scholars have explored the distinction between the French word ‘ressentiment’ and the English ‘resentment’, taking as their point of departure Jean Améry’s Beyond Guilt and Atonement (see Fassin 2013; Brudholm 2006). Améry looks at ressentiment as a refusal to forget on the part of the victim. This aims to keep alive the responsibility and accountability of the perpetrator, such that victim and perpetrator remain part of the same moral community (Brudholm 2006). While this is related closely to Nietzsche’s 168

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idea of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1989), it does not involve the desire for vengeance, but simply a slow smouldering of memory. To describe resentment as a negative emotion demeans those already victimised because it implies a refusal to engage with the cause of their bitterness (see also Campbell 1994). In his insightful essay, Fassin locates the difference between ressentiment and resentment in two kinds of ‘anthropological conditions’ that go beyond mere ‘affect’ (2013: 256). The emotion is conditioned and interpreted as symptomatic of a structural position. Ressentiment is exemplified by South African survivors of Apartheid, whose desire to keep the ideal of justice alive is, at once, impotent but powerful. Resentment is typified by the French police in the context of the 2005 riots, such that their animosity towards immigrants and minorities enables the ‘dirty work’ of policing (2013: 257). The police portray themselves as victims of public hostility, thereby displacing their responsibility for carrying out the state’s repressive activities onto those far less powerful. This chapter does not, however, deal with the legitimate expression of ressentiment or resentment in Barbalet’s first sense, although the Adivasis who have joined the Maoists’ armed struggle against the state are clearly inspired by a sense of injustice. They refuse to accept the state’s claims of ‘development’ and ‘welfare’ against their reality of decades of impoverishment, repression, displacement, and the theft of their resources. Instead, I look at two different instantiations of resentment, both of which have fuelled the Indian state’s counterinsurgency war. The two types of resentment are explored ethnographically through two different actors in the war against the Maoists: (i) urban or semi-urban non-tribal immigrants involved in vigilante activities and (ii) young (generally male) Adivasis conscripted as irregular members of the police or special police officers (SPOs), many of whom are former Maoist guerrillas.1 Both kinds of actors occupy different structural positions and have different histories and relations with each other as well as with the Maoists, each of which inflects their resentment in particular ways. The immigrants are motivated by the resentment of the dominant, while the Adivasis are conscripted foot-soldiers anxious, frustrated and guilty at being placed in a position in which they are forced to fight against their own people.

The resentment of the dominant Much of the recent literature on resentment has focused on the resentment of dominant classes that project their anxiety about changing economic and political advantages onto those they see as unwarranted competitors. For instance, sociologists have sought to measure white ‘racial resentment’ towards affirmative action for blacks in the US (see, for example, Dudas 2005; Feldman and Huddy 2005; Wilson and Davis 2011). As Kinder and 169

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Sanders (1996) observe, racial resentment differs from older forms of racism in that it is not founded on ideas of biological difference, but on the allegedly undeserving nature of African-Americans who feel entitled under affirmative action programs to education or employment without the commensurate effort put in by white Americans (quoted in Wilson and Davis 2011: 119). In India, a similar ‘caste resentment’ is evident in upper-caste objections to reservations or quotas2 for lower castes – the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Classes and Scheduled Tribes (STs) – on the grounds that ‘merit’ is being sacrificed at the altar of some spurious notion of ‘social justice’. At the same time, dominant landed castes such as the Patels of Gujarat or the Jats of Haryana have resorted to violent action to have themselves classed as ‘backward castes’ eligible for a stake in the reservation system. Equally, there is a sense of ‘communal resentment’ in the allegations of ‘minority appeasement’. The constitutional protections that India’s minorities enjoy are seen not as rights, but as an unnecessary concession. The selfassertion of subaltern groups is matched by corresponding aggression on the part of dominant groups fearful of losing their power, whether it is in the shape of gendered control over women or caste and communal supremacy. Dudas (2005: 723) argues that racial resentment moves easily into assertions of a monopoly over nationalism: ‘The allegation of special rights propels and amplifies activists’ resentment, transforming it from one that is based primarily upon competing self-interests into one that is concerned with values, morality and national identity’. In the US, therefore, conservative counter-mobilisation claims authorisation by reference to core American values and tradition. Much the same logic appears to be playing out in India, which in recent years has become a veritable ‘republic of resentment’. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance came to power in June 2014, Indian society has been viscerally divided. This has taken the shape of assertions of Hindutva or Hindu chauvinist ideology imposing bans on what can be eaten, read, thought, or seen. Protests by groups opposing the diminution of liberal spaces have been met by rightwing counter-protests (see Zecchini, this volume). In the case of the CPI-M, a party that believes in armed struggle and which has been banned, the claim that it is ‘anti-national’ comes easily. This chapter looks at the relation between the Adivasis and dominant immigrant communities in Bastar in Chhattisgarh. The latter have made money on the trade in forest produce and mining, and illegally acquired indigenous land. They harbour a deep resentment against the Maoists for limiting the degree to which they can exploit the locals (see Sundar 2007, 2016a), but their argument is couched in the language of universal development – to which the Maoists are, ostensibly, an obstacle. The immigrants also speak in the name of ‘peace’ to which they oppose the ‘violence’ of armed struggle. But peace for them is only a codename for 170

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‘business as usual’ in which they can maximise profits at the expense of Adivasi wage labour. Not all those who participate in right-wing mobilisations necessarily belong to dominant groups. As Banning (2006: 85) argues, moments of economic crisis, peaks in resentment and attacks on critical thought are all connected, and this involves a fundamental displacement of anger onto groups that are more subordinate still. She observes that the cultural politics of resentment that currently circulates in the US is fundamentally premised on the displacement of the ability to speak about or act directly on the original injustice and in many cases the ability to know from where the injustice was derived and results in a shift of negatively loaded emotion to other human targets, often in lateral or subordinate positions. (Banning 2006: 71) Much of this holds true for subordinate groups such as the SCs and STs who are incited by upper castes to riot against Muslim communities, which are as poor and vulnerable (Shah 2002; Teltumbde 2005). When it comes to the Adivasis, the Hindu Right has also managed to deflect attention from Hindu traders and moneylenders and concentrate on Muslim traders instead (see Devy 2002). In the context of the state’s war against Maoists, this role is exemplified by the Adivasi SPOs or armed auxiliaries.

The sociopolitical context Cutting across central India from east to west is a large swathe of forested, mineral-rich land inhabited largely by indigenous peoples or Adivasis. At the heart of this lies Bastar division (carved into seven districts), a 39,114-square kilometre tract. The area was neglected by the government for many years, with few welfare schemes, schools or hospitals to speak of. Government intervention was primarily in the form of public sector mines that were used to extract iron ore for export to Japan – a major source of foreign exchange for India. Like other indigenous inhabited areas, Bastar has seen significant demographic changes over the last century, and especially in the last five decades, with a rapid increase in the population of non-tribal settlers, from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Punjab, and Andhra Pradesh. In addition to controlling the bureaucracy as well as trade, they have assumed a gradual hold over Adivasi land – aided by poorly implemented laws meant to protect these holdings – and come to dominate electoral politics. The nonAdivasis are concentrated in small urban clusters along the road, dominating the highways and pushing the Adivasis further into the forests. In the early 1980s, Maoist guerrillas from the neighbouring southern state of Andhra Pradesh entered Bastar and began rallying the villagers to defend 171

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their land and forest rights. As they slowly established a parallel state, the government’s physical presence receded from the villages to the highways and urban settlements. In 2005, the Indian government began concerted operations to bring the area back under state control. Its first step was to prop up a so-called ‘people’s movement’ known as the Salwa Judum – translated literally as ‘purification hunt’. The movement was organised by the police and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Its public face, however, was the Adivasi leader Mahendra Karma, in the opposition Congress Party. He mobilised his relatives and non-Adivasi supporters who went on to become Salwa Judum leaders. The police and Salwa Judum activists led punitive expeditions to villages that were considered Maoist strongholds. Between 2005 and 2007, at least 3,000 houses were burnt down and 500 villagers killed (see Sundar 2016a). Many of the Adivasi villagers working with the Maoists as village militia members or functionaries of the parallel government were forced to surrender and become SPOs – a euphemism for poorly paid frontline combatants charged with tracking down and killing former comrades. Others were recruited as SPOs on the pretext of being given a government job, not realising that their entanglement with the government’s counterinsurgency would leave them estranged from their fellow villagers. Unlike the Judum leaders, many of whom were non-Adivasi, the SPOs were mostly Adivasi or Dalit (SCs). SPOs were often bound in client relationships with the Judum leaders. For instance, many Dalit boys worked as assistants to traders buying produce. By 2009, the Salwa Judum had become a full-fledged police and paramilitary operation. Since then, the number of deaths, rapes and civilian arrests has escalated, quite apart from the casualties among security forces and Maoist cadres (see Sundar 2016a for a detailed account of the conflict).

Accessing resentment I lived in a village in south-central Bastar between 1991 and 1993. The central hamlet was dominated by immigrants from UP and Bihar who were engaged in petty businesses and trade in forest produce, while the surrounding villages were inhabited by Adivasis. This gave me a chance to observe the interaction between the two communities at length, as a neutral ethnographic observer, though the immigrants could never understand why I would choose to live with the Adivasis instead of with them (see Sundar 2007). Since 2005, I have been engaged in human rights work in the area and thus my interaction with members of the Salwa Judum has been in a more hostile context – in which I was reviled as a human rights activist who created trouble for them. I have also drawn on newspaper accounts over the same period, and text messages exchanged among a WhatsApp group of journalists and police officers for the period 2014–16. 172

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The resentment is visible in conversations with the Salwa Judum leaders and from their social media messages. Accessing other emotions, however, is more complicated since how the vigilante leaders present themselves is belied by what they do. For instance, in one conversation with ‘PV’, a Salwa Judum leader, in October 2010, he asked me to broker peace. A few months later, in March 2011, he was part of a vicious physical attack on a senior human rights activist, Swami Agnivesh. It is not clear whether his emotions and his objectives vis-à-vis the situation had changed or if he had simply adjusted his public face to whatever was most expedient at the time. In June 2010, I employed a research assistant, Sushant Panigrahi, to interview SPOs, since I had no easy access to them myself. He interviewed 42 SPOs, while I interviewed a few who had been deputed to ‘guard’ me to ensure I did not visit any villages or speak to anyone (see Sundar 2016a: 333–4). What these interviews revealed may not add up to a consistent and continuous emotion called ‘resentment’, but glimpses of some different elements that make up resentment – anger, anxiety, bitterness, and fear – were all evident. As Fassin (2013: 266) argues in response to Brudholm (2006), who questions how he can know experience, and as I describe in this chapter with respect to both the Salwa Judum leaders and SPOs, there are two types of political subjectivity, born of certain structural positions. Moreover, inasmuch as publicly motivating emotions are not private, but located at the level of social formations such as class (see Barbalet 1992), one can infer the social emotion from its effects. This is not to say that all members of a particular class share the same emotions (indeed, the SPOs and Maoists came from the same social group), but simply to say that the propensity to certain emotions has structural roots and is not simply located in the individual psyche. This is evident in the difference between the Maoists and the SPOs, and between the SPOs and the vigilante leaders.

Vigilante leaders In his magisterial exploration of the Victorian psyche, The Cultivation of Hatred, the historian Peter Gay describes three dominant ‘alibis’ that enabled aggression: (i) the Darwinian idea that competition was fundamental to social life; (ii) the construction of the Other, based on pseudo-scientific theories of race as well as regular prejudice and (iii) the cult of ‘manliness’ (Gay 1993: 35). The ‘alibis’ that enable and feed the resentment of the immigrant community in Bastar towards Adivasis in general and the Maoists in particular comprise the following elements: (i) Religious and linguistic chauvinism: The immigrants believe firmly in their own civilisational superiority over the Adivasis, who practice a form of animism (rather than one of the country’s major religions) 173

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(ii)

(iii)

(iv)

(v)

and speak their own languages (not a dominant state language such as Hindi). The poverty of the Adivasis: Although this stems primarily from over a century of colonial and postcolonial resource appropriation and growing landlessness, the Adivasis’ poverty is turned against them to justify their displacement for more productive uses of land, such as commercial agriculture, real estate or mining. Adivasis, with their intimate relationship with the forest and swidden cultivation, are seen as backward and incapable of fully utilising the advantages of the area. Between 1947 and 2000, approximately one in four Adivasis nationally has been displaced to make way for dams, industries, mines, and similar projects (see Sundar 2016b: 9–10 for statistics on Adivasi poverty and displacement). The idea of a ‘mainstream’: Adivasis are seen as an anomaly that needs to be ‘mainstreamed’ – not only in terms of language and religion, but even more so by inculcating in them ‘mainstream’ consumer aspirations and locating them within the capitalist structure, even if it is as labourers. State protection: From the immigrants’ perspective, the laws preventing the alienation of Adivasi land are inimical to their own freedom of movement and right to practice their profession wherever they please. These laws are also intended to prevent the rise of a market for land in the area. In practice, the non-Adivasi bureaucracy, which is ostensibly responsible for protecting Adivasi land, helps the immigrants circumvent such ‘obstacles’. Affirmative action: Although very few Adivasis make it to the top rungs of the bureaucracy, and the state of education is so dismal that even most lower-level jobs go to outsiders, the immigrants share the general upper-caste belief that Adivasis are ‘indulged’ by the state while their own hard work is undervalued. This belief in their own industriousness is common across settler populations for whom the land inhabited by indigenous people is a tabula rasa. That immigrant settlers have made supernormal profits in the process is attributed to their enterprise, hard work and courage in settling a frontier zone – not to their underhanded dealings in forging land records or underpaying for local produce and labour.

Over the years, the children of these immigrants have grown to consider themselves even more ‘indigenous’ than the Adivasis. It is this constituency that is especially vocal in their demands for a railway line, mining and industrialisation, which they think will bring them jobs. As a class, the immigrants resent the Maoists whom they see as holding up ‘development’ by attacking roads, transformers and pipelines to prevent mining companies and other industries from entering the area. The immigrants have no 174

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patience with the Maoist vision of development, which promotes irrigation, sustainable agriculture and the collection of forest produce in a manner that improves the existing livelihoods of the Adivasis rather than displacing them. Another reason for resenting the Maoists is that they have checked the extent to which the immigrants can exploit the Adivasis. Some immigrant traders, who later became Judum leaders, had worked for the Maoists – driven by the need for adventure in small-town life as well as by compulsion, given that the Maoists could prevent them from plying their trade in the interior villages. Relations between the Maoists and the traders have always been marked by mutual distrust and dependence – a combination of animosity and compliance. This was enhanced when the traders found themselves having to obey young Adivasi Maoist commanders – people they had always looked down on. At least the Maoist leadership that came from Andhra Pradesh consisted of non-tribals.3 As state-sponsored vigilantes, the Salwa Judum has enabled the everyday resentment against the constraints imposed by the Maoists to translate into violence and unchecked greed. One example is that of ‘RBK’, originally from UP, who became the Salwa Judum leader in Dornapal. He is alleged to have worked as a courier for the Maoists, who threatened to punish him for having extorted money in their name. Seeking police protection, he was assigned an armed guard, but this stopped when the government changed. Subsequently, ‘RBK’ procured a rifle, became the Judum leader in Dornapal and accompanied Congress leader Mahendra Karma on his village-burning sprees. As camp leader, he made considerable sums of money and built himself a large house outside Bastar once it became too dangerous to continue living in Dornapal. This fear is not unfounded: many of the Judum leaders were killed; Mahendra Karma was killed in 2013. Not all Judum leaders are non-tribals. Mahendra Karma, for instance, started political life as a Communist leader fighting for Adivasi rights, but later found he could make more money working with mainstream parties. He was comfortable arguing that tribal life was ‘backward’ and should be modernised through industry. In this sense, the Adivasi Judum leaders are not very different from their non-Adivasi counterparts. They, too, resent the Maoists for redistributing land that had belonged to powerful landed Adivasi families and for checking corruption among Adivasi sarpanches [elected leaders] in the villages. Once the first phase (2005–07) of burning and looting villages had passed, the average day of a Judum leader involved driving through the area in an SUV (bought with money siphoned off from relief supplies meant for displaced villagers) and striking contract deals with government officers. The Judum leaders would buy expensive equipment such as tippers and tractors and rent these out to the government. A sub-inspector in Konta told me that the area’s rival gangs – one headed by ‘PV’ and the other by ‘PS’ – were constantly vying for government contracts, each trying to pit the police against 175

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the other (interview with the author, 2010). In sum, the Judum offered those with a criminal past the chance to turn their resentment against the Maoists into a profitable business. Indeed, this resentment against the Maoists eventually became a way of life, when any attempt to stop the Judum leaders from making money, including by the state, became an occasion for anger and even violence. This was exacerbated by clientelist politics, in which a leader or patron is essential for both developing group feelings and accessing spoils, as I shall illustrate in the section on in-groups.

Police and vigilante relations and claims of victimisation Describing police resentment towards immigrants and minorities in France, Fassin writes that ‘the police are all the more aggressive since they view their public as hostile and through their aggressiveness render the public hostile’ (2013: 257). He goes on to argue that this perceived public hostility creates an ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ mentality. However, in the context of Bastar, when patronising vigilantes, the police necessarily extend their in-group to civilians – selected journalists, vigilante leaders and others. The police and security forces in Bastar claim that they are the real victims of this counterinsurgency, that nobody is bothered about their human rights and that they are subjected to Maoist slander.4 The perceived victimisation of the police and that of urban immigrants meld into one powerful emotion in which the primary targets become ‘human rights activists’ and, to a lesser extent, the courts and media. The human rights activists are accused of bias – of siding with the Maoists or terrorists – and are easy whipping boys when the latter cannot be caught. For the traders and others who comprise the base of the Judum, displays of their proximity to the local administration and police are a status symbol. A WhatsApp (all-male) group consisting of journalists and police officers provides an interesting glimpse of how the in-group is bound by camaraderie as well as by aggression directed at outsiders. From 2014 to 2017, SRP Kalluri, an officer notorious for fake surrenders, fake encounters and sexual violence on his watch, circulated images of corpses on the group’s message thread, claiming they were of Maoist cadres killed in police encounters. Since the bodies were dressed in civilian clothes and appeared to be carrying rudimentary weapons, it was highly likely that these were extrajudicial killings of ordinary villagers. Despite the graphic images, most journalists on the message thread responded with emoticons – a pair of hands clapping, a thumbs-up – even though some have acknowledged privately in conversations with me that Kalluri’s actions are illegal and coercive. Apart from police press releases and occasional messages threatening any journalist who dares disagree, the message thread consists largely of birthday and wedding anniversary greetings, stories of foreign trips, pictures of deities, and misogynist jokes. The group’s members like to think of themselves as 176

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‘good’ people – willing to donate blood or organise extravagant weddings for Maoist couples who have surrendered to the police – but allowing nothing that challenges their privilege. What turns their everyday resentment against the Maoists into violence, however, is police incitement and the knowledge of their own impunity. Judum leaders provide the police with plausible deniability, not just when targeting villagers but also when the police want human rights activists brought to heel. In 2010, a Salwa Judum leader, ‘SM’, under the banner of the newly formed vigilante group Ma Danteshwari Swabhiman Manch, took to heckling well-known social activists in Dantewada.5 Inebriated members of his gang pelted them with garbage and rotten eggs before being escorted away quietly by the police. In 2011, ‘PV’ and others assaulted celebrated activist Swami Agnivesh in Dornapal, where he was delivering relief goods to villagers whose homes had been burnt down by SPOs.6 In 2015/16, the Samajik Ekta Manch, another vigilante organisation floated by the police – and consisting of Salwa Judum leaders, lawyers and traders – attacked journalists and human rights activists in a series of incidents and were instrumental in having a group of human rights lawyers evicted from the area. In October 2016, the police became vigilantes themselves, burning effigies of human rights activists (including mine); in November 2016, they filed false murder charges against me and others.7 The vigilantes also give the police an alibi, allowing them to claim they have public support for their illegal actions. Thus, when veteran BBC journalist Alok Putul tried to contact Inspector General Kalluri to ask for his version of the situation in Bastar, the latter’s rejoinder was that he had no time to waste on ‘biased and partisan journalists’, the ‘patriotic and nationalist sections of journalists were fully with him and he would rather spend his time with them’ (Putul 2016). Both the police and the vigilantes have tried to build up resentment against Telugu-speaking Maoists or metropolitan activists on the grounds that they are ‘outsiders’. This conveniently ignores the fact that many of the Judum leaders and all the police officials are from other states. That the local people speak primarily Gondi and not Hindi, and that the Maoists have learnt and developed Gondi, are not seen as germane to the issue because Gondi is an ‘uncivilised’ language not worth speaking or learning. Even as the police play the ‘insider’ card, their relationship with local Adivasis employed as SPOs remains a patronising one.

SPOs and the violence of hierarchy I desperately want to go home. My brother and uncle are still in the village. The Maoists convinced me not to become an SPO. Now I am terrified they will kill me if I return. I regret joining this job, but now I can’t leave it. (author’s interview with an SPO, 2010)

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Young villagers who enlisted as SPOs are often the most brutal members of the forces. They are at the bottom of the police hierarchy, looked down on by security forces and by the police, who resent having to fight this war. In the case of these SPOs, their resentment stems not from the loss of privilege as is the case with Judum leaders, but instead from a sense of helplessness vis-à-vis their position in the police pecking order and the unlikeliness of defeating the Maoists. They are also made to feel inferior to other police and security officers. What they find hardest to process is their guilt at having betrayed former comrades and their fear of reprisals, given the Maoists’ military prowess. Both emotions feed the SPOs’ resentment towards the latter. Their attitude towards the Maoists is best understood as what Freud describes as ‘projection’, where ‘the search for villains is bound to prove an agreeable diversion from self-reproach’ (Gay 1993: 70). In 2005, when the police distributed job application forms among the villages of Bastar, many young people assumed that working as an SPO would help them obtain permanent police jobs. To the contrary, what the police were looking for were not regular recruits, but cheap, dispensable foot-soldiers, particularly Maoist defectors who could identify former comrades, track their movements and furnish details of their civilian contacts. As the Union Home Ministry wrote to the Supreme Court in 2011, the SPOs were to be the state’s version of the Maoist village militias, given that ‘the SPOs are also locally recruited and are familiar with the terrain, dialect and the local population’.8 To this logic, the Chhattisgarh government added the qualification that they should be ‘victims of Naxal violence’,9 thus enveloping vengeance and betrayal within the basic structures of policing. In fact, personal resentment is the worst possible qualification for a police officer, especially in situations of armed conflict. Some SPOs were unsavoury characters who had been reprimanded by the Maoists for their actions and, therefore, felt they had good reason to join the police. In December 2011, villagers told me that ‘BM’ of Matpalli (all village names changed), for instance, had stolen a bull and molested a girl before signing up as an SPO. Several others, especially women, had joined the police because they needed a job. Fifteen-year-old ‘SN’ from Gorpalli told me in October 2010 that he had decided to become an SPO after failing the tenth grade – there was no other work available in the Judum camp to which the villagers had been forcibly brought. In hindsight, almost everyone said they would never have chosen to become SPOs had there been an alternative, especially knowing it meant one could never return home. Only a couple of SPOs reported having joined the police because the Maoists had redistributed their family land in the village (interviews with the author, June 2010). For most SPOs, leaving the police was not an option: most of them were sure they would be killed by the Maoists if they returned home. After interviewing seven SPOs stationed at the Kasoli camp in June 2010, my research 178

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assistant Sushant Panigrahi noted that six of them said they were being ‘used’ by the government, adding that their lives have always been unsafe. Earlier they used to work with Maoists, and were unsafe and fearful of getting killed by government and now when they are working for the government they are living with fear of getting killed by Maoists. They never had a feeling of safety and protection. (Fieldnotes). Many SPOs were members of the sangham or Maoist parallel government, and had been forced to surrender after the Judum attacked their village. They were then conscripted as SPOs or gopniya sainiks – literally, ‘secret soldiers’ or police informants. ‘VR’ from Jagarmetla, one of the SPOs deputed to guard me, said that the Maoists had frequented his school. Some years ago, he was arrested while carrying oil and soap for them. After surrendering, he became a ‘special informant’, spending his nights at the police station (interview with the author, October 2010, Sukma). Although the police have indoctrinated such people with a deep loathing for the Maoists, having worked closely with the latter means that the SPOs’ anger is mixed with admiration for the Maoists’ military prowess, and fear for their own lives. Several SPOs told Sushant Panigrahi that defeating the Maoists would take a very long time and involve considerable bloodshed: The whole situation is all about politics. Government is responsible for this situation and Maoists are getting stronger. I doubt that Naxalism can be finished. (interview with ‘SN’, June 2010, Kasoli camp) There will be great bloodshed and only Adivasis will have to pay a heavy price for the coming future. . . . It is all about dirty politics, if government is honestly ready to do something else, it’s not a big thing, but our government doesn’t want this, it will push us into more vulnerability instead. (interview with ‘BU’, June 2010, Kasoli camp) For many young, inexperienced SPOs, their jobs are not only their livelihoods but also a means of becoming ‘modern’, acquiring consumer goods and learning Hindi. Some SPOs, with personal loyalties to local Salwa Judum leaders, have formed gangs with earmarked territories, but their living conditions remain poor. An SPO living in government accommodation said that his room had no ventilation, no source of water and barely any electricity, even though there was an electricity connection (interview by Sushant Panigrahi, June 2010, Kasoli camp). They all said they missed their 179

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villages terribly, especially because they knew they could not return. Unlike the central forces who had access to some degree of entertainment, most SPOs had nothing better to do than spend any free time with their peers – in this case, other SPOs. By 2010, SPO wages had doubled from INR1,500 (in 2005) to INR3,000, but many of the SPOs we interviewed said they received only INR2,150, which was barely enough to live on (interviews by Sushant Panigrahi, June 2010; interviews by the author, October 2010). Most SPOs sent money home to their parents. They also complained that, while they were supposed to work only 4 to 6 hours a day, in practice this could stretch to a 16–18hour day, with no fixed working hours. Their tasks included accompanying the police on patrol, combing operations in villages (which they also carried out on their own), road access duty, forest watch duty, and guarding the Judum camps. Unlike women Maoists, many of whom had joined the movement to escape domestic drudgery, the lives of the few women SPOs we encountered were defined by patriarchy. They worked from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., doing the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officers’ laundry, cleaning the police station or barracks and helping in the canteen. They almost never went on patrol. Some women were married to other SPOs or local constables. They were also vulnerable to sexual abuse by the police. Most SPOs lived in fear of being fired or having their salary deducted if found absent; they were always on call. All cases of dismissal or suspension had to do with the dereliction of minor duties. As one SPO, ‘BSB’, said to Sushat Panigrahi: I have been on many operations like Operation Green Hunt, village searching, camp patrolling, etc. and we are working more than any other force in Chhattisgarh. We are paying a heavy price but getting the lowest salary. Our salary doesn’t even meet our basic needs. Government doesn’t even provide any kind of basic infrastructure and entertainment for us. (June 2010, Gangalur camp) Moreover, the casualty rate among SPOs was disproportionately higher than among the security forces. Although the compensation amount for SPOs who had been killed on duty rose from INR100,000 in 2004 to INR500,000 in 2007, it was negligible compared to the pension a regular police officer’s family would receive. Correspondingly, the attrition rate among SPOs was high. In June 2010, ‘VM’, a Salwa Judum leader in Bhairamgarh, told Sushant that, of the 865 sangham members who had surrendered and become SPOs, 205 had returned home and rejoined the Maoists. Indeed, loyalties in this war have always been in question – for a long time, the government

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was reluctant to arm the SPOs for fear these guns would find their way back to the Maoists. Many SPOs were deeply ambivalent about their role. ‘BK’, one of the SPOs Sushant interviewed in June 2010 in the Gangalur camp, said – without any apparent undertone of guilt – that he was ‘proud of shooting a dozen Maoists’ (he had been assigned an Indian Small Arms System rifle with 100 rounds). Nonetheless, he added sullenly, ‘CRPF men are not good. They treat us like animals and inferior human beings’. ‘BSB’, another SPO, said that, ‘although we don’t interact too much with CRPF, they don’t behave properly and blame us for the kind of life they have been going through’ (June 2010, Gangalur camp). Of the 42 SPOs Sushant interviewed, 32 said they were unhappy about being treated as lesser citizens by the CRPF. Even those who claimed to have better relations with the security forces noted that the latter were authorised to assign extra duties to SPOs or suspend them for minor infringements. While CRPF officers from other parts of India detested the Adivasis who had joined the Naxalites, describing them as savage and irrational, they also looked down on the Adivasi SPOs under them, whom they described as being ‘poor material’. Initially at least, killing former comrades was difficult. ‘KR’, an SPO who was part of a Naga patrol that had caught two Naxal women in uniform, told me rather dejectedly that they didn’t see us – we hid and shot them. They were both local girls, one from Ipaguda and one from Bodaras. I recognise[d] them because when I was studying, they would visit our school and would tell me to join them after I had finished. (Fieldnotes, October 2010, Sukma) The higher up an SPO had been in the Maoist hierarchy, the more aggressive he was likely to become. One example is that of ‘BH’ of Jonpalli, now an SPO notorious around Konta for harassing villagers. According to the Jonpalli villagers, he once commanded a squad and was given INR15,000 by the Maoists to procure goods from Andhra Pradesh. Instead, he went to the Judum camp in Dornapal, surrendered and became an SPO. In 2006, he led security forces to a neighbouring village and killed two squad members. By 2013, ‘BH’ was well ensconced as the local SPO don, known for extorting money from the villagers. Over time, it became easier – and almost casual – for all SPOs to kill and rape. The police allegedly told them they would be ‘regularised’ as constables after killing 10 Naxalites; having killed, they knew there was no return. Camp residents told me that SPOs inebriated with alcohol or drugs would often trade scores, boasting of how many people they had killed (interviews, 2007–11). Some were vicious to the point that even the police were moved

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to pity the villagers. More than one villager told me that, having been picked up by an SPO and incarcerated, a sympathetic policeman had helped them escape (interviews, 2007–11). Even as SPOs were punished for minor derelictions of duty to maintain this violent hierarchy, the police ensured that heinous crimes such as rape, murder and looting went unpunished – and were even encouraged as part of the general design to create insecurity in the villages. The inferiority of the Adivasi was underlined at every level. As menial SPOs, they ranked very low in the police hierarchy and yet had been outsourced the power to kill other Adivasis. The latter lay completely outside the pale of state protection.

Conclusion This chapter has looked at the combination of resentment, incitement and knowledge of impunity that the Indian state uses to mobilise certain sections of the local population against others. I have explored two kinds of resentment. The first is that of upper-caste immigrants who have been displaced from positions of power by the Maoists and seek to re-establish their ‘right’ to exploit local resources and people. The second is that of young Adivasi conscripts into the police force who resent both the Maoists and their superiors in the police force. In both cases, the state and police play a critical role in fuelling and shaping this resentment, offering impunity and encouragement and deflecting attention from the conditions that led villagers in Bastar to join the Maoists’ armed struggle against the state. Emotions here work almost as tangible phenomena or ‘social facts’ that are created, mobilised and deployed to work in political contexts, for political ends, especially in the ‘outrage’-driven politics of South Asia (see Blom and Jaoul 2008: para. 27). At a collective level, emotions may even be actors in their own right. While the emotions are individually felt, they are shared across a particular structural condition and accessed through both individual interviews and their manifestation in collective action.

Notes 1 In July 2011, after the Supreme Court banned the use of SPOs, they were renamed the Armed Auxiliary Forces. In 2014, the same class of recruits was called the District Reserve Group. In this chapter, however, I refer to them by the original name, SPOs. 2 The Indian Constitution enables the government to ‘reserve’ or set aside government jobs, admissions in educational institutions and seats in the legislative assemblies at the state and central levels for SCs and STs in proportion to their population.

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3 The Maoist movement in Bastar was brought over by the Andhra cadre of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War in the early 1980s. In 2004, the party was renamed the CPI-M. Over time, local Adivasis rose in the ranks, although the top leadership continues to be non-tribal. 4 See also Tate (2007) on the Colombian military’s claim that it is the main victim of human rights violations despite ‘defending’ human rights itself. 5 Nandini Sundar and Ors. WP 250/2007, August 2010 Written Submissions. 6 Affidavit by Swami Agnivesh in Nandini Sundar and Ors. WP 250/2007, 1 April 2011. 7 Application for protection for Nandini Sundar, in Nandini Sundar and Ors. WP 250/2007, 10 November 2016. 8 Chhattisgarh Aff. ¶ 10, 3 May 2011, in WP 250/2007. 9 Ibid.

References Banning, Marlia E. 2006. ‘The Politics of Resentment’, JAC, 26(1–2): 67–101. Barbalet, Jack. 1992. ‘A Macro Sociology of Emotion: Class Resentment’, Sociological Theory, 10(2): 150–63. Blom, Amélie and Nicolas Jaoul. 2008. ‘Introduction: The Moral and Affectual Dimension of Collective Action in South Asia’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2, http://samaj.revues.org/1912. Brudholm, Thomas. 2006. ‘Revisiting Resentments: Jean Améry and the Dark Side of Forgiveness and Reconciliation’, Journal of Human Rights, 5(1): 7–26. Campbell, Sue. 1994. ‘Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression’, Hypatia, 9(3): 46–65. Devy, Ganesh N. 2002. ‘Tribal Voice and Violence’, in Siddharth Varadarajan (ed), Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, pp. 246–66. New Delhi: Penguin. Dudas, Jeffrey R. 2005. ‘In the Name of Equal Rights: “Special” Rights and the Politics of Resentment in Post-Civil Rights America’, Law and Society Review, 39(4): 723–57. Fassin, Didier. 2013. ‘On Resentment and Ressentiment: The Politics and Ethics of Moral Emotions’, Current Anthropology, 54(3): 249–67. Feldman, Stanley and Leonie Huddy. 2005. ‘Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race-Conscious Programs: Principles or Prejudice?’ American Journal of Political Science, 49(1): 168–83. Gay, Peter. 1993. The Cultivation of Hatred, vol. 3 of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. London: W. W. Norton and Co. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Putul, Alok Prakash. 2016. ‘Patriot Media with Me, Why Waste Time on You?’ www.bbc.com/hindi/india/2016/02/160221_bastar_putul_blog_aj (accessed on 9 March 2016). Shah, Ghanshyam. 2002. ‘Caste, Hindutva and Hideousness’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(15): 1391–93. Sundar, Nandini. 2007. Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 2nd ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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———. 2016a. The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar. New Delhi: Juggernaut. ———. 2016b. ‘Introduction: Of the Scheduled Tribes, States and Sociology’, in Nandini Sundar (ed), The Scheduled Tribes and Their India, pp. 1–45. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tate, Winifred. 2007. Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Teltumbde, Anand, ed. 2005. Hindutva and Dalits: Perspectives for Understanding Communal Praxis. Kolkata: Samya. Wilson, David C. and Darren W. Davis. 2011. ‘Reexamining Racial Resentment: Conceptualization and Content’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 634: 117–33.

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Part IV DIRECTING AFFECTS ACROSS THE ELUSIVE BOUNDARIES OF THE POLITICAL

10 MOBILISING ANGER IN ANDHRA PRADESH The emotional politics of the angry young man and popular Telugu cinema Imke Rajamani*

Anger was a decisive factor in the 2014 election in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.1 Shortly before the election, the central government announced its decision to carve the new state of Telangana out of northern Andhra Pradesh.2 For the numerous supporters of the pro-Telangana movement, this was, clearly, cause for joy.3 At the same time, the bifurcation led to anxiety and anger among those who preferred the idea of a united or ‘Greater Andhra Pradesh’ (Vishālāndhra) – most of whom lived in the coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions (known collectively as Seemandhra), which form the remaining part of the state. Political opposition forces in favour of a united state blamed the Congress party, which then headed the central and state governments, for ‘dividing’ Andhra Pradesh. Accordingly, their election campaigns focused on mobilising anger against the ruling party. Their politics proved successful: the Congress was dislodged from office and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and its allies won a majority in the state’s legislative assembly. The anger mobilised against the state’s bifurcation and the Congress was also directed at Telugu film star and politician Chiranjeevi – the ‘Megastar’ who had headed the Congress campaign in Andhra Pradesh. While Chiranjeevi’s own political career ground to a halt in 2014, the politics of mobilising anger motivated another actor to turn to electoral politics. ‘Power Star’ Pawan Kalyan, Chiranjeevi’s younger brother, had opposed the state’s bifurcation and decided to set up the Jana Sena [the People’s Army] party and fashioned the ‘public wrath over the state’s bifurcation’ (Times of India 2014) into a youth movement. Anger constituted the party’s sole agenda and characterised its performative style. Although Pawan Kalyan ultimately decided not to contest the election himself and asked his supporters to vote

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for the opposition alliance, comprising the TDP and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he succeeded in establishing himself as the new, iconic ‘angry young man’ and the political voice of Seemandhra’s youth. Ironically, he inherited this mantle from his elder brother, for whose political downfall he was partly responsible. This chapter explores the role of popular Telugu films in shaping anger as a mobilising factor in the recent history of Andhra Pradesh. I argue that cinema functioned as a central arena for political action and feeling in South India by conceptualising, teaching and mobilising emotions that decisively informed people’s ideas of leadership and citizenship. After a brief introduction to the chapter’s theoretical foundations, I proceed as follows: the first part explains how anger emerged as a practice and characteristic of the political leadership idealised by the screen image of ‘Megastar’ Chiranjeevi. An analysis of the representational politics of anger in the finale of the film Tagore (2003) demonstrates how director V. V. Vinayak designed an audiovisual dramaturgy that aims to blur the line between ‘reel politics’ and ‘real politics’. The second part explains how anger was employed as a leadership emotion in the film Cameraman Gangatho Rambabu (dir. Puri Jagannadh, 2012) to fashion ‘Power Star’ Pawan Kalyan into a political leader on, and beyond, the screen. I argue that this film enabled Pawan Kalyan to mobilise anger among Seemandhra’s male youth prior to the 2014 election and recruit his fans as the ‘angry army’ of the Jana Sena.

Theoretical framework In the sociology and political theory of anger, collective discontent is seen largely as a shared emotion that emerges from the bottom up and is usually directed (by the powerless) at the powerful. According to Lyman (1981, 2004) and Holmes (2004: 127), anger can be a threat to democracy as well as an opportunity for democracy: it motivates a constant public dialogue that is central to ongoing processes of democratisation. Anger and its management are at the heart of the political process and participation. Recognising people’s anger can legitimise a given political order and the rule of its elite. On the other hand, anger can also challenge the political order and undermine the legitimacy of the incumbent government – especially if the ruling elite is oblivious to people’s anger. Ost (2004: 229) points out that, in most political theories and sociologies of anger, ‘emotions have been presented as a problem that power has to deal with, not something with which power is itself intimately involved’. Popular cinema is the political arena in South India in which anger is conceptualised as a virtue of political leadership. In the first part of the chapter I argue that the representational politics of the concept of ‘mass’ and the mobilising anger inherent in popular Telugu cinema urge us to rethink

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earlier theories on the relationship between anger, power and democracy. The second part of the chapter shows how anger, as an emotional style of leadership, was used by Pawan Kalyan to mobilise his fans against the Congress government. Among scholars of political media cultures and media sociology, the central role of mass media in facilitating mobilisation and participation is a question of common sense: Dahlgren (1995: 123–4) argues that ‘viewership’ is always a ‘potential moment of citizenship’, Corner (1995) theorises television audiences as ‘citizen-viewers’ and Harindranath (2009) contends, specifically in the Indian context, that the Indian ‘public’ constitutes ‘audience-citizens’. Despite their foundation in sociological and ethnographical audience-based research, these theories tend to assume a generalised relationship between the media, audiences and political participation. Rather than applying one of these theories to popular Telugu cinema, I have chosen to take an inductive approach by exploring how popular Telugu films conceptualise the viewer, the star and the politician, thereby revealing the popular understanding of cinema as an arena for political mobilisation. These films allow us to learn how filmmakers and cinema audiences understand the role of mass media in facilitating the public performance of collective politicised anger. This method stems from my larger approach to anger as an ‘emotion concept’ – one that has a history, but that also functions as a factor in history. Implicitly, this follows the model developed by Pernau and Rajamani (2016): that is, how emotions are felt – and therefore how they can be mobilised and used to mobilise – depends crucially on how they are conceptualised by historical actors. Here, I should add that the ways in which certain emotions can be felt and mobilised through popular media depend partly on how media makers and viewers conceive of the medium’s function and power to elicit feelings, and how they use it and ‘encode and decode’ (Hall 1992) its content accordingly. I conceive of making and watching movies as social ‘emotional practices’ that people use to ‘evoke feelings where there are none, to focus diffuse arousals and give them intelligible shape, or to change or remove emotions already there’ (Scheer 2012: 196). In what follows, I show that Telugu filmmakers have inscribed the function of mass media as a virtuous means of mobilising collective anger into their films’ stories and dramaturgies. I argue that their viewers can easily understand, agree with and act according to the popular theory of anger, mass media and the viewer’s role therein because it is based on the emotion concept of āvēdana [suffering; anger; to make known; outcry]. As a sphere of economic, social and emotional action and transaction, cinema in Andhra Pradesh has become inseparable from electoral politics. Madhava Prasad (2014) has coined the term ‘cine-politics’ to describe how these fields have merged in South India. Srinivas’ studies on popular Telugu cinema show that N. T. Rama Rao’s trajectory from the leading star

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of Telugu mythological films to chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1983 marked the moment in which the ‘intimacy between cinema and politics’ became a form of co-constitution. Since then, the performance of stardom and fandom has become a central mode of political action (Srinivas 2013: 1, 20). Emotions are crucial in this context. Bhrugubanda (2011) explains how popular Telugu mythological films fused cinema, religion and politics by popularising, teaching and eliciting bhaktī [devotional love] as an affective practice of religious worship, cinematic fandom and political following. She argues that N. T. Rama Rao could mobilise bhaktī among his newly formed ‘citizen-devotees’ as a god on the screen, as the industry’s most popular Telugu film star and as a star-politician. The display of emotional intensity and excess is a feature of screen acting and political leadership alike, in that fan-spectators direct the same sort of affection, loyalty and devotion at their ‘heroes’ whether the latter are performing on screen or taking part in electoral politics. The development of ‘cine-politics as performance’ in Andhra Pradesh since the early 1980s, therefore, enabled both the stardom as well as the political ambitions of Chiranjeevi and his brother Pawan Kalyan. My argument, however, is that the affective performance of fandom and stardom is not enough to explain the emotional dynamics that unfolded between the two film heroes and their followers. Instead, the filmic conceptualisation and popularisation of anger as a virtue of leadership and citizenship has decisively shaped the cine-politics of representation and identification in Andhra Pradesh.

Chiranjeevi: mass media and the making of anger as a virtue of political leadership In 1983, Chiranjeevi made his breakthrough as the leading star of popular Telugu cinema with the film Khaidi [Prisoner], directed by A. Kodandarami Reddy. Within a national cinematic trend of popularising anger against social injustice as a form of heroic masculinity, Khaidi was the first and trendsetting movie in a series of films that fashioned Chiranjeevi into the iconic angry young man of Telugu cinema.4 In several films of the 1980s and 1990s, Chiranjeevi embodied the heroic underdog whose anger was directed at a corrupt establishment; labour exploitation; the inability of legislative, judicial and executive institutions to protect citizens from violent oppression; and the state’s failure to establish and deliver justice. Unlike Telugu film legend N. T. Rama Rao who, as the divine avenger or hero of the oppressed, challenged injustice ‘from above’, Chiranjeevi’s screen roles were designed to represent the voice of suffering ‘from below’. This new variety of popular action cinema became known as the Telugu ‘mass film’.5 The concept of ‘mass’ has a twofold meaning in this context:

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first, it denotes the broad audience that producers and filmmakers aim to attract with the popular – and populist – appeal of this genre of action and attraction cinema. Second, ‘mass’ became a label denoting a popular style of masculine youth culture that playfully adapted the social markers (or prejudices) of the ‘lower classes’ and presented them as signs of regional masculinity and pride – such as the use of ‘rude’ language, machismo vis-àvis women and the aggressive display of dark-skinned muscles. Telugu films popularised ‘mass’ dance, ‘mass’ dress and ‘mass’ speech in opposition to the habitus of the mannered classes. The angry hero would, therefore, fight the selfish, corrupt ruling classes as a vigilante in the name of ‘the masses’. The industry’s cinematic aesthetics and narratives playfully reversed images of good and bad. The rowdy, the petty crook and the loafer became the new heroes who saved the common people from oppression and injustice, while decrying those in positions of economic, administrative and political power as false moralists and dangerous villains. The anger of the mass hero was presented as a virtuous anger: it singled him out as a responsible citizen and, increasingly, as a leader of victimised social communities. The mass cinema of the 1980s and 1990s ‘gestured towards the struggles of empowerment of the lower class-caste population, at times representing these struggles with a surprising degree of sympathy’ (Srinivas 2005: 114). In Khaidi (1983) and Rustum (dir. A. Kodandarami Reddy, 1984), for instance, it is the farmers who suffer under the despotism of greedy landlords and hypocritical priests. In Gang Leader (dir. Vijaya Bapineedu, 1991), it is the unemployed urban youth that is deprived of a future by corrupt officials. In Muta Mestri [Community Leader] (dir. A. Kodandarami Reddy, 1993), a local market community is threatened by a rich businessman who plans to build a modern shopping complex where the marketplace stands. As the angry mass hero, Chiranjeevi embodied the exceptional common man, the ‘one-of-us’ leader representing various local communities or specific social groups. Through the film Tagore (dir. V. V. Vinayak, 2003), Chiranjeevi’s screen image shifted from that of the leader of a small gang or local community to the idealised mass leader of the people of Andhra Pradesh. As Srinivas points out in his analysis of the film, the angry young man was transformed into a ‘father figure’ whose emotional style combined youthful anger and mature authority (2009: 229). The angry hero thus became a mobiliser and leader of a mass of people that no longer resembled a local community or youth gang as much as a crowd of disenfranchised citizens. In what follows, I examine how the film Tagore reworked the cinematic concept of virtuous anger as a quality of idealised leadership by negotiating the audiovisual concepts of mass and āvēdana. The analysis shows how director V. V. Vinayak created a politicised imaginary that blurred the line between fiction and reality by equating Chiranjeevi’s fans with the people of Andhra

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Pradesh, by promoting film-viewing as an emotional practice of political participation and by nurturing Chiranjeevi’s political ambitions beyond the screen. The titular hero Tagore, whose name is meant to mark him as a patriot (in deference to Rabindranath Tagore), is a professor by day and head of the vigilante Anti-Corruption Force (ACF) by night. The ACF abducts and kills corrupt members of the political and administrative establishment and displays the bodies – along with evidence of their crimes – in public spaces. When the police captures and brutally tortures students who serve as ACF executives, Tagore surrenders to the police. Thanks to the reports in newspapers, TV and radio, Tagore becomes the hero of a public whose cause he fights by means of his virtuous anger. He mobilises discontent against corruption as well as affection and support for himself and his vigilante mission among the audiences of the mass media. Tagore’s hearing during the trial is the climax of the film. Accused of murder, the hero defends his illegal actions, claiming that the state machinery has facilitated corruption and failed to protect the people of Andhra Pradesh. Poverty, hunger, unemployment, and avoidable deaths, he contends, are direct consequences of the despotism and negligence of corrupt officers. Tagore then questions the moral competence of the judge and the state attorney in this process by pointing out their own involvement in scams and corruption. Ultimately, the defendant becomes both judge and jury in the name of the people of Andhra Pradesh. The people’s mobilisation and choice of Tagore as their leader and advocate comes across in highly symbolic images during a musical sequence. During the first part of the song, people march towards a huge gathering. The concluding scene is set at night: we see a crowd carrying torches (fire being a canonical signifier of anger) and bearing a large cut-out of Tagore above their heads, one finger outstretched, pointing to invisible perpetrators – a typical symbol of the demand for justice. A thin banner with the colours of India’s national flag flutters in the background. After this mobilising song, the film cuts to the crowd that has gathered on the court steps to support Tagore. They watch as his trial is broadcast on a giant screen affixed to the court building. Elsewhere, I have argued more extensively that Tagore’s leadership is based on his exceptional ability to enact anger publicly and make people’s suffering known (see Rajamani 2017). Their individual voices having been systematically silenced, the people need a leader who can mobilise them into a powerful crowd and represent them in front of the authorities. The individual voice of Tagore communicates the reason for, and aim of, the people’s anger, which a crowd could not convey. The crowd communicates the intensity of anger through its noise and massive presence, which an individual voice could not convey. For enacting virtuous anger and taking on

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the risk of making their suffering known, the people reward Tagore with expressions of affection and loyalty. The emotion concept used in the film’s dialogues and audio-visual semantics is that of āvēdana. In contemporary spoken Telugu, the term is commonly used to denote ‘suffering’; its older meaning of ‘to make known’ (see Brown [1853] 2004: 76) occurs less frequently. In popular Telugu mass films, however, this meaning is central to the audio-visual semantics of virtuous anger in the shape of raising one’s voice against injustice – it is the emotion that creates an outcry, the moment of mediation that allows suffering to bear anger. In Tagore, the hero enacts āvēdana with the help of mass media: the spectacle of dead bodies used to publicise corruption and the ACF’s fight against it dominate the media. News headlines are shown to evoke strong emotions among the common people. The public screening and viewing of Tagore’s trial frames the hero’s āvēdana as a feeling that is not just personal but also social and political. The screen affixed to the court building, which shows the crowd what is going on during the trial, enables the people to mark their presence in the court room. Their cheers, claps and whistling in support of Tagore’s speech against corruption permeate the walls of the building, which Tagore accuses of hosting a law that deliberately turns a blind eye to injustice. What the film conveys is that mass media and their makers carry out the crucial function, and are responsible for, informing – even enlightening – the public, thereby enabling their mobilisation into a powerful mass movement. According to this popular theory of mobilisation, the making and reception of any media that addresses injustice is the emotional practice of āvēdana, of making suffering known by expressing anger. The angry leader, and the transmission of his voice through the mass media, forces the authorities to open their eyes and ears to the woes of the people. The latter need Tagore as the angry leader able to collectively claim their citizen-rights to justice and protection. At the same time, the presence of the people and the mass media during the trial legitimises Tagore’s anger against injustice as a form of civil courage and reaffirms his role as public spokesman. As he leaves the court, a triumphant Tagore raises his hands in a gesture of victory, first in the direction of the journalists and cameramen that surround him, and then towards the large crowd behind, thanking ‘the masses’ for their support. These images also document a real event. Following a public invitation from the director, an estimated 10,000 people took part in the making of this scene on 31 August 2003 at Sri Venkateshwara University in Tirupati (see Idlebrain.com 2003). The event itself – one of mass mobilisation – and the images of the event blur the line between the fictional narrative of Tagore thanking the citizens of Andhra Pradesh and film star Chiranjeevi thanking his fans for their affection and support during the shooting. Director V. V. Vinayak inscribes the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and reality

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into the film and its reception by giving the practice of film viewing political and emotional meaning. The fictional screen affixed to the court building and the real screen in the movie theatre are intended to equate the public viewing of Tagore’s trial with the act of watching Chiranjeevi’s film in a cinema. The shots switch back and forth from the perspective of the citizencrowd in front of the screen and full frames of what they are supposed to be seeing, to the perspective of what is implied from within the court room. The production and editing of the images were intended to create imbrications between Chiranjeevi’s fans in Tirupati, the fictional crowd of Tagore’s supporters and the cinema-going audience. The people we see in the film whistle, cheer and clap for their hero, whose hard-hitting dialogue strips bare the misdeeds and immorality of the establishment – just as Chiranjeevi’s fans sitting in a movie theatre hoot and clap when he lands a verbal or physical punch on the villain. This mirroring effect reinforces how the actor’s fans watching the film can identify with the mobilised citizens on screen. This works through the encoding of emotional practices: the scene extends the meaning of whistling, cheering and clapping from emotional practices of cinematic fandom and expressions of enjoyment while watching a movie to emotional practices of political participation. A fan who whistles in appreciation of his hero is invited by the images on screen to feel that his act of whistling is an act of participation in a collective expression of āvēdana. Moreover, while watching Tagore, Chiranjeevi’s fans become the people of Andhra Pradesh and vice versa. The ‘young men, often lowercaste and lower middle-class in origin’ (Srinivas 2009: XXI),6 who form the bulk of Chiranjeevi’s organised fans, are encouraged by the film to identify themselves as a politicised ‘mass’ public that has been enlightened through their consumption of mass media – namely, the popular mass film Tagore. The mobilised ‘mass’ society imagined in the film Tagore is not a pluralistic, mediated public in which perspectives and positions are likely to be discussed. Rather, it is a mass of discontented citizens with a shared aim and a singular, shared emotional disposition – one might say, a homogenised nation estranged from its state. As the voice of this nation, the mass media and the idealised leader have one truth to reveal: the misdeeds of the corrupt establishment. The film’s politics of identification and representation suggest that, like watching the news on television or reading the newspaper, watching popular mass films is (i) a political practice that has helped people see the corrupt establishment for what it is and (ii) an emotional practice that transforms the passive spectator into a mobilised citizen. In the political imaginary of the mass film, popular Telugu cinema is a public space in which a self-aware, defiant nation has been formed and mobilised. The central figure around whom the citizen-audience becomes mobilised is, then, the angry hero. Like no other film until then, Tagore nurtured speculation and a desire for its star actor to enter electoral politics (Srinivas 2009: 231). An anonymous 194

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online reviewer speculated whether Chiranjeevi might have used the film as a ‘test balloon before launching his own political party’ (Sify Movies 2003). Five years after Tagore, Chiranjeevi decided to use the mobilising potential of his screen image as an angry young man and as a representative and leader of the people of Andhra Pradesh. On 26 August 2008, he formally announced the establishment of his Praja Rajyam [People’s Rule] Party in Tirupati. The event, which was organised largely by party workers and Chiranjeevi’s fan clubs, was an impressive display of mass mobilisation. The Hindu (2008) estimated that a million people had gathered to attend the event. Fans and ‘political aspirants’ had booked at least 18 special trains and 1,450 buses in advance to ensure they could be part of the Megastar’s ‘mega-event’. Even the staging of the event, the image put forward by Chiranjeevi, the content of his speech, and the behaviour of the audience were shaped fundamentally by the practices and motives of Telugu cinema. Das (2008) described the scene for the Hindustan Times as follows: Film songs beamed onto a giant screen, laser shows and a film star bowing repeatedly to the crowd. . . . You could have been forgiven for thinking it was a movie premiere. . . . The massive crowd clapped, whistled and danced as Chiranjeevi announced the name of the party, ‘Praja Rajyam’ (People’s Rule). ‘Who called me into politics? It was you,’ he said dramatically. ‘It should be rule by the people, for the people.’ He added: ‘The new party will . . . strive to make this state “Santosha Andhra Pradesh” (Contented Andhra Pradesh) and “Ananda Andhra Pradesh” (Happy Andhra Pradesh)’. Based on the setup of the event and the content of the promotional films that were being played, Srinivas observes that, while the ‘aspiring Chief Minister of the state was standing before the crowd in person . . . the crowd was being called upon to watch his screen persona’ (2009: XVI). As in Tagore, the event gave the mobilised crowd of cheering people a threefold function: that of an assembly of potential voters, spectators of big-screen images and fans of a leading Telugu film star. The notion of imagining Chiranjeevi’s leadership of this massive crowd stemmed from his image as the angry man willing to fight against corruption and for political change in the name of the people. While anger was the emotional tool that mobilised cinemagoers into becoming politically or socially aware citizens and voters, it was not the goal advertised by Chiranjeevi’s party or the films that promoted him. The leader’s mobilising anger was conceptualised as a means of achieving contentment and happiness (santoshamu and ānandamu) for the people of Andhra Pradesh, who both Chiranjeevi and his later films imagine, ideally, as a nation of compassionate people. Finally, he transformed his public image as a politician into that of a ‘compassionate patron’, resembling the 195

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old-fashioned image of an ideal leader, but ultimately dashing the expectations his films had raised (Rajamani 2017). In the 2009 election, his party did poorly and he did not achieve his goal of becoming chief minister. In 2011, Chiranjeevi merged the Jana Sena Party with the Congress and served as minister for tourism until 2014.

Pawan Kalyan: mobilising an army of angry citizens Soon after Chiranjeevi parted ways with his erstwhile angry-hero persona, ‘Power Star’ Pawan Kalyan was touted as the new angry young man – a ‘youth icon’ and leader of the ‘young generation’ (GreatAndhra.com 2014). While Chiranjeevi was seen as being ‘sober’ and ‘down-to-earth’, Kalyan had a ‘fiery temperament and readily expressed his anger at the country’s corrupt political system’ (Economic Times 2014). The most effective tool in heralding Pawan Kalyan as a potential political leader was the mass film Cameraman Gangatho Rambabu (dir. Puri Jagannath, 2012), in which the star plays a ‘compassionate’ angry young man. The qualities associated earlier with Chiranjeevi were now projected onto, and adapted by, his younger brother on and beyond the big screen. Although the style of anger portrayed in Cameraman Gangtho Rambabu is, in many ways, consistent with that of the angry young man of Chiranjeevi’s films, three significant changes occur. First, the anger of the hero is aimed primarily at mobilising anger among the film’s spectator-citizens – the importance of compassion, happiness and affection as foundational feelings for the national community decreases. Second, the representation of mobilised people changes from that of an unruly, albeit affectionate crowd to that of an army of angry young men. Third, the Telugu concept of kopam, which hitherto denoted anger as a negative emotion and character trait of short-tempered persons, is presented as an individual expression of youthfulness and courage, that enables men to initiate and participate in collective practices of āvēdana. Through these changes, anger becomes an emotional style of idealised citizenship. The story revolves around Rambabu, a mechanic who is easily angered by injustice and immediately tries to set things right: he separates a crowd of hostel boys fighting over caste issues, he beats up criminals, he adopts an abandoned baby girl, he helps an unemployed man find work. His masculine altruism and compassion for the weak arouse admiration among his friends. His anger (kopam) infuses fear in his enemies. With the help of the heroine, ‘cameraman’ Ganga, Rambabu becomes a media phenomenon, a public hero and a moral authority. As a reporter, he cleverly uncovers politicians’ misdeeds. When the main villain vies for the post of chief minister of Andhra Pradesh by buying votes, Rambabu organises a massive protest march to protect the state from further corrupt politics. Until now, he has

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been a lone figure fighting for justice and attracting public acclaim. In the film’s climax scene, however, he becomes the people’s leader and mobilises millions into an army of angry citizens. In the filmic preparation of this scene, director Puri Jagannath employs a dramaturgy of emotional mobilisation in five stages:7 Stage 1, mobilising attention. A large crowd gathers as Rambabu begins to address the public. He sits casually on the steps of a large building – barefoot, clad in jeans and an ordinary shirt. He is waiting for the public to become his audience. Journalists and cameramen set up their microphones and cameras. All the television channels interrupt their programming to live-broadcast Rambabu’s speech. The first stage of mobilising attention centres on the curiosity his mere presence elicits in the mediated public. Students having dinner stop to watch the television at their hostel mess. Young people on the street stop and gather around the television at a teashop. Three young men interrupt their drunken revels to concentrate on what is unfolding on the television screen. The dynamic background music and increasing pace at which the film cuts between images of journalists and the viewing public that sits in tense anticipation clearly aims to mobilise attention also among the people watching the movie. The dramaturgy that follows increasingly invites the extra-diegetic audience (the film’s viewers in the cinema) to mirror and identify with the intra-diegetic audience (the audience watching Rambabu’s live broadcast in the film), to experience the scene as a moment of emotional and political animation. Stage 2, mobilising approval. Rambabu begins to speak. He laments that, while the mass media has done well to report incidents of suffering and injustice, nobody but he has bothered to react. The youth of Andhra Pradesh, he says, lack civil courage. Facing the camera, Rambabu points at his audience: ‘Hey you! Are you listening! . . . You are the youth! (Nuvve! vintunnavā! . . . yuvatha nuvve!)’. He gets up and bids them to take responsibility for their wellbeing, that of their families and that of the people of Andhra Pradesh. At this point, the film’s intra-diegetic viewers look at each other and nod approvingly: they are bound to agree with Rambabu’s judgment of their passivity as a moral shortcoming. Stage 3, mobilising indignation and anger (kopam). Warning people of the consequences, should the main villain become chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Rambabu talks himself into a rage. When criminals become political leaders, he thunders, they raise the price of basic commodities, public transport and education, thereby satisfying their own greed at the expense of ordinary people. For audiences watching Cameraman Gangatho Rambabu in 2012, this projected future of rising costs was already a reality. The speech implicitly criticises the state’s Congress government, which had been in office since 2009. As the compassionate angry young man, Rambabu is portrayed as a role model of virtuous political action and reaction to

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injustice. It is not an exceptional physique or appearance that mark his heroism and distinguish him from other ordinary young men (and this is done deliberately), but his sense of social responsibility – arising from his intense embodiment of anger. What the scene conveys, therefore, is this: if viewers think that the increase in prices is unjust, then it becomes their moral obligation as ordinary citizens to react with indignation and anger. Stage 4, mobilising heroism. Heroism or vīramū is an emotion concept in Indian performance culture as well as in popular Telugu cinema. Through the medium of the mass film, virtuous anger has become a key constituent of heroism as an emotional performative style. In his speech, Rambabu proposes that performing heroic acts and feeling heroic should not be reserved for the leading few. By instilling in himself civil courage and reacting to injustice and misgovernance with public anger, every ordinary young man can become a hero. He both provokes and encourages: ‘You want a hero? Aren’t you a hero yourself? (Nuvvu hero kavalā? Nuvve hero kādā?)’. We see the film’s intra-diegetic viewers straighten up in response. Stage 5, mobilising fear (bhayam). Rambabu’s part-provoking, partencouraging summons to the youth of Andhra Pradesh is followed by a show of anger as a leadership emotion intended to mobilise fear. He bellows at the young men sitting in front of their televisions and, with sweeping gestures, calls on them to join him immediately on a march to the state capital of Hyderabad. His order contains a warning: refusal to participate will result in their becoming the target of Rambabu’s – and Pawan Kalyan’s – anger. As the hero points to his intra- and extra-diegetic audiences, he simultaneously employs a gesture characteristic of the actor, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck to signify the anger aroused. Both gestures usually mean a warning of impending violence to villains and thugs.8 Not joining Rambabu’s movement is tantamount to opposing him – and this, in turn, means standing against a higher morality, justice and the people’s nation. Passivity becomes equal to villainy; passive youth become enemies of the mobilised nation of Andhra Pradesh. In a manner similar to the climax of Tagore, this scene aims to blur the line between the representational politics of fiction and reality by equating Pawan Kalyan and Rambabu with the image of the angry leader and by equating the intra-diegetic audience of young men with the audience comprising Pawan Kalyan’s fans in the cinema hall. The angry gestures address both the intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic viewer. The politics of representation and extra-diegetic address become clear when the mobilising hero entreats his audience to miss just one matinee at the cinema and expend that time in social work or political activism instead. Here, Pawan Kalyan is talking to his fans. The image and voice of the fictional angry leader and the film star in reality, interweave. The speech is followed by a mobilisation song. Its marching rhythm and heroic fanfare convey a military ethos. The lyrics, which comprise patriotic 198

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slogans and repeated calls to imaginary listeners to join the movement, are sung by a male principal representing the leader, accompanied by a large chorus representing the mobilised people. The images in this sequence show people leaving home and banding together in increasingly large processions as they travel by tractor, truck, motorbike, bicycle and foot to Hyderabad to ‘free’ Andhra Pradesh from the film’s main villain. On the streets of Hyderabad, the mobilised people merge into a crowd on the march, with Rambabu at its head. As in Tagore, the crowd represents the united and unitary civil society of Andhra Pradesh. Yet there is a decisive change in the visual representation of the people. In Tagore, the crowd was portrayed as rather chaotic. During the shooting of this scene, Chiranjeevi’s fans expressed their admiration for the star in excessive terms and were as ‘unruly as always’ (Srinivas 2009: XVI). Indeed, one reporter notes that several fans clashed with the police during the event (Idlebrain.com 2003). In Cameraman Gangatho Rambabu, however, the images of the vast crowd are the digital creation of a disciplined mass of people. As one can already sense from Rambabu’s speech, the mobilisation in this film is both a project of collective anger and crowd discipline. This point is important, since collective anger is often associated with disobedience and unruliness. But Rambabu mobilises the youth of Andhra Pradesh into an angry army that is both disciplined and obedient to its leader. In the final scene, the crowd forms a straight front line that faces off against the single line of armed security guards in front of the towering hotel in which the villain is about to buy the loyalty of the legislative assembly. Again, the presence of the mass media signifies its participation in the movement: it facilitates the revelation of truth and the re-establishment of justice in this scene. We see journalists and cameramen taking position at the margins and behind the security guards. Rambabu stands before the front line as the leader of the people’s army. Closer shots show that the core of this army comprises young men clad in a similar uniform – jeans and a shirt. They stand straight, alert, facing their leader as they await his command. As Rambabu raises his right knee, his army stamps one foot on the ground in unison; the sound reverberates through the building, jarring the politicians inside. As Rambabu opens his mouth, his army lets out a collective ‘Hey!’ that almost batters the windows, pounding the ears of the villain and politicians. The anger of the angry people’s army hits the corrupt politicians like an earthquake, a storm. The quasi-natural force of this anger drives them out of the building and in front of the mediating public, before whom they are exposed as corrupt and criminal. In the end, the angry army overruns and kills the main villain. In this scene, the mobilised youth are no longer a crowd of individual bodies. Rather, they function as one angry body with an invincible physical presence. This new conceptualisation of the ‘masses’ in the film Cameraman 199

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Gangatho Rambabu produces a different idea of the nation: the anger embodied by Chiranjeevi was used to mobilise his fans into a Telugu nation bound by mutual compassion and affection for their leader. The anger enacted by Pawan Kalyan, on the other hand, builds on mobilising young men into an emotional community of shared anger and martial virtue. The imagined angry Telugu nation in this ideology is disciplined, uniform and militaristic – its images resemble the aesthetics that have underpinned fascist and socialist authoritarian regimes. The change in the visual representation of the Telugu nation runs counter to the political ideals of pluralism and democracy. As in the case of Chiranjeevi, the ‘power’ of Pawan Kalyan’s mobilising anger on the big screen fed speculation and desire for the star to become a leader in ‘real politics’ as well. On 14 March 2014, he announced the creation of his party, the Jana Sena.9 Reporting on the event for Rediff News, journalist Mohammed Siddique noted that about 6,000 fans attended the party launch at the International Convention Centre in Hyderabad, while ‘lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of others [heard and watched] the speech through a live telecast across the state’. Siddique (2014) went on to add that, Kalyan, who appeared very angry over the recent bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, said he was out to take revenge, because he did not like the manner in which the Congress high command divided the state and took away ‘our own Telangana’. Siddique (2014) also quotes Kalyan, who framed his speech as a ‘“call to the nation” to “wipe out” the Congress party.’ Although his ‘aggressive and candid speeches became a mania among youth voters’ (GreatAndhra.com 2014), Kalyan ultimately decided not to contest the 2014 election himself. He urged his fans and followers to act according to the slogan ‘Congress hatāo, dēsh bachāo’ [beat the Congress, save the nation] and vote for the opposition, the regional TDP and its central ally, the BJP. Pawan Kalyan’s ‘people’s army’ became part of the large body of protest voters that expelled the Congress from office.

Conclusion My analyses of the films Tagore and Cameraman Gangatho Rambabu show that the Telugu mass film developed a popular ‘vernacular theory’ of mobilisation that underscored the role of popular mass media – and, therefore, its own role – in facilitating the public performance of anger (āvēdana and kopam) as emotional tools for political and social change. Mass films taught patterns of emotional practices of anger that political leaders employed to mobilise fans into voters. In both films discussed here, the audio-visual

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semantics and dramaturgy of the climax scene reveal a deliberate attempt to blur the line between ‘reel’ and ‘real’ by endowing the emotional practices of film viewing and cinematic fandom with a sense of meaningful political action and performance. In the cine-politics of Andhra Pradesh, the mobilisation of anger has occurred neither as a bottom-up nor top-down process. Instead, it has been a discursive process in which ‘the people’ (‘the masses’) and ‘the leader’ perform different, but complementary, emotional practices. In Chiranjeevi’s case, anger was conceptualised as an attribute of leadership that enabled the mobilisation of a downtrodden, discontented ‘mass’ into a community of people whose emotional practices and public performance were dominated by affection for their leader and mutual compassion (see also Rajamani 2017). Here, the leader’s anger was largely a mobilising device intended to raise support, trust, affection, and compassion among his followers. With Pawan Kalyan, the mobilising anger of the leader was transformed into a heroism that was meant to be embodied by the ‘masses’ as well. The film Cameraman Gangatho Rambabu conveyed the notion that mobilising one’s anger against social and political injustice was a virtue constitutive of citizenship. Being angry meant being a ‘good’ Indian and a citizen of Andhra Pradesh. It is this idea of anger, I argue, that allowed the state’s opposition parties to mobilise anger on a massive scale – anger against the Congress government and its decision to create the state of Telangana. There is no doubt that anger can be a powerful tool in making voices heard. Anger can help minorities gain recognition, stimulate debate and create pluralism. However, it can also be a means employed by majority groups or dominant communities to drown out the voices of smaller interest groups and individuals. In this case, anger bolsters a political culture in which the law of the strongest triumphs over debate and compromise. The analyses in this chapter have shown that the mobilising anger of the Telugu mass film is an effective tool for motivating young people to participate in political activities – a chance for civil courage, debate and democratisation. At the same time, the example of Cameraman Gangatho Rambabu has shown that anger in Andhra Pradesh also tends to homogenise the emotional performance of citizenship and educate citizens to react to opinions and actions that deviate from the ideological mainstream with moral outrage. The popularisation of anger in the Telugu mass film thus runs the risk of promoting anti-pluralist and anti-democratic forms of governance.

Notes * I thank Ravi Vasudevan, S. V. Srinivas, Lisa Mitchell, and all the members of the EMOPOLIS team for their insightful comments and questions. Our discussions at different stages of my research decisively shaped the arguments presented in this chapter.

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1 The election for the legislative assembly of Andhra Pradesh and the Indian general election were held in April and May 2014; the results were declared on 16 May 2014. 2 The Telangana bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha on 20 February 2014 and received presidential assent on 1 March 2014. The bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh and the formation of Telangana as India’s 29th state became effective on 2 June 2014. 3 For different perspectives on the movement for a separate Telangana state, see Reddy and Sharma (1979); Nag (2011); Muppidi (2014); and Srinivas (2015). 4 While Amitabh Bachchan had already established himself as the ‘angry young man’ of popular Hindi cinema by the 1970s, a new generation of male leads in South Indian film rose through this image during the early 1980s. They, too, followed a similar career path, graduating from screen villains and antagonists to the central heroes of their industry. Rajnikanth in Tamil films (see Maderya 2010); Mammootty and Mohan Lal in Malayalam cinema (see Osella and Osella 2006) and Chiranjeevi in Telugu films (see Srinivas 2009) all played the angry young man valorised for his ‘manliness’ and ‘forcefulness’. 5 For a detailed description of the economic and aesthetic characteristics of the ‘mass film’ as a marketed genre, see Srinivas (2009: 74ff). 6 While Chiranjeevi had a large fan base among women (who went to the cinema to see his films), they were usually not organised as fan clubs nor did they attend the public gatherings that centred on him (Srinivas 2009: XXI). 7 Images of the scene described in the following cannot be shown in this book due to copyright concerns. However, the full film can be viewed on Youtube (www. youtube.com/watch?v=5hF2AolbewE). The following descriptions pertain to the scenes starting at the time count 2:04:30. 8 The pointing finger as a gesture of constructed personalised address through mass media is a particularly interesting aspect of mobilising speech, as it resembles the famous image of ‘Uncle Sam’ urging young men to join the US army (‘I want you for U.S. Army’) during the two world wars. 9 See the party website for a description of its symbolism and political agenda (http://janasenaparty.org).

References Bhrugubanda, Uma Maheswari. 2011. ‘Genealogies of the Citizen-Devotee: Popular Cinema, Religion and Politics in South India’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. Brown, Charles Philip. (1853) 2004. English – Telugu Dictionary. Vijayawada: Victory Publishers. Corner, John. 1995. Television Form and Public Address. London: Edward Arnold. Dahlgren, Peter. 1995. Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media. The Media, Culture and Society Series. London: SAGE Publications. Das, Ashok. 2008. ‘Tirupati Premiere for Chiranjeevi’s Party’, Hindustan Times, 27 August, www.hindustantimes.com/india/tirupati-premiere-for-chiranjeevi-s-party/ story-yspFbcSuKlcAayRLqRgpFN.html (accessed on 13 June 2014). Economic Times. 2014. ‘Chiranjeevi and Pawan Kalyan: Siblings with Contrasting Styles’, 30 March, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-03-30/

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news/48704913_1_pawan-kalyan-praja-rajyam-party-ysr-congress (accessed on 30 March 2014). GreatAndhra.com. 2014. ‘Fans Love Megastar & Powerstar, but . . .’, 5 December, http://m.greatandhra.com/mviewnews.php?id=61963&cat=1&scat=4 (accessed on 5 December 2014). Hall, Stuart. 1992. ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, pp. 128–38. London: Routledge. Harindranath, Ramaswami. 2009. Audience-Citizens: The Media, Public Knowledge and Interpretive Practice. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications. Hindu. 2008. ‘Chiranjeevi Launches “Praja Rajyam”’, 26 August, www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/chiranjeevi-launches-praja-rajyam/article1324404.ece (accessed on 13 June 2014). Holmes, Mary. 2004. ‘The Importance of Being Angry: Anger in Political Life’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 123–32. Idlebrain.com. 2003. ‘Lathi Charge on Chiru Fans’, 31 August, www.idelberain. com/news/2000march20/news239.html (accessed on 13 June 2014). Lyman, Peter. 1981. ‘The Politics of Anger: On Silence, Ressentiment and Political Speech’, Socialist Review, 11(3): 55–74. ———. 2004. ‘The Domestication of Anger: The Use and Abuse of Anger in Politics’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 133–47. Maderya, Kumuthan. 2010. ‘Rage Against the State: Historicizing the “Angry Young Man” in Tamil Cinema’, Jump Cut, no. 52, www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc52.2010/Tamil/index.html (accessed on 15 June 2013). Muppidi, Himadeep. 2014. Politics in Emotion: The Song of Telangana, Interventions. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Nag, Kingshuk. 2011. Battleground Telangana: Chronicle of an Agitation. Noida: HarperCollins. Osella, Caroline and Filippo Osella. 2006. ‘Young Malayali Men and Their Movie Heroes’, in Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella (eds), Men and Masculinities in South India, pp. 224–61. London: Anthem Press. Ost, David. 2004. ‘Politics as the Mobilization of Anger: Emotions in Movements and in Power’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 229–44. Pernau, Margrit and Imke Rajamani. 2016. ‘Emotional Translations: Conceptual History Beyond Language’, History and Theory, 55(1): 46–65. Prasad, M. Madhava. 2014. Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Rajamani, Imke. 2017. ‘Feeling Anger, Compassion and Community in Popular Telugu Cinema’, in ‘Feeling Communities’, ed. Margrit Pernau, special issue, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1): 103–22. Reddy, G. Ram and B. A. V. Sharma. 1979. Regionalism in India: A Study of Telangana. New Delhi: Concept Publishing. Scheer, Monique. 2012. ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51(2): 193–220. Siddique, Mohammed. 2014. ‘I Don’t Care Who Sonia or Rahul Are: Pavan Kalyan at Party Launch’, Rediff News, 14 March, www.rediff.com/news/

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report/ls-election-pavan-kalyan-launches-party-congress-hatao-desh-bachaoslogan/20140314.htm (accessed on 15 March 2014). Sify Movies. 2003. ‘Tagore’, review of Tagore, directed by V. V. Vinayak, 25 September, www.sify.com/movies/tagore-review-telugu-pclvtldeaecfe.html (accessed on 3 January 2016). Srinivas, S. V. 2005. ‘Hong Kong Action Film and the Career of the Telugu Mass Hero’, in Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu (eds), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, pp. 111–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2009. Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema After N. T. Rama Rao. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. ———. 2015. ‘Maoism to Mass Culture: Notes on Telangana’s Cultural Turn’, BioScope, 6(2): 187–205. Times of India. 2014. ‘Pawan Kalyan Proves a Hero, Setback Again for Chiranjeevi’, 17 May, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/Pawan-Kalyan-provesa-hero-setback-again-for-Chiranjeevi/articleshow/35251151.cms (accessed on 17 May 2014).

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11 HOPE AND NOSTALGIA IN BENGAL The longing for Netaji in a contemporary millennial movement Raphaël Voix

‘Netaji is alive! Netaji will return!’1 Since 2011, over 5,000 people have assembled on the streets of Kolkata every year on 23 January, to mark Subhas Chandra Bose’s birth anniversary (born in 1897). Like many Indians, they distrust the official version of Bose’s death, according to which the Bengali freedom fighter died in a plane crash in August 1945. However, they are among the very few who believe that Netaji – who would be 122 years old in 2019 – is still alive and could return at any time to solve the problems facing India and, indeed, the whole world. This chapter shows that focusing on emotions can help one understand how a mobilisation that initially looks very unlikely becomes possible. Following Daniel Cefaï, I use the term ‘mobilisation’ in the broad sense of ‘any collective action oriented by a concern for promoting a public good or for repealing a public evil, that gives itself adversaries to fight against, so as to make the process of participation, redistribution and recognition possible’ (Cefaï 2007: 15).2 In this sense, I use the term to describe a social phenomenon that goes beyond the annual street procession. Instead, it encompasses the group of people behind it – a few thousand Bengalis from different social classes who unite under the banner of the Vaidik Santan Dal (vaidika santāna dala, literally, ‘the Vedic group of children’) or VSD and engage collectively in promoting the idea that Subhas Chandra Bose could return. Their activities range from closed-door devotional gatherings to collective public action, including publications, lectures and social media networking. The VSD’s ideology involves an eschatological destruction and radical remaking of the world that has certain structural parallels with Western visions of the Millennium.3 In this sense, the VSD fits into Wessinger’s category of the ‘catastrophic millennial movement’, given that its outlook involves, as we

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will see, ‘a pessimistic view of human nature and society’ and the notion that ‘the only way that things may be made perfect is through divine intervention to destroy the current order and establish a new one’ (2011: 5). I first heard of the VSD in November 2014 while observing a political rally at the Maidan in Kolkata. Fastened to trees along the roadside were posters of a familiar bearded face: the guru of a movement I was studying at the time.4 Next to his picture was one of Subhas Chandra Bose and a caption announcing a public march on 23 January 2015 to celebrate the latter’s birthday.5 I attended the procession, during which I spoke informally to about a dozen followers, recorded the different addresses given onstage, took photographs and shot videos, and approached the leader of the VSD movement. Subsequently, I interviewed him at length to find out what had prompted him to engage in such a cause.6 I also spent time with one of the movement’s oldest insiders, who gave me access to internal documents and invited me to different functions that helped me understand the group’s usual activities. Since then, I have also been a member of the VSD’s social media network: this has allowed me to examine the daily exchanges that take place among its different WhatsApp groups in the shape of hundreds of text messages ranging from casual greetings, ideological pamphlets and photomontages, to audio and video clips of the group’s local activities. I have also compiled a substantial body of printed literature on the group and its history, including leaflets, books, journals, newspaper clippings, and legal documents.7 In this chapter, I focus on the emotion work undertaken by leaders of this movement to inspire people into committing themselves to the group’s cause. My analysis of the different devices they use shows that emotions play an important role in their engagement with people. Among the cluster of feelings that emerge in this mobilisation, hope is the most prevalent – and is orchestrated by the VSD’s leaders. However, I argue that this feeling is grounded in people’s dissatisfaction with the present and that, underlying this mobilisation is an implicit longing for a lost home. Thus, cultivating hope in the idea that Subhas Chandra Bose still lives enables VSD members to reconcile themselves to an undigested past and a disappointing present. The first part of the chapter looks at the specificity of the figure of Bose to help understand why he is the subject of such hope. The second part examines the emotion work involving hope carried out by the VSD during one of its events. The third part of the chapter looks at the conditions under which nostalgia grows.

Subhas Chandra Bose and the VSD Since its formation in 2007, the VSD has made a point of propagating the idea that Subhas Chandra Bose will return as a netā [leader]. It is worth recalling his importance in Indian history and in Bengal’s cultural identity,

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and why his death is the subject of an ongoing controversy. This helps explain the extent to which Bose is the subject of emotional manipulation in contemporary Bengal. Born in Cuttack in 1897, Bose was a high-caste Bengali Hindu who, after being educated in Bengal and England, rose through the ranks of the Indian National Congress to become one of its main leaders, following the death of his mentor, Chittaranjan Das, in 1925. As Leonard Gordon (2006) recalls, Bose’s ‘foremost passion’ was Indian independence from the British Raj. Believing that the British would never leave India peacefully, he distinguished himself from other Congress leaders, especially Gandhi, by organising an armed force for which he sought help from the Allies’ enemies during the Second World War. In 1943, Bose left for Southeast Asia to reorganise the Indian National Army (INA) and set up the Provisional Government of Free India. Despite its failure to invade India with Japanese help in 1944, the two years he spent there allowed him to experiment with the ideal to which he aspired: a free, united, secular India with everyone from different communities, classes and sexes sharing a common language and cooperating with each other (Gordon 2006: 108). Bose’s sudden disappearance on 18 August 1945 – officially, he is said to have died in a plane crash in Taipei – not only ended his project abruptly but also tolled the bell for the last Bengali leader of national and international stature.8 In 1947, India gained independence, but at the cost of a fratricidal drama: the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent into two separate nationstates, India and Pakistan, led to one of the largest mass migrations in history (between 10 million and 14 million people were displaced), coupled with unprecedented atrocities.9 Since Bose disappeared before Partition, not only can he not be held responsible for its legacy, but his admirers also believe that, had he lived long enough, he could even have prevented such a tragedy. Moreover, since his disappearance, Bengal has been increasingly marginalised at the national political level, to say nothing of the international level.10 Bose is thus remembered as the ‘lost’ hero of independence and his legacy – as their last leader of importance – still cherished among Bengalis. The absence of any physical evidence of Bose’s death, however, meant that rumours of his survival circulated widely.11 In Bengal, among the many people who contributed to this public narrative was a self-made guru known as Balak Brahmachari” (1920–1993).12 Originating from East Bengal – an important detail – he settled in Kolkata13 after Partition, where he attracted thousands of layperson followers, mainly among lower-class Hindus. Brahmachari called his movement the ‘Santan Dal’ – a name taken from Ānandamatha [The Sacred Brotherhood], Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s famous nationalist novel.14 Since initiation into the group was easy – no formalities were required nor were members obliged to follow special rituals

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or diets – the Santan Dal established local branches across Bengal and Balak Brahmachari became a respected local figure.15 During his lifetime, Brahmachari was very vocal about Bose’s disappearance.16 He would explain that he had carried out his own investigations into the matter while in north and northeast India during 1961–63. There, he had met different persons, from simple peasants to the officers in charge, who had convinced him that Netaji was still alive (Brahmacārī [2001] 2013: 211–24). Brahmachari made his first public allusion to Bose in 1963 at a function in Kolkata,17 saying he not only believed that Netaji was alive but also that he knew ‘where he is now and in what way he is’. To this, he added that, ‘if the government gives him its assurance to co-operate, then [he] will try to bring him back’ (ibid.: 293).18 Two days later, Brahmachari was arrested and jailed. Although the charge had nothing to do with this declaration,19 he saw a causal link in the concomitance of both events and denounced his arrest as a state ‘conspiracy’ against him for the stand he had taken on Bose’s alleged ‘death’ (ibid.).20 Subsequently, among Brahmachari’s followers, any public stance on Bose was considered dangerous and ‘anti-state’. Brahmachari himself regularly compared the act of talking about Netaji during what he called the ‘Congress regime’ (the period during which Congress was in office) with that of ‘singing “Vande mātaram” [hail to thee, Mother] during the British regime’. In both cases, he argued, it was a ‘crime’ (Brahmacārī [2001] 2013: 116, 172, 221). Under the British, the poem had become a political emblem for Indian revolutionaries and been banned by the government: those who defied the ban were imprisoned. After independence, the ban was overturned and Vande mātaram became a free India’s national anthem. By comparing the act of mentioning Bose in a public space under the Congress ‘Raj’ to that of singing Vande mātaram in a public space under the British Raj, Brahmachari could assert himself symbolically as a ‘revolutionary’ fighting against an ‘unjust government’. Underpinning this analogy was the idea that Bose could become the symbol of a new freedom of India that would unite the country. Indeed, this double analogy is critical to the case study in this chapter, since the VSD is an offshoot of Brahmachari’s Santan Dal. Long after Brahmachari’s death, the ongoing controversy over Bose’s death periodically made national headlines. In May 1999, the Government of India appointed a new commission to investigate the matter, which presented a fresh conclusion: that ‘Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose [was] dead [but that] he did not die in the plane crash as alleged’ (Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry 2006: 123). The government rejected these findings, giving more credence to ‘conspiracy narratives’.21 In 2004, the success of Shyam Benegal’s award-winning film Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero, which had left a question mark hanging over Bose’s death, fed the controversy for a new generation. It was in this public atmosphere of continual controversy surrounding Bose’s disappearance that Chitta Sikdar 208

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founded the VSD. He had served as secretary of the Santan Dal from 1965 until 2006, when, following a tussle with the then president, he left and formed the VSD in 2007. Although membership of the two groups is not mutually exclusive – some members of the Santan Dal participate in VSD functions and vice versa – the VSD is distinct in the importance it gives to cultivating hope that Subhas Chandra Bose will return as leader.

Cultivating hope in the return of the leader The VSD having been introduced, let us now look at the role of emotions in this mobilisation. For this purpose, I will concentrate primarily on one of the group’s specific collective actions – its annual celebration of Subhas Chandra Bose’s birth anniversary. Not only is this event the group’s most public action, taking place as it does in the centre of Kolkata, but it also illustrates the uniqueness of the VSD’s ideology – its belief that Bose will return as a leader. Specifically, I will focus on locating and analysing the different ‘sensitising devices’ mobilised during these celebrations.22 The term ‘sensitising device’ has been coined by Christophe Traïni to designate ‘the material support, the arrangement of objects and the staging deployed in order to inspire the affective reactions that predispose those who experience them to support the proposed cause’ (Traïni 2010: 233). I argue that the emotion work carried out by VSD leaders during this event aims to maintain the fervour of existing supporters and that focusing on this helps one understand the persistent existence of such a mobilisation. All members of the Santan Dal receive either by post or WhatsApp group notification an invitation calling for a ‘huge procession’ and ‘public meeting’ on Bose’s birthday. As mentioned earlier, the meeting is also publicised through posters affixed to roadside trees, bus stands and walls. Each poster or flyer features two faces: on the left, Balak Brahmachari, and on the right, Subhas Chandra Bose in his INA uniform, thus suggesting a clear continuity with the Santan Dal. The text in the centre announces the event’s main attraction: ‘an address by the sampādaka [secretary] appointed by the paramapitā [divine Father; referring to Balak Brahmachari] of the Santan Dal’. At the bottom is the venue: ‘Rani Rashmoni Avenue’ in Esplanade, Kolkata’s centre of power and a rallying point for mass protests since the 1950s. On D-day, delegations from across Bengal meet at Sealdah Station. The vans hired to escort the crowd to Esplanade are draped with banners bearing excerpts from Brahmachari’s discourses. Among these is the following quotation: In 1939, when Netaji went to Dhaka, he held a meeting at Oakland Park in Sadarghat, where I met him. He said: ‘I have seen that many of your children are working as volunteers. You should form a battalion (bāhinī).’ Santan Dal is the fruit of that [meeting with Bose].23 209

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This extract is from a public address that Brahmachari gave on 1 September 1969 when he first explained the creation of the Santan Dal in response to Subhas Chandra Bose’s injunction (see Brahmacārī [2001] 2013: 172). The quotation is important because it serves to remind (and inspire) participants of the abiding connection between Brahmachari and Bose – and, by extension, between members of the Santan Dal and Bose’s own army.24 This idea of a brotherhood between the two men is also expressed through the photomontages being sold among groups of participants, which feature both men standing side by side. To the left, Brahmachari is seen wearing a traditional white (the Brahmin’s colour) dhoti or orange (the renouncer’s colour) sarong. In some versions, he wears a long garland around his neck and holds a trident – an attribute of the Hindu god Shiva. To the right, Bose is represented in the khaki uniform of the INA – riding boots and military jacket – and wearing his forage cap. The association between the two can be seen as a perfect union of the knowledge of the Brahmin and the power of the Kshatriya. Rani Rashmoni Avenue has been cordoned off and a stage set up for the main function, which is due to start at 10 a.m. The stage backdrop (see Figure 11.1) features an image of Brahmachari (on the left) looking directly at Bose (on the right). To the onlooker, this is a vivid depiction of the intimate bond that exists – in the Santan Dal’s collective imagination – between the two men. In turn, this bond is important because it helps foster the ‘affective loyalties’ (Jasper 2011) of Brahmachari’s disciples. Between the two images is a quotation attributed to Brahmachari that reminds participants of his divine ascendency: ‘rāma nārāyana rāma [mantra]. My blood is Caitanya’s blood.’ Most participants consider Brahmachari to be a direct descendent of the 16th-century Bengali mystic Caitanya (1486–1533), who is seen as a divine incarnation in Bengal.

Figure 11.1 A VSD public meeting in Kolkata: the stage backdrop shows Balak Brahmachari (left) looking directly at Subhas Chandra Bose (right). Source: Photograph by the author.

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The devotional chanting that has continued since morning – carried out by professional musicians – also nurtures this sentiment. In the hours leading up to the address, people can be seen reciting in unison the collective mantra, ‘rāma nārāyana rāma, which is specific to the group and considered to hold special power. The chanting binds the audience together through their shared sense of devotion. Among the seated crowd, some people have their eyes closed, some are moving their body in rhythm and others are verging on spiritual ecstasy: a young man in front of the assembly stands up and begins to chant, his eyes shut, palms on his chest, as if absorbed by the devotional chant. It is only after this mood of devotion to Brahmachari has been set that Chitta Sikdar arrives onstage. He is announced once again as being the ‘appointed secretary’ of the ‘divine Father’. An elderly man, his age inspires respect among the assembly, which considers him also worthy of devotion. Tall and thin, he sits on the floor, his spine erect, and speaks extempore. His monologue flows, but remains structured; his voice is firm and his delivery rapid, which indicates his sense of assurance. Sitting still, he speaks for over an hour-and-a-half without interruption. His discourse aims to arouse defiance against the state’s official version of Netaji’s death and confidence in the belief that Bose is still alive. Sikdar explains, giving numerous details, how Netaji’s death in a plane crash was a made-up story, that the crash in Taiwan had been faked and Netaji had sought to escape to Stalin’s Soviet Union (a country he had always admired) where he was taken prisoner.25 This rhetorical strategy is a classic aspect of ‘conspiracy narratives’ – the use of many unknown ‘facts’, accompanied by numerous details that are hard to prove or disprove. Enumerating these conveys the impression that Sikdar is very knowledgeable, and this is reaffirmed by audience members who express their great respect for him. Many of them cite his writings, which are on sale at the adjacent bookstalls – specifically, one titled ‘Self-Revelation’, which elaborates Sikdar’s hypothesis of the faked crash and Netaji’s subsequent incarceration in the Soviet Union. For the participants, this literature reinforces the reliability of Sikdar’s discourse and, in turn, their mistrust of the state’s official version, which he has denounced. What makes his discourse original is the claim that Bose suffered ‘treachery and betrayal’ at the hands of the state. The effectiveness of this denunciation lies in Sikdar’s ability to involve the crowd emotionally. He does so by articulating his defiance of the official version of Bose’s death, invoking an emotion to which most of the audience can relate: injustice and betrayal by the government. This has its roots in an earlier incident. In May 1993, then on behalf of the Santan Dal which he was representing as secretary, Sikdar publicly refused to recognise Balak Brahmachari’s death.26 He organised a long vigil over Brahmachari’s body, waiting for the latter to break his samādhi [state of deep meditation].27 Some 55 days later, on the orders of 211

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the West Bengal state authorities, several thousand policemen stormed the group’s headquarters, immobilised its members using teargas shells, took charge of the body, and removed it to a nearby crematorium. This event was ‘critical’: many fellow disciples saw themselves as victims of ‘undemocratic and illegal police action’ and of the ‘authoritarian and undemocratic action of the government’ (Chatterjee 2004: 45–6). Having thus experienced violence at the hands of the state meant that Netaji’s situation directly echoed their own. While the VSD opposes the official version of Netaji’s death – a position that is shared by a wider circle of people in India – it also defends the idea that Bose did not die later of old age. How, then, does one reconcile what seems to be an ‘incredible’ or ‘unbelievable’ statement, in the VSD’s own words? VSD workers make a point of reminding the audience that Balak Brahmachari gave the same message during his lifetime. Since most participants are former members of the Santan Dal, the idea is to invoke their loyalty to Brahmachari. The message displayed on the stage backdrop leaves no room for doubt: ‘This is not false. My own words are eternal truth. There is no error; my predictions cannot be wrong: Netaji lives. Netaji will return as our leader.’ Given that VSD members see Brahmachari as a divine incarnation, his words must be considered eternal truth. If he asserted that Netaji was still living, this cannot be called into question and Netaji is, therefore, still alive. This is reaffirmed by Sikdar: ‘For one who attained excellence at birth (janmasiddha), his speech is the eternal truth.’ Of course, belief in Brahmachari’s words over 25 years after his death is not enough. To make people feel that Netaji could still be alive, the VSD needs to prove not only that Bose did not die in 1945 but also that he did not die later of old age. This is done by reframing Netaji as a ‘great yogi’: one who has been able to conquer death. This thesis relies on the belief that Bose acquired through sādhanā [ascetic practices] ‘extraordinary powers’ – an expression that designates the ‘capacities to accomplish acts and attain knowledge beyond the ability of most people’ (Jacobsen 2012: 4).28 The belief that yogis can live hundreds of years is a common trope in India and still widely shared in contemporary Bengal, where many saints are believed to have lived past 150, if not overcome death altogether.29 However, because it is only celibate ascetics who, through sādhanā, can attain ‘extraordinary powers’, the VSD needs to discard Netaji’s worldly compromises. His marriage to Emilie Schinckel and the birth of his daughter Anita Bose are, therefore, rejected as being part of a ‘defamation campaign’ and conspiracy. To anchor the claim that Bose is still alive, the VSD keeps relaying all possible ‘signs of Netaji’s presence’. At the bookstalls situated next to the stage, one finds posters that allude to his whereabouts, drawing on different theories. For instance, one photomontage (created by a VSD member and circulated among other members) juxtaposes numerous articles published in the Indian press, such as in The Statesman and Anandabazar Patrika [ānanda 212

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bājāra patrikā], that portray photographs of persons who look like Bose, but in very different contexts. These are supposedly of Bose in disguise. The men in the photographs resemble Bose as he would have looked in the 1940s. By suggesting that he is still a young man and shows no signs of old age, these photographs nourish people’s hope that Bose will return, against any facts or arguments that might prove otherwise. Such photomontages are also distributed regularly through the VSD’s WhatsApp groups. The five-page tract in Bengali that is circulated among the assembly is another sensitising device. Titled Pāncajanya – the name of the conch blown by Krishna in battle – it reproduces two letters written to Chitta Sikdar as well as two pamphlets, ‘Sleepless bird of the night’ and ‘Watchman’ (published in 1995).30 The text invites the reader to allow him/herself to be won over by his/her doubt over the author’s identity. The writings are signed under a pseudonym, ‘very old celibate’, but their style suggests Bose’s authorship. The fact that, among the crowd, one can see many placards in Bengali bearing the enigmatic phrase ‘On his birthday, we wish [Bose] a long life’, tends to show that this belief is shared widely among the VSD’s audience, most of whom are devotees.

Bose and the longing for a lost home Although Netaji is a remote historical figure, he still features regularly in the national news because of the ongoing controversy over the declassification of files related to his death. My argument is that, more than his actuality, Netaji appears as a great figure to be invoked because, symbolically, he embodies the two principal dimensions of collective mobilisation: a denunciation of the present and a proposal for an alternative future. An important aspect of Sikdar’s discourses is his criticism of contemporary India, notably the absence of a true leader. ‘Today, the entire world is devoid of any netā’, says Sikdar. Again, while the idea that Netaji was a great leader and a dynamic man of action is common in India,31 within the VSD this admiration takes on a specific affective dimension. Sikdar continues his address, asking the assembly, ‘Where is this netā who has love and affection?’ The idea of a leader who will love the people, and whose people will love him in return, is important to the VSD and resonates with all the participants, many of whom hold placards in Bengali that read ‘Let Netaji come back! Netaji will return as our leader!’ or ‘The people of our nation are still waiting for [Netaji to] come back’. Crucial to the mobilisation is the idea of a reunited India. Sikdar goes on to say: Time is coming to an end. It is through destruction that change will take place. . . . With [his venue] the two Bengals will unite, India [will become at last] whole (akhanda bhārata).32 The Asian 213

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countries [will be] united [as a bloc]. [There will be] one universal state and one universal family. . . . Obama is coming.33 On all sides, everyone is preparing. A new age is certain to come. Sikdar’s denunciation of the present situation is, therefore, imbricated with a yearning for a world in which Pakistan, Bangladesh and India are one, and a united Bengal is at the centre of a pan-Asian coalition. The impact of this discourse lies in what I infer as being a profound nostalgia for a lost home.34 It comes as no surprise that many of the participants are Bengalis who were forced to migrate to West Bengal at the time of Partition. Indeed, a characteristic of millennial movements is that they occur during periods of transition and uncertainty, and specifically among persons who have been ‘dislocated’ or ‘banned’ from the cultural or political centre and relegated to the periphery; see, for example, Levitas (1990: 194); and Werbner (2004: 455). Although the ‘coming of Netaji’ might seem dubious, regular references to the present lend some reality to this idea. The VSD refers constantly to incidents in which Netaji is said to have intervened and links these directly to the emotional experience of the participants. For instance, one of the books on sale, titled The World-Famous Absorption into the Infinite (Sikdar 2000), provides a new interpretation of the police operation at the group’s headquarters in 1993. According to this version, Balak Brahmachari’s body was replaced with another corpse. This mysterious switch took place thanks to the actions of Netaji,35 whose men from the Asian Liberation Army, dressed as policemen, smuggled the body down to the river where a white boat was waiting to carry it towards the Bay of Bengal. The boat vanished and, ultimately, Brahmachari’s corpse was taken to Manosarovar Lake, Netaji’s ‘headquarters’. Adding to this narrative, the VSD regularly announces the imminent return of Netaji, which helps maintain participants’ fervour. The VSD also cultivates fervour among its members by embodying its expectations in a common Hindu religious imaginary. The millennial belief in the return of Netaji and Balak Brahmachari is associated with the belief that a coming war will give rise to a new age. A leaflet being circulated that day drives home this analogy with the Mahabharata [Mahābhārata] by advocating a ‘great war’ – a direct allusion to the Kurukshetra war described in the epic.36 It is this imminent tremendous war that is thought to be the suitable context for the advent of Netaji as the leader of the universe: It is through this Third World War that Netaji’s reappearance will take place. . . . Netaji will return as our leader (netā). Not only India will know [him] when he returns, but all great countries too. . . . Today, the entire earth is heading towards destruction. This is why we are waiting for the incredible/unbelievable return of Netaji. . . . This is not a mere story nor a figment of imagination, but universal law. After low tide comes high tide; after the new moon comes 214

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the full moon; after night comes day; after one age comes the new age. . . . The war of the Mahabharata [the Kurukshetra war] lasted 18 days; the great war [to come] will end in [only] seven days. For participants, reading this leaflet invokes emotions that are important to their involvement in the group. The statement is a moving narrative because it combines a summary of their own experience with references seemingly to the present. The emotions experienced because of this sensitising device are most likely an extension of the sensibilities they owe to experiences shared within the mobilised group. The link between Netaji and the great Hindu epic poem does not limit a discursive analogy in the discourse. Another booklet distributed among the crowd, titled ‘The Future Leader of the Universe’ (Chakrabarti 2010), explains in detail how Netaji and Balak Brahmachari are working ‘in disguise’ and that, when the ‘[right] time comes’, they will ‘appear in front of everyone’. This belief draws on a religious analogy by comparing Bose’s supposed life undercover with the Mahabharata’s description of the Pāndavas’ exile, during which they prepared for the coming war to establish the rightful dharma [socio-cosmic world order]. The same idea is conveyed in a chromo (popular among VSD members) that I saw hanging on the wall at Sikdar’s house (see Figure 11.2). Its artisanal technology of production is embedded in the Santan Dal’s ideological constraints. Brahmachari and Netaji’s future struggle for India’s ‘real’ freedom is compared to Krishna and Arjuna’s participation in the Kurukshetra war for the purpose of creating dharmarājya [ideal kingdom or world order]. In the chromo, Netaji, in the role of Arjuna, leads the chariot driven by Brahmachari in the role of Krishna. During the nationalists’ struggle for Indian freedom, the same symbolic idiom was used to gain the support of the upper-caste constituency (Southard 1980).37

Figure 11.2 A chromo popular among VSD members, showing Netaji (left) in the role of Arjuna and Brahmachari (right) in the role of Krishna. Source: Photograph by the author.

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A more significant measure of this chromo as a sensitising device is that, if we were to remove the chariot, it would resemble a Stalinist or Maoist chromo. Communist red dominates the image against the background of a bright blue sky, a red flag fluttering in the wind. In the far-right corner is a golden halo encircling the face of the ‘prophet’ (also found in some Communist chromos) – in this case, Balak Brahmachari, who seems to be looking down at the chariot as if validating the scene. The trident on the flag appears as an alternative to the Communist hammer and sickle. As leader, Netaji (shown in his military uniform) guides the way, his hand outstretched, his gaze directed at the horizon of History. This depiction of a leader as a steersman dressed in combat uniform is typical of Communist – and totalitarian – representations. In the far background, one can see ‘the masses’ mobilised in support of their leader. They are painted in a mixture of military green and Communist red and the trident they are raising suggests sheer energy – the people carrying out the revolution. Let us note also, the white of the horses drawing the chariot, where white is symbolic of purity, passion and dignity. All these details show just how much the VSD’s millennialism not only draws from Communist millennialism but also organises itself within the latter. In researching the VSD movement, what is striking is the gap between, on one hand, the high ideals claimed by Sikdar and, on the other hand, the uncertainty of its predictions and the small concrete political actions they have prompted. I would argue that this should not be seen as a contradiction. Most of the VSD’s predictions do not materialise, but they are quietly dropped while the few successful elements are repeatedly emphasised. Over time, this establishes the impression of a successful prophecy, which gives the audience a sense of fulfilment. This phenomenon is what Robertson calls a ‘rolling prophecy’, i.e., ‘small prophecies [that] are made on a regular and ongoing basis, albeit tied to a broader millennial narrative’ (2015: 9). Moreover, it must be remembered that millenarian discourse as ‘a critical political commentary on world events’ can be ‘empowering in its own right’ (Werbner 2004: 455). Although it demands no immediate action, it is ‘a badge of moral shock which does not necessarily imply a serious willingness to give up the material comforts of bourgeois society’ (ibid.). This is because, as argued earlier, framing events in terms of catastrophic millennialism has the ‘power to convert pessimism into optimism, despair into hope’ (Gallagher 2011: 28).

Conclusion ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ (Bose and Bose 1994: 82). This is how Subhas Chandra Bose, the Bengali leader of the Indian National Congress, described to his future Austrian wife, Emilie Schinkel, a sensational story that was doing the rounds in the Indian press in September 1936. The story was that of an ascetic who, in 1921, appeared in Dhaka, bearing a striking resemblance to a young aristocrat, the prince of Bhawal, who had died 216

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suddenly in Darjeeling in 1909. In the years that followed, much of the Bengali public – and notably Kolkata’s elite – was convinced of his identity. The British government denounced the ascetic as an ‘impostor’ and deprecated the unfortunate propensity of Indians to believe in implausible stories. In his remarkable study of this case, Chatterjee notes that Bose’s observation is ironic: he did not know that, one day, he too would become someone around whom equally sensational stories of mistaken death would excite the popular imagination in Bengal (2002: 272).38 The same words could be applied to describe what I have discussed in this chapter. That said, it is worth considering that this ideology and sense of belonging is a ‘form of enchantment’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 293) that gives real meaning to life for thousands of our contemporaries, helping them reconcile themselves to the present. For members of the VSD, Netaji might still be alive because he was never proven dead. His Southeast Asian journey, from which he was expected to return to lead the INA and free India from the colonial yoke, has not yet ended. His work continues: another liberation of India is still expected, but this time, a ‘real’ liberation. This longing for a lost home is thus transmuted into the expectation of a reunited India under the direction of a Bengali leader. As I have shown, among the cluster of feelings associated with the VSD mobilisation, dissatisfaction (with the state of affairs in India) and ‘hope’ (that things might improve) emerge most clearly as the emotions that structure this mobilisation. My argument is that, implicitly, the emotion work centring on this hope is founded on a nostalgia that is symptomatic of a certain contemporary Bengali culture. This nostalgia can be traced to the sense of loss that many East Bengali Hindus felt when they were displaced by Partition. The rise of the VSD can, therefore, be seen as a response to the experience of loss and defeat among most Bengalis. By cultivating the figure of a still-living or immortal Subhas Chandra Bose, the VSD enables its members to make their peace both with a disappointing present and an undigested past.

Notes 1 In North Indian languages as well as Indian English, ‘Netaji’ (netājī) – literally, ‘revered leader’ – is the honorific by which the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose is known. 2 The English translation of the original quotation was suggested by Amélie Blom. 3 For a broader discussion of the parallels between Western and Hindu visions of the Millennium, see Urban (2011). 4 This refers to Balak Brahmachari [Bālaka Brahmacārī] (1920–1993), leader of the Santan Dal – a movement founded in the 1950s. I have studied the Santan Dal since June 2013, when I first visited its ashram in Kolkata. 5 A dear friend, Sukanya Roy, attended meetings in my place while I was not in India and sent me video recordings of the street demonstrations that took place on 23 January 2016 and 2017. She also helped me sift through the vast body of literature produced by the VSD.

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6 Captain Banerjee, with whom I spent considerable time, was invaluable in helping me trace resources and approach Chitta Sikdar, the VSD founder and leader. 7 I wish to thank the librarian-in-chief of the Ananda Bazar Patrika for helping me collect newspaper clippings on the group. 8 According to the official version, Bose was badly burnt in the crash and taken to a local military hospital, where he died. His body was cremated and the ashes taken to Tokyo, where they remain to date (Gordon 2006: 109). 9 This includes sectarian and sexual violence, mass abductions and forcible conversions. 10 This process had, of course, started earlier, a noteworthy example being the displacement of the capital of British-held territories in India from Kolkata to Delhi in 1911. 11 As Gordon (2006: 109) explains, the controversy over Netaji’s death arose almost immediately because there was no body, nor were there any photographs, death certificate or official and public reports. The war was ending and the chaos in East Asia meant that neither the Indian nor British government released any official reports. Moreover, Bose had disappeared several times before. To settle the controversy, the Indian government set up different commissions to investigate his death. In 1956, the Shah Nawaz Commission concluded that Bose had died in a plane accident. The matter did not end here because the commission’s findings entailed a two-to-one majority. The third member was Bose’s elder brother, Suresh Chandra Bose, who submitted a dissenting report stating that there had been no plane crash involving Netaji’s death. In 1970, the Khosla Commission was set up to investigate the myths surrounding Bose’s activities after his ‘death’ as claimed by different witnesses and documents. While this commission also reached the same conclusion – that Bose had died in a plane crash and that his ashes were now in Tokyo – the controversy lingered. 12 Born Birendra Chandra Chakravarty to a Brahmin family in East Bengal, he was not initiated into a traditional Hindu sect (sampradāya). His disciples, however, considered him to have been ‘born as a perfected being’ (janmasiddha). 13 Calcutta, Bengal’s capital, was renamed in 2001 as “Kolkata”. For convenience I use the new name to refer to the city both prior and after 2001. 14 In Chatterjee’s novel, santāna dala means ‘children of the mother’ and refers to an army of renouncers fighting against the British colonists and Muslim nawabs. In this context, and according to the organisation itself, santan refers to ‘all the children of this universe’ with the qualification that ‘there should be no discrimination based on politics, caste, values, or sentiment’ (Santan Dal 2011: 3). Hence, I have translated the term as ‘children of the universe’. 15 The group publicises photographs of Brahmachari receiving famous Indian artistes, scientists and politicians, among them Pranab Mukherjee, former president of India; Jyoti Basu (1914–2010), former chief minister of Bengal; Mamata Banerjee (1955–), the present chief minister of Bengal; Jawaharlal Nehru, former prime minister of India; and Barin Ghosh (1880–1959), freedom fighter and brother of Aurobindo Ghose. For a detailed study of this movement and its ideology, see Voix (forthcoming). 16 During his lifetime, Brahmachari’s discourses were published bimonthly in the sect’s mouthpiece, Karācābuk (literally, ‘the strong whip’). In 2001, all these discourses were published as a single volume. I have drawn on the fourth edition of this volume for the information presented here (see Brahmacārī [2001] 2013). 17 The function was held in Deshapriya Park in the south of the city, organised by his disciples to celebrate his birthday. 18 Unless stated otherwise, all translations from the Bengali are mine.

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19 Brahmachari was arrested for allegedly having appropriated a widow’s property. The case went to trial on 17 November 1973. See Superintendent and Remembrancer . . . versus Birendra Chandra Chakravarty [AIR 1974 SC 290, 1974 CriLJ 341 (1974) 3 SCC 661]. 20 This did not prevent Brahmachari from taking different stands on the whereabouts or activities of Bose – no matter how vague or contradictory – over the course of his life. See, for example, Brahmacārī ([2001] 2013: 11–113, 117–18, 206–8, 211–13, 221–4, 293). 21 Unlike the expression ‘conspiracy theory’, which is impossible to define, the term ‘conspiracy narrative’ has the advantage of not ascribing ‘beliefs’ to the actors, as ‘subscribers may only partially or even playfully utilize these ideas’. It also makes no distinction ‘between proven and unproven theories’ (Robertson 2015: 8–9). 22 I have taken examples from the procession I attended on 23 January 2015 and supplement these with examples from the 2016 and 2017 processions. 23 Fieldwork observations from 23 January 2015. Photographs available from the author. 24 Another story that circulates among VSD members is that Brahmachari was Bose’s guru and that he initiated the latter into shākti worship [Divine power] and sādhanā. Although it is highly improbable that a 19-year-old could have initiated the charismatic president of the Indian National Congress (who was 23 years older), the rhetoric is interesting because it suggests that a deep and invisible relationship connects the two people. Note that another Bengali sect, the Ananda Marga, promoted the same idea: their guru was believed to have initiated Bose into tantric sādhanā (Voix 2010). 25 This hypothesis, if proven, could prove extremely embarrassing for India, which had friendly diplomatic ties with the former Soviet Union. There are usually two variations of the story: one in which Netaji died in a gulag not long after and the other in which he eventually returned to India, but as an ascetic, and died of old age. 26 Sikdar argued that Brahmachari had entered a higher state of consciousness – an ‘absorbed concentration without object’ – involving the suspension of bodily functions, which could only be achieved by those with the highest spiritual powers. At the time, he recalled that, in 1967, Brahmachari had remained in a state of samādhi for 22 days during which, to all outward appearances, he was dead. He had then emerged from his trance and resumed normal life. 27 The matter soon became a ‘public event’ in Kolkata. It was picked up by the press, which reported that the body was being kept on slabs of ice in heavy air-conditioning. This turned the story into what Partha Chatterjee calls a ‘fight for rational values in public life and against obscurantist beliefs and practices’ (2004: 43). Since then, most Bengalis tend to remember the Santan Dal in the context of this event. 28 The expression ‘extraordinary powers’ is preferable to ‘supernatural powers’, ‘supernatural abilities’ or ‘miraculous or magical powers’ because, from a yogic point of view, powers acquired through sādhanā ‘are not disruptions of the laws of nature’: rather, they ‘show mastery over nature’. That is, they are part of how nature works and cannot be considered miracles because there has been no interference in the laws of Nature by an external power. For a detailed discussion of this, see Jacobsen (2012). 29 This is the case, for example, of the Bengali saint Lokenath Brahmachari, wellknown to VSD members. 30 The translations of these titles are given by the VSD. 31 As an example, a reviewer of two recent books on Bose writes that reading them had left him with ‘a sinking feeling that if I were to compare any present political

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leader in India against Netaji, [it would imply that] India [was] doomed to a future of conflict and stagnation’ (Majumdar 2016). 32 Since the promulgation of the Constitution of India in 1950, which reads, ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’, ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ have become interchangeable, at least at the juridical-political level. However, it should be noted that they have not always carried the same meaning through time. In everyday contemporary conceptions, ‘Bharat’ (skt. bhārata, also bhāratavarsha) is ‘perceived as native because it was found in ancient Sanskrit literature’ (ClémentinOjha 2014). 33 Sikdar gave this address on 23 January 2015, two days before the US President Barack Obama’s official visit to India, which the press saw as a sign of warming relations and the beginning of a new collaboration between the two countries. 34 For this analysis, I rely on what Traïni calls the inductive paradigm, which consists of ‘hunting down traces – in their double meaning of involuntary marks and physical remains – and inferring causes from effects is the only method in any discipline that aims to acknowledge those processes to which the observer does not have direct access’ (2010: 237). 35 As proof, he explains that the minister in charge had renamed what was popularly known as Operation Satkar (literally, cremation), Operation Jugnū. The word jugnū [firefly] was taken from the name of a 1973 Hindi movie in which a real diamond was replaced with a fake. According to this account, not only was Brahmachari alive in 1993, but he was also still alive today. 36 The leaflet distributed on 23 January 2015 was published by the Maitri Mahal (friends of the organisation), the Mahila Karmisangha (women’s wing) and the VSD. 37 Although militant religious symbolism drew primarily on Shakta, Jugantar, a newspaper closely associated with Aurobindo Ghosh and a mouthpiece of militant revolutionary ideology, ‘occasionally referred to the Vaisnavite tradition of Krishna’s participation in the Mahabharata War’ (Southard 1980: 367–8). 38 Partha Chatterjee reveals the exceptional nature of this case: the protagonists clashed in a long trial that took place in Kolkata during the decisive years of the Indian anticolonial movement (2002: 272–3).

References Bose, Sisir Kumar and Sugata Bose, eds. 1994. Subhas Chandra Bose: Letters to Emilie Schenkl 1934–1942. Delhi: Permanent Black. Brahmacārī, Bālaka. (2001) 2013. Samagra karā cābuka sankalana [The Complete Edition of ‘The Strong Whip’]. Kolkata: Vaidik Santan Dal. Cefaï, Daniel. 2007. Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on? Les théories de l’action collective. Paris: La Découverte-MAUSS. Chakrabarti, Satya. 2010. Bhābī vishvarāstranāyaka [The Future Leader of the Universe]. Kolkata: Vaidik Santan Dal. Chatterjee, Partha. 2002. A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Clémentin-Ojha, Catherine. 2014. ‘“India, That Is Bharat . . .”: One Country, Two Names’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 10, http://samaj. revues.org/3717 (accessed on 30 December 2016).

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Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 2000. ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, Public Culture, 12(2): 291–343. Gallagher, Eugene V. 2011. ‘Catastrophic Millennialism’, in Catherine Wessinger (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, pp. 27–43. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Leonard A. 2006. ‘Legend and Legacy: Subhas Chandra Bose’, India International Centre Quarterly, 33(1): 103–12. Jacobsen, Knut. 2012. ‘Introduction: Yoga Powers and Religious Traditions’, in Knut Jacobsen (ed), Yoga Powers: Extraordinary Capacities Attained Through Meditation and Concentration, pp. 1–31. Leiden: Brill. Jasper, James M. 2011. ‘Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research’, Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 285–303. Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry. 2006. Report of the Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry on the Alleged Disappearance of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, http://mha.nic.in/hindi/sites/upload_files/mhahindi/files/pdf/jmci-I-eng.pdf (accessed on 27 June 2017). Levitas, Ruth. 1990. The Concept of Utopia. New York, NY: Phillip Allan. Majumdar, Sumit K. 2016. ‘The Rediscovery of Netaji: A Review Essay on the Life of Subhas Chandra Bose’, Economic and Political Weekly, 51(47): 39–44. Robertson, David G. 2015. ‘Conspiracy Theories and the Study of Alternative and Emergent Religions’, Nova Religio, 19(2): 5–16. Santan Dal. 2011. A Complete List of Central Committee Elected in 44th Annual General Meeting of Santan Dal by Lord Sri Balak Brahmachari. Kolkata: Santan Dal. Sikdar, Chitta. 2000. Vishvavishranta nirvikalpa samādhī [The World-Famous Absorption into the Infinite]. Kolkata: Kartrika Sarvasvastva Sāhā. Southard, Barbara. 1980. ‘The Political Strategy of Aurobindo Ghosh: The Utilization of Hindu Religious Symbolism and the Problem of Political Mobilization in Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies, 14(3): 353–76. Traïni, Christophe. 2010. ‘From Feeling to Emotions (and back Again): How Does One Become an Animal Rights Activist?’ trans. James Terry, Revue française de science politique, 60(1): 219–40. Urban, Hugh B. 2011. ‘Millenarian Elements in the Hindu Religious Traditions’, in Catherine Wessinger (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, pp. 369–84. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Voix, Raphaël. 2010. ‘Dévotion, ascèse et violence dans l’hindouisme sectaire: Ethnographie d’une secte shivaïte du Bengale’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. ———. Forthcoming. ‘“Vedic Communism”: A Case Study of the Santan Dal in West Bengal’, in Raphaël Voix and Caterina Guenzi (eds), In the Name of the Veda: Evoking the Vedic Past in India and Abroad. London: Routledge. Werbner, Pnina. 2004. ‘The Predicament of Diaspora and Millennial Islam: Reflections on September 11, 2001’, Ethnicities, 4(4): 451–76. Wessinger, Catherine, ed. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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12 DIALECTICS OF (DE)MOBILISATION Humour in Islamic sermons of contemporary Bangladesh Max Stille*

Over the course of my research on wa’z mahfils, Sunni Islamic sermons held after sunset and outside the mosque in contemporary Bangladesh, I realised increasingly that humour and jokes played a critical role. This chapter provides a close reading and rhetorical analysis of the jokes that various preachers told during sermons I recorded or acquired in multimedia formats.1 The focus here lies not so much in addressing the specific pragmatics of each sermon congregation, but rather to provide an analysis of the (de)mobilising dynamics of humour across different occasions, preachers and sects. Humour comprises a particularly ambivalent and interesting set of emotional practices in the context of this volume. It complicates the relationship between emotions and mobilisation, as it includes aspects of mobilisation (in the sense of activating group perception and shared concern) as much as of demobilisation (that of opponents as well as forms of action-inducing rhetoric). Using examples from public religious speech, I question the common perception that the religious public is devoid of a sense of humour, as against a secular public for whom anything is potentially an object of fun. This is not to downplay the incidence of violent threats against freedom of expression, in the name of protecting Islam against alleged blasphemy, which have contributed to making contemporary Bangladesh a dangerous place, e.g., for so-called ‘bloggers’. Nevertheless, it would be an analytical mistake to conclude from this that the religious public lacks a sense of humour altogether. The jokes and humorous anecdotes that are part of the sermons analysed in this chapter provide comic relief, ridicule opponents and mobilise the preacher-and-audience community by turning the powerful into figures of fun. The wa‘z mahfils of contemporary Bangladesh are held in colourful tents in the evening and at night, often lasting up to two hours. Seated on chairs 222

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on a slightly raised platform, a row of speakers address their audience, which sits on the ground. The sermon is broadcast loud enough for the sound to carry well beyond the tent, particularly in the quieter rural areas. Another communicational characteristic of the sermon is rhythm – that of the audience’s loud response, speech melodies, accompanying gestures, and the display of emotions. The sermon starts on a more restrained and ritual note; as its emotional intensity builds up, the audience becomes increasingly engrossed. The tears of the religious characters in the narrative as well as those of the preacher and his audience play a key role. Jokes and humorous descriptions, are, however, as ubiquitous as tears of (com)passion or slogans of heroism, and while laughter is not regarded as salvific as weeping, it is still a common audience reaction. Laughter, the receptive side of humour, is communicated through a plethora of ‘sensitising devices’ (Traïni 2009: 13) – the preacher’s voice, tone and language as well as his facial expressions and gestures – and by several actors (the preacher’s followers and the audience), whose laughter swells across the whole congregation. Although laughter occurs spontaneously, it is learned and performed collectively. Those assembled get into ‘the mood for laughter’. The tent is brightly lit so that audience members can see each other, but the preacher sits on stage together with a circle of followers, forming a ‘model audience’ whose reactions are observed and imitated by the other attendees. Often, once the first wave of laughter has rippled through the audience, the preacher builds on this and narrates further humorous stories. This collective mood is pivotal to the reception of the sermons: relief and disruption form counterparts to other expressions of emotion (in particular, crying) and receptive attitudes (in particular, immersion into the sermon).2 The wa‘z mahfil is different from the relatively formal Friday sermon held in a mosque as a prerequisite to the Friday prayer. It is linked to public poetry recitals (Petievich and Stille 2017) and to the narrative traditions of Bengal and beyond (Stille 2014: 110–13). The often festive character of a wa‘z mahfil situates the sermon’s humour among other instances of humour at religious festivals in South Asia (Raj 2010: 22) and phenomena such as ritual levity in South Asian religious traditions more generally (Raj and Dempsey 2010). In the literary and performative traditions of India, humour has played a significant role across religions and contexts: the Panchatantra may seem remote, but humour is also essential to closer genres such as Bengali pīr [Muslim spiritual guide] tales (Stewart 2004: 25) and the Urdu dāstān [popular romance tradition] (Pritchett 1991: 16). In short, while Islamic traditions record the Prophet Muhammad’s humorous side, Islamic public narration, whether it is preaching or storytelling, expands the purview of humour considerably. There are, of course, finer distinctions to consider: the laughter at a wa‘z mahfil does not exceed a certain point, but nor is it as carefully limited as it would be at a Shiite Muharram sermon (Bard 2010: 166). Since the 223

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preachers of the sermons dealt with here often take an oppositional stance to the Bangladeshi state and polity, styling themselves and their audiences as subaltern counter-publics, the humour of their sermons is always entangled with power relationships – not only between the preacher and his audience but also between the congregation at large and the public.3 Particularly with the wider dissemination of such sermons through the social media, these relationships become part of a religious public that reaches far beyond the physical audience and preacher. This means that preachers’ ideological affiliations, e.g., to Deobandi or Barelwi madrasas [seminaries] or to the Jamaat-e Islami, become part of a larger discourse organised around shifting genre conventions. As I will show, preachers with different attitudes to political mobilisation struggle with these genre conventions. My analysis, therefore, also speaks to the growing interest in humour in social movement studies (see, for instance, Hart and Bos 2007). Humour is classified as an emotion by many of the rhetoric and poetic traditions on which the wa‘z mahfil is built. Rhetorical theories of Greek and Latin antiquity, which have influenced Islamic homiletics in South Asia in many respects (Stille 2016a), count humour among the (lighter) emotions directed at the speaker (ethos) (Ueding 1996: 25). The study of which objects evoke humour and how is shared between rhetoric and poetics. In South Asia, discussions of humour in art go back to Bharata Muni’s theory of drama as laid out in the Nātyashāstra, in which it is treated as one of the eight aesthetic emotions or rasas and referred to as hāsya. Although it did not give rise to a separate genre equivalent to the comedy in Europe, its conceptualisation includes many aspects that were central to discussions of the comic there as well and which recur in my following analysis of the sermons. Among these facets of humour are ‘unseemly dress and ornament’, an example of the incongruity theory of humour and the violation of propriety, which was carried on by later Indian theorists; the ‘strange movement of limbs’; and the idea that humour is evoked primarily by ‘women or persons of the inferior type’ (Siegel 1987: 110). Among the types of laughter in the Nātyashāstra, we also find the ‘laughter of ridicule’ or upahāsita. This term is the root of the Bengali word denoting satirical humour and a dimension of humour that will be the starting point of my analysis. In analysing the functions of humour in the wa‘z mahfil, I follow two opposite, but interlinked, impulses. The shortlist of its functions provided earlier already contradicts the widespread perception of humour as being liberal or subversive and emphasises its quality as a rhetorical means of shaping collective attitudes. In the first section, I deal with such humour as a means of mobilisation. The jokes I analyse induce laughter because they are consciously directed at an object of ridicule, thereby mobilising group cohesion, as they endow both the preacher and his congregation with the counterfactual unity typical of populist rhetoric. At the same time, it is difficult to keep humour in check, as I show in the second section. Under 224

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the heading of ‘demobilisation’, I look at humour as a ‘tilt-phenomenon’. I show that, while humour may target specific opponents, it always has the potential to destabilise one’s own position. I follow the gradual tilting from controlled role-play, via parody in the sermons, towards parodying the sermon genre itself. This chapter, therefore, complicates the role of humour as a mobilising emotion (as defined in the introduction and distinguished from mobilised emotions). Humour, a constituent of the emotional spectrum of the sermons in question, is a double-edged sword because it necessarily links mobilising and demobilising impulses. The synthesis of these movements raises new questions about the directionality and level of emotions, as I elaborate in the conclusion.

Mobilisation by ridiculing the other In its most targeted and mobilising form, humour overlaps with polemic and insult, and can be used to defame groups singled out as opponents. One frame for doing this is through the inside conversations that preachers occasionally have with ordinary believers, during which they might mock the latter – a role reversal also reported within Shiite Urdu preaching (Bard 2010: 167). Such accounts can be used to further political attitudes, for instance, by discursively alienating one’s opponents from their Islamic credentials. For instance, a preacher and politician of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami presents an account that (among other things) juxtaposes Islamic belief and philanthropist engagement, which in Bangladesh is a critical basis for secularist mobilisation (Shehabuddin 2011). He ‘recounts’ his conversation with a rich person who engages in all kinds of charity work, but who asks the preacher if he can be a good Muslim despite not praying regularly: ‘Will my faith (īmān) be broken only for not praying regularly?’ The preacher tells his audience: ‘I said to him: “Dude, since you don’t have any belief in the first place, what is there to be broken?”’ (Sayeedi 2014, 00:58:36). In this mockery, a fundamental shared conviction, the importance of prayer, is the basis for ‘othering’ a group (here, philanthropists) by showing that it does not share the same conviction (here, not praying regularly). The dialogue also portrays the preacher as steadfast and principled against (potentially hypocritical) efforts to elicit his approval of an obvious wrong. One might add critically that the preacher’s described behaviour legitimises, and provides a model for, polemical retort instead of meaningful engagement with his conversation partner’s concerns. Similarly, irreconcilable and presumptuous humour is sometimes directed at ‘polytheists’, ‘idol worshippers’ or, more concretely, ‘Hindus’. As is often the case with imprecations or jokes bordering on the illegitimate, these instances tend to rely on short, simple word-games. Another preacher, for example, describes an incident in which the ‘idol’ is left alone by its devotee 225

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and ‘cannot even defend itself’ against a dog urinating on it. This description is intended to disgrace the religious ‘Other’ and is comical at the same time – it builds up the comic contrast between the holy and highest and the profane and lowest. The climax of laughter is teased out by the joke’s punchline, which creates, in compressed form, conceptual proximity by phonetic association, calling to mind children’s taunting nicknames. The angry devotee asks the idol, ‘Are you God (khodā) or [a] fraud (hodā)?’ (author’s field notes, 13 March 2014, Sylhet). The pun, used in different sermons to decry the powerlessness of pre-Islamic polytheistic worship, is transferred to a polemic description of Hindu pūja [worship] in this case. The preacher adds a second phonetic pun, this time pairing the Hindu goddess Durga with the word dargah or sufi shrine, thereby condensing the long-cultivated allegation that the sufi is ‘Hinduised’. In both cases, we can see how small phonetic displacements are used to transfer negative value judgements to new objects – first, Hindus and then, sufis. A variety of humour more important than such pinpricks and polemics is expressed through elaborate narrations that draw out the comical from political interpretations of a fundamental religious conviction. The basic trope underlying most non-humorous, directly mobilising forms of these sermons is the transfer of Allah’s almightiness from the religious to other realms. Allah’s might comes in handy for a populist perspective ‘from below’ since it underlines the futility of all earthly powers. Preachers will regularly ask their audience, ‘Whose land/country (zamīn/desh) is this?’, to which the latter will shout out the obvious answer: ‘Allah’s!’ The humorous side of this mobilising agitation relies on the fact that, from the perspective of an omnipotent deity, all human power is rendered comical or, more precisely, it suffers from a strong, incongruous megalomania. This, in turn, offers the opportunity for carnivalesque descriptions in which it is not the ‘little man’ who is mechanically – and comically – steered by someone else, but his more powerful counterpart instead. In other words, preachers can establish the wa‘z mahfil as a counter-discourse against the powerful, and can profit from the pleasurable and relieving laughter of a lower-class audience without having to simultaneously analyse the emotion or direct it towards any concrete action. Let us look at three examples – all related to narratives from Islamic history – to illustrate the different levels of this mechanism. The first two show the importance of auditory performance and visual description as well as the connection between humour and wonder. The third example establishes Allah’s intervention as something that caters specifically to ridiculing His opponents. Taken together, the three examples demonstrate shades of the topos, or commonplace, in which the powerful are made ridiculous. The comical aspect of megalomania can be teased out with reference to archetypal figures from Islamic history. One preacher, for example, includes a satirical account of the pharaoh in his description of the Exodus. He 226

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recounts the well-known story of Moses leading the tribes of Israel out of Egypt. The pharaoh wants to pursue Moses and orders: ‘“At cock’s crow at the end of the night, I will start [in pursuit] with my armed soldiers!”’ (author’s field notes, 8 January 2013, Shiddhirganj). However, the preacher shows that the pharaoh’s expectations are thwarted, as he did not reckon with God’s playful intervention. While the pharaoh relies ‘naturally’ on the cock’s crow at dawn, the cock’s true nature – from the sermon’s perspective – is to serve Allah. As the preacher goes on to say: But whether the cock will crow is in the hands of Allah the Pure. Is that right or wrong, my brothers? [Right!] In this very night, Allah the Pure has given an order to the cock: ‘Messenger, there is no need for the cock to crow this night’. (author’s field notes, 8 January 2013, Shiddhirganj) The audience starts to laugh at the pharaoh’s overconfidence and revels in anticipating his humiliation. The preacher asks: ‘So what does the cock say? Does he say, “Cock-a-doodle-doo”? No.’ The laughter swells and feeds into the emotion of wonder at the glory of Allah. The preacher continues: ‘He recites the praise of God: [in Arabic] “Glorified [is He] Our Lord, and the Lord of the angels and the Spirit”’ (author’s field notes, 8 January 2013, Shiddhirganj). By juxtaposing the inarticulate animal’s call (which the pharaoh expects to hear) with emphatic praise in the holy language, the preacher overturns the ‘natural’ expectations of the powerful in a comic moment. The humorous element of this transformation relies performatively on the contrast between two imitations of a non-human/extra-human voice. Mimicking the cock would have meant the preacher adopting the cock’s crow – a ridiculous thing to imagine in itself and, therefore, bound to amuse the audience. Again, this expectation – suspended just before the preacher starts his recitation – is not met: instead, it is exceeded. While the preacher alters his voice, he does so by shifting gear into a beautiful recitation in Arabic, glorifying God. The joy of superiority, fun and the wonder at God’s majesty overlap in the cock’s praise (subbūh). Since the audience is already in the mood for laughter, the preacher continues to lampoon the pharaoh – again, by referring to animals and adding a visual dimension to the preceding joke. When Moses parted the sea to make way for the tribes of Israel, the preacher recounts, even the pharaoh’s horse knew better than he of the divine intervention to come: Everyone is moving forward. Clattering fills the air. On this side stands the pharaoh with his horse. He says to the horse: ‘Descend!’ The horse says: ‘Am I crazy [that I would do so]? You’re going crazy. You’re the craziest man in the world’. (author’s field notes, 8 January 2013, Shiddhirganj) 227

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After the initial laughter at this mockery of the powerful, the preacher extends the comic effect with a graphic description of how the pharaoh finally descends onto the seabed, God having commanded the archangels to ‘help’ him: ‘He sends Jibrā’īl and Mikā’īl: one from the front and one from behind. One pulls from the front and the other pushes from behind. That’s how he [the pharaoh] descends’ (author’s field notes, 8 January 2013, Shiddhirganj). We can easily recognise two elements of the comic figure into which the pharaoh is transformed: the external control being exerted over him and the mechanical back-and-forth movement this entails. A second example of a carnivalesque depiction of an archetypal ‘enemy of Islam’, Abū Jahl, occurs in another sermon. Here, it is based on a saying of the Prophet Muhammad that is also well-known from the Bible: ‘He who digs a pit for his brother will be thrown into it by God.’ The preacher draws on the story to elicit schadenfreude. Abū Jahl digs a pit into which he hopes the Prophet will fall on his way to the Ka‘bah one night. Gabriel, however, carries the Prophet across on his wings. The preacher continues: Going to a corner of the pit, [Abū Jahl] sees there is no way out from inside. ‘Let me check whether he has fallen in or not’ [he says to himself]. . . . Since it is dark and he can’t see well, he goes even closer. Allah says: ‘You dug a pit for my Prophet to fall into. See how you like [falling into] it yourself!’ (author’s field notes, 27 March 2014, Komilla) As in the narrative about the pharaoh, a powerful ‘enemy of Islam’ is depicted as a comical figure whose physical effort exceeds by far his mental effort, rendering both fruitless. Again, the comic effect is created by referring to divine intervention and thereby inducing a feeling of wonder vis-à-vis Allah’s might. While the build-up of tension towards Abū Jahl’s fall is in line with the moral impetus of the Hadith, Allah’s intervention (and particularly His comment) serves to increase the comic effect – Allah Himself partakes in ‘the flagrant immorality of situational comedy’ (Jauss 1982: 193). This also implies that the ‘laughing community’ includes Allah Himself, with Whom the audience becomes connected in their laughter. While these examples rely on the link between humour and divine intervention in carnivalesque redistributions of the sensible (Rancière 2004), another important mechanism of the comical in the wa’z mahfil concerns ‘transparency’. Here, the opportunity to laugh at a scoundrel’s mistake is created by redistributing narrative information. The comic tension arises from the difference between what the narrator (and thus the audience) knows and what the story’s characters know. This structure is taken up in relation to well-known legends and, in turn, feeds into more political instances. An example from Islamic lore is the account of Yūsuf’s brothers 228

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faking his death. To mislead their father Ya‘qūb, they drench Yūsuf’s shirt in blood. In this case, the preacher continues the narration as follows: But Allah had loosened a screw in their heads. They forgot to rip the shirt apart. They went to their father, wailing, ‘A tiger has devoured Yūsuf!’ Ya‘qūb (a.s.) took the shirt. . . . ‘How could a preying tiger devour my Yusuf from within his shirt, without slashing the shirt through, without even cutting it open. What a skilful tiger!’ (Ansari 2013, 00:00:39) The brothers’ ‘wailing’ is revealed to be false, both to Ya‘qūb as well as the audience. This first instance of parodying emotions questions the authenticity of their expression. This is all the more important because the preacher imitates the sound of their weeping at a vocal level, caricaturing one of the most important techniques of the expression and evocation of emotions in the wa‘z mahfil. The brothers’ pathos described here is made out to be hypocritical and is thereby ridiculed and destroyed. Ya‘qūb’s omniscience allows him to ‘see through’ his sons’ lie: he does not, therefore, begin to wail as the traditional story arc might demand (Stille 2013: 77–78). Instead, he mocks them in irony. Applied to the political sphere, the comic tension between different levels of information is played off against stories of rulers hatching plots at the expense of their people. Here, the same preacher superimposes the ‘hypocrisy’ of Harūn al-Rashīd, the Abbasid caliph of One Thousand and One Nights fame, onto rulers in general and, by extension, onto the Bangladeshi political leadership. Not only are they responsible for the increase in the price of rice, he says, but they also respond to criticism with further hypocrisy, arbitrarily having innocent persons arrested to avoid being held responsible themselves. This is an example of how the topos of the duplicitous ruler is drawn into the present: his general and trans-historical characteristics are retained, but the instances to which they are applied are common popular grievances in Bangladesh: the high price of basic foodstuffs; arbitrary, politically motivated arrests that often target scapegoats. Like Ya‘qūb, the preacher ‘sees through’ these plots, as does the audience. In the guise of a joke, this mobilises a collective sense of release and, therefore, of community, but no tangible political action. At the same time, it articulates criticism of the powerful and makes ‘social conventions bearable’ (Verkaaik 2003: 15). Having established the degrees to which humour – based on a populist religious conviction – targets different objects of ridicule, the next example juxtaposes the tainted, everyday world with the ideal world of God in an abstract sense and without naming tangible opponents. Addressing students in the central courtyard of a madrasa, the preacher achieves this

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by quoting the first clause of an antithesis, which leaves the second part implied: ‘The workings of Allah are different!’ he says, meaning ‘different from worldly affairs’ (author’s field notes, 8 January 2013, Shiddhirganj). The centrality and authority of the sentence are underlined twice: first, by speaking in Urdu, the language of madrasa instruction – ‘Allah kē muʻāmalāt aur hain’ – and then repeating this in Bangla. Building on this juxtaposition, the preacher adds a joke relating to the God-world relationship. The joke plays on the difference between worldly and divine action in terms of speed, ease and finality, and between ‘building’ and ‘creating’ by referring to a taxing experience that everyone congregated there (including myself) had undergone several times. The main traffic hub near the madrasa had been catastrophically choked for several years due to the construction of a flyover, which the preacher calls an ‘overbridge’ when juxtaposing the pace of construction with the divine powers of Moses’ staff: Now Mūsa Kalīmullah casts the Staff of Faith [on the ground]. . . . As soon as [the staff] falls to the ground, the waters of the sea recede on either side. In the middle, 12 extensive roads are created: 12 extensive roads; 12 roads for 12 tribes. This is not the overbridge of Jatrabari, which is in the making, in the making. [There is] no end in sight. People are under strain and are suffering. Coming to this wa’z mahfil, I was caught in a traffic jam for three-and-a-half hours! How arduous! It’s in the making, in the making. May Allah forgive [us]! Allah kē muʻāmalāt aur hain – the dealings of Allah the Pure are different. The way of Allah the Pure is kun fa yakūn [be, and it is]. Isn’t that right? (author’s field notes, 8 January 2013, Shiddhirganj) The preacher thus ravels out the comedy of man’s vain efforts to complete even the smallest task vis-à-vis God’s ability to accomplish anything effortlessly. The comic effect is reinforced by the way in which he narrates the story. For instance, when talking about the ‘overbridge’, the preacher decelerates the narrative speed by repeating that it is ‘in the making’ – as if to say, doesn’t this unsatisfactory state of affairs hold true for so many things in Bangladesh, where corruption and political impasse often lead to construction works being duplicated or grinding to a halt? The punchline is highly condensed, and shifting to the holy language, Arabic, emphasises the shift to the divine sphere of God. The command’s formal brevity ‘proves’ its content at the poetic level: the speed of God’s creation = the pace of the narrative. Since the audience expects the second part of the antithesis to be about as long as the first, it comes as a surprise when the preacher delivers a sudden, condensed application of the Infinite to a trifling aspect of the everyday world – thereby provoking laughter. 230

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So far, we have dealt with humour that mobilises fellow feeling between speaker and audience by mocking common enemies. This appears to be particularly successful when preachers link religious convictions to populist criticism of the powerful. As Jauss (1982: 193) notes: The pleasure in the inversion of hierarchical positions and the symbols of power reveals itself; placing the hero into a comic situation destroys the spell of admiring identification and allows the laughing spectator to enjoy a moment of superiority and unconcern vis-a-vis the hero who is ordinarily his superior. The primary rhetorical function of humour, then, is to direct this pleasure towards the relationship between speaker and audience. While the joke (which links religion to political counter-discourse) is being told, both speaker and audience achieve a common identity despite their different backgrounds. The criticism inherent in the mocking discourse thus is not negative, but positive. It mobilises the audience in the sense of persuading listeners of the preacher’s objectives, which, based on the common ground that has been established, they accept easily as their own. These ends, however, may be very different from the object of the ridicule itself. A wa’z mahfil is hardly the place for clarion calls to action, but its strength lies in remaining removed from party politics: only by maintaining this distance can the preacher claim to offer an ‘easy’ solution, which immediately resonates with his listeners. Censure uttered explicitly during a wa’z mahfil most commonly targets other religious schools, generally following the divide between the two main Sunni schools in South Asia, the Barelwi and Deobandi (named metonymically by their place of origin). Even here, most preachers are not especially harsh: a preacher who exceeds the level of ridicule deemed acceptable by his audience or the wa‘z mahfil’s organisers4 might not be invited to future events. The importance of the commonplace in the humour sketched so far lies not in explicit mobilisation for political causes, but in building a deeper consensus and community feeling between speaker and audience and legitimating the former’s positions on other issues.

Demobilisation: collapsing oppositions and their tilting Thus far, we have assumed that humour is an easily directed means to a predefined end. The rest of this chapter argues that, while humour creates a closeness among those laughing (by distancing them from an Other), it also has a self-distancing effect. Again, this can be used as a tool of persuasion, but it also enables a more fundamental shift in receptivity. Wolfgang Iser (1976) calls humour a ‘tilt-phenomenon’ to indicate how ridiculing the Other and causing it to collapse invariably destabilises the humourist’s ‘own’ position. While the earlier examples illustrate how humour is often 231

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built on oppositions, Iser argues that these cannot be maintained in a stable manner: laughter emerges in response to the crisis created when the recipient reproduces this tilting and destabilising process. This section considers the tilting phenomenon with respect to the different directions of humour. It argues that the intended direction of humour can ‘tilt’ and backfire. There is a fluid passage from different elements of the role-play and humour employed by preachers (particularly parody) to a distancing attitude towards rhetorical form in general and important elements of the genre in particular. This finally paves the way to parody of the genre as such. Let us start by discussing how the preacher might play with his role and performance. Often, this play is indicated by shifts in his linguistic and vocal register. He might switch from a register of public speech to a more conversational, intimate one by (i) lowering his voice; (ii) turning to the followers sitting next to him onstage, thus enacting an intimate space that is visible and audible to the rest of the congregation; (iii) choosing dialectal forms and avoiding theologically ‘loaded’ vocabulary otherwise typical of a wa‘z mahfil in favour of everyday expressions; and (iv) presenting topics that match the setting, such as personal anecdotes or jokes ‘among men’. These techniques widen the preacher’s role from that of a serious, reproving figure of authority to someone more approachable. Role shifts can lead temporarily to what we might call the ‘unreliable preacher’. For instance, while it is part of his normal role to instruct the audience to remain seated in accordance with mahfil etiquette, one preacher exaggerates this trait by saying: ‘If you are sitting behind someone who gets up, you will be fined! . . . If someone in front of you gets up, make him sit down by grabbing his leg’ (author’s field notes, 14 January 2013, Cox’s Bazar). Another common instance of playing on one’s performance is to use the tag questions that are ubiquitous in wa‘z mahfils, and whose function is to make the audience reaffirm what the preacher has just said, thus emphasising the group consensus. If the response is not enthusiastic enough, the preacher will repeat the question or urge his audience to answer louder. Another preacher toys with these expectations by playing on the phonetic closeness of ‘jānnāte [in paradise]’ and ‘jāhānnāme [in hell]’ to mock the audience. His listeners reply in low, muffled voices and end up giving the wrong answer – the mistake dissolves in the ensuing laughter (Munawar 2015, 00:01:45). A preacher’s ability to play on the established role of the audience, his listeners’ expectations and his own role is primarily a sign of his selfconfidence and mastery. Such role-play involving his own role is typically short and always entails communicating with the audience. Like the jokes of a good moderator, such role-play will not question the preacher’s authority in other situations. Indeed, he will depict himself as someone able to let go of his authority – albeit temporarily and in a controlled manner. In this 232

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sense, the tilting aspect of humour, however inevitable, does not necessarily destabilise the genre or the role of the preacher. It may even stabilise them. At the level of simple role-play, there is a clear limit as to which aspects of the preacher’s role are negotiable and which are not. The laughter evoked here is that of the audience laughing with the preacher, who incites and controls it through his own laughter. However, does engaging consciously in such role-play not leave the preacher’s own role vulnerable to humorous ambiguities? I argue that we might conceive of role plays as the beginning of parody. Parody is essential to the tilting phenomenon: it not only tells us about the object of humour but also imitates it (Ueding 1996: 29). In this way, it is a mimesis of the second order: it relies not on ‘reality’, but on prior expressions to whose form it refers. The comic effect is produced by the tension between these expressions and their twisted imitation. The emphasis on form is important because it demonstrates how humour achieves distance, not only vis-à-vis individuals and individual utterances but also relative to speech forms and entire genres. Again, this power can be deployed in a targeted way to discredit certain forms of speech. A frequent target of such polemic parody is sufi song. Through parody, preachers from opposing theological schools aesthetically underline a negative ‘rationalist’ interpretation that refuses to decode sufi topoi and forms of expression (Stille 2016b). Since the ridiculous has been conceptualised as the ‘arch enemy [Erbfeind]’ of the sublime (Richter 1827: 137), parody can serve as an effective means of ‘blocking’ the evocation of the sublime by sufi song. Nevertheless, the fact that the preacher plays a double role has an indirect effect. He embodies the person uttering what he parodies, but he is also still himself. While the shift between different roles is often marked explicitly in the sermon, parody relies on blending both roles to produce ambiguity. The audience must pay attention and decide for itself whether the emotion on display is a parody (and thus the opposite of what should be adopted) or if it is ‘real’ (and should be identified with). Often, a fine and unstable line separates the two, making it possible for the parody itself to backfire on the speaker and his medium. The reference to the ‘overbridge’ in the sermon discussed earlier might seek to ridicule the slow pace of roadworks, but it also contains the seed of a question – just how applicable are ‘Godly’ yardsticks to such a trifle? This then compels self-reflection on a highly idealistic worldview. Let us turn to a parody of a mobilising rhetorical feature common to sermons, showing how parody has the power to demobilise. How does this mobilising rhetorical device usually work? In this case, the preacher asks his listeners to espouse his position not only by responding verbally but also by raising their hands in unison. The formulated goal to which the audience subscribes can be very general, such as reaffirming that they will ‘hold on’ to the Qur’an ‘from Sūra al-Fātiha to the Sūra al-Nās’ (author’s fieldwork notes, 14 January 2013, Cox’s Bazar). Sometimes, a more concrete action – such 233

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as vowing to reject the practice of dowry – is introduced, building on the general position. Frequently, this mobilising device is pitted against some ‘Other’. In a sermon (recorded in 1987) against President Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s zakat ordinance, the Jamaat-e-Islami preacher cited earlier brands organisations rallying around the liberation war as ‘Communists’. He instructs his audience not to help them: ‘O Muslims, will you help the Communists in any way? Those who will not help them, raise your hands!’ (Sayeedi 2014, 01:24:36). His explicit aim is to politicise the wa‘z mahfil in the cause of an Islamic revolution by legitimising his audience’s espousal beyond the space of the mass congregation he is leading at that moment (Sayeedi 2003: 71). However, there are many other stances towards the genre. As mentioned earlier, the matter of assent is far less tangible in the case of most preachers, who are not aiming at political mobilisation at all and might well even be opposed to it. One very popular preacher, for example, gears his sermon to elicit melodramatic emotions and creates a parody of the mobilising form of the audience raising their hands. He frames the ‘call for action’ ironically. Asking his audience to fight, he does not single out an opponent from the ‘real world’. Rather, he refers to a figure from Islamic history, whom he has just introduced.5 The preacher asks: ‘If Abū Jahl were to come here and stand in the middle of our wa‘z tent (pandal), would you continue to listen to the wa‘z or confront him?’ The audience responds by saying they would challenge Abū Jahl first. At the same time, some men start to chuckle. The preacher continues, describing how Abū Jahl would be scared and never dare face a community as ready for combat. Finally, he asks everybody to raise their hands if they were ready to take the Prophet’s side. To this, they shout, ‘Ready!’ and raise their hands. Others shout further refrains, closing with slogans that are reminiscent of the country’s more political Islamic movements: ‘Bangladesh is on the Islamic path’ and ‘We want jihad, jihad! We choose jihad!’ Once the slogans have died down, the preacher continues with the hint of a smile on his face. In a slightly mocking tone, he asks: ‘Ah! You will carry out jihad against Abū Jahl? Is that what you really want to do?’ His audience resounds with a ‘Yes!’ Now grinning widely, he asks: ‘Or [will you fight] against [worshipping at] the graves of saints?’ – an absurd proposal, which the audience denies amid collective laughter. Obviously, this play on the mobilising technique is meant to target groups that consider worship at the graves of saints to be anti-Islamic and indeed even attack shrines. It thus makes fun of internal opponents, aiming to discredit them as misled and not fighting for the Islamic cause. However, there are several other questions to consider. Doesn’t the parody draw attention to the general structure of the mobilising call-and-response? Doesn’t it relegate this espousal to the realm of ritual action – as removed from everyday action – by directing the collective raising of hands at a distant enemy who will certainly not appear in the wa‘z tent? Doesn’t it imply that the audience 234

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understands the speech acts of the wa‘z mahfil as being invalid outside the ritual, thereby restricting their espousal to the mahfil experience? Or does this conflation of two levels create a situation in which neither the fictional nor the real can lean comfortably into one another and must therefore ‘tilt’? Undoubtedly, the parody works against directly translating the reception of scenes from the Heilsgeschichte [salvational history] towards outer action in the ‘real’ world – an attitude that fits the preacher’s melodramatic and cathartic presentation, which relies on the suspension of judgement. Next, let us examine the development of parody outside the wa‘z mahfil to illustrate the ‘tilt-phenomenon’ of humour. One might ask whether this is not an altogether different topic, as we leave the sermon genre and enter a secular space that does not decry the ridicule of religion. In fact, there is a seamless transition from humour in sermons to humour about sermons. Indeed, parodies of the sermon genre in spaces other than the wa‘z mahfil remain connected intimately to the sermon genre itself. The most popular parodist of the wa‘z mahfil was a student at a religious school when he established himself as a stand-up comedian. His parodies include, but are not limited to, the wa‘z mahfil, and have made him popular among students of religious schools and beyond, even to the point of being invited to perform at a comedy show in West Bengal. He points to the tangible connection between his parodies and the wa‘z mahfil genre: he claims to have been inspired by attending the wa‘z mahfils of a preacher from his region (interview arranged by the author). Indeed, the latter’s sermons and the comedian’s parody seem directly tied to one another. Watching a video of the sermons given by the preacher who inspired the parodist, what is striking is that the preacher takes role ambiguity far beyond the usual. His sermon is delivered in correct form, with melodic speech and snippets from a hadith in Arabic, and he makes statements that might seem otherwise incongruous (see Islam 2015). As a result, his listeners are compelled to suspend judgement until this uncertainty is resolved in favour of ironic interpretation. The parodist, in turn, condenses several decisive formal features used by this preacher and others in a TV parody that is comprehensible only to genre insiders (see Sarkar 2013). Moreover, it seems important that university students, who perform their own parodies at get-togethers, take up his style of comedy – recollecting their own humorous encounters with wa‘z mahfils as children. Students I interviewed said that, parallel to learning the ritual weeping often performed at the end of a sermon, when calling to Allah through mimetic learning, they would playfully imitate these acts of weeping – long before they understood other reasons for doing so. With respect to this common experience, one of the students ended his parody self-reflectively: ‘Allah, forgive us, for all our fake imitations we did during all this time!’ (author’s interview with Anwar Chowdhury, 5 May 2015, Dhaka). 235

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The dynamics of humour in popular Islamic preaching What do we learn about mobilisation and emotions from this analysis of the dialectics of humour in wa‘z mahfils? First, mobilisation is not necessarily based on ‘strong’ emotions such as anger, love or hatred, but can be achieved by the ‘light’ relief brought about by humour. Second, this mobilisation often relies on the poly-directionality of humour, which uses its object to mobilise positive emotions with respect to the relationship between speaker and audience. This direction of humour seems to be missing from Verkaaik’s (2003) discussion of ‘transgressive humour’, which focuses on the object but does not pay attention to the communicational effects of humour. Preachers tighten the group identity through satire targeting their religious opponents or profit from the shared pleasure of carnivalesque descriptions of the powerful, intended for a lower-class audience – descriptions that link several levels of reference from Islamic history to the present day. Third, different emotions are linked to the humour in these sermons, which might, for example, transform repressed anger against the elite of this world into triumph and wonder at God’s power. Fourth, self-reflexive humour provides an opportunity for the preacher to extend his emotional repertoire beyond an exhorting role. Fifth, this laughter with the preacher as a peer is separate from the audience’s laughter at the elite, although both are conscious rhetorical devices. Sixth, there is a seamless transition from directed humour and parody to blocking opponents from mobilising emotions, be they religious or political. Seventh, parody is also an example of humour as a ‘tilt-phenomenon’ that turns the wa‘z mahfil genre back on itself – within such sermons as well as in their reception in the wider cultural sphere. Such humorous distancing from key mobilising speech acts of the genre illustrates how the latter negotiates its position between religious ritual, poetic communication and outward political action. I have argued that humour, while an indispensable part of the rhetorical strength of wa‘z mahfils, is also risky when it comes to ‘directed’ communication. The receptive attitude that is built on, and furthered by, humour makes it possible to perceive the medium from a playful distance. Parody thus evolves as a crucial mechanism for suspending one’s emotions. The emotions experienced in this frame may be more akin to the suspended emotions experienced during the reception of fiction. This would mean that theories of the effects of virtual experiences, ranging from theories of catharsis to those of modern media, could be applied to the wa‘z mahfil. The thresholds they deal with may help explain why politically oriented preachers at times find the genre frustrating to use. The importance of the virtuality of role-plays also deconstructs any simple binary between supposedly ‘secular’ humour and an impassioned religious genre. The wa’z mahfils’ internal dynamics not only emotionalise the religious and mobilise emotions 236

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around political (and other) issues but they also demobilise and aestheticise. While secular and religious ideologies are at times pitted against one another, both are criss-crossed by the powerful yet possibly tilting humour attached to fictional and ritual roles.

Notes * My sincere thanks to the EMOPOLIS team, whose feedback helped greatly in shaping my initial (and often vague) thoughts on the subject. My special thanks to Amélie Blom, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal and Margrit Pernau for their detailed feedback; to Raphaël Voix for presenting a draft of this essay in Delhi in 2015; and to Denis Constant Martin for discussing it in Paris the following year. I am also grateful to the participants of the South Asia Colloquium at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. 1 Overall, I discuss 10 sermons downloaded from YouTube, obtained as television and video recordings or recorded during my fieldwork. 2 The analysis of this interdependence seems to be a major contribution of the theories of humour stemming from poetics. One of the most pointed examples of an adverse relationship is that of Jean Paul’s juxtaposition of humour and the sublime (see Hügli 2005: 13). 3 This political context and its analytical implications constitute a major difference to laughter in Indonesian sermons as described by Millie (2017). 4 Most often local voluntary associations but also sufi networks, madrasas and branches of Islamic political parties. 5 Fieldwork video (number 8) shot in 2006 with the assistance of Shamsul Haque.

References Ansari, Jubaer Ahmed. 2013. ‘Bangla waz jubaer ahmed ansari Sura Yusuf Er pt1’. YouTube video of Jubaer Ahmed Ansari’s sermon, 19:16, posted by ‘belal hussan’, 26 February, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZlecEqt0gA. Bard, Amy C. 2010. ‘Turning Karbala Inside out: Humor and Ritual Critique in South Asian Muharram Rites’, in Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (eds), Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions, pp. 161–84. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hart, Marjolein’t and Dennis Bos, eds. 2007. Humour and Social Protest. International Review of Social History: Supplement 15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hügli, Anton. 2005. ‘Lachen, das Lächerliche’, in Gert Ueding (ed), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, pp. 1–17. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Iser, Wolfgang. 1976. ‘Das Komische: Ein Kippphänomen’, in Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning (eds), Das Komische, pp. 389–402. München: Fink. Islam, Nazrul. 2015. ‘New Bangla waz mufti sayed nazrul islam 8 ti amol nia alochona’. YouTube video of Nazrul Islam’s sermon, 2:35:21, posted by ‘moyes bulbul’, 24 January, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAWLbJS1Z_k. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw, vol. 3 of Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Millie, Julian. 2017. Hearing Allah’s Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Munawar, Tarek. 2015. ‘BANGLA WAZ MULANA TAREK MUNAWAR AT JACKSON HEIGHTS ISLAMIC CENTER, NY DATE 02-June-2015’. YouTube video of Tarek Munawar’s sermon, 1:49:35, posted by ‘mohammod islam’, 15 June, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFXL4nKFMnY. Petievich, Carla and Max Stille. 2017. ‘Emotions in Performance: Poetry and Preaching’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54(1): 67–102. Pritchett, Frances W., trans. 1991. The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Raj, Selva J. 2010. ‘Serious Levity at the Shrine of St. Anne in South India’, in Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (eds), Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions, pp. 21–36. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Raj, Selva J. and Corinne G. Dempsey, eds. 2010. Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Richter, Jean P. 1827. Vorschule der Aesthetik [Introduction to Aesthetics], vol. XLI, Erster Band: Jean Paul’s Saemmtliche Werke [Complete Works]. Berlin: G. Reimer. Sarkar, Tanvir. 2013. ‘Bānglādesher 64 Jelā_ashādhāran kautuk_mirakkel_tānbhīr sarkār’. YouTube video of Tanvir Sarkar’s performance on Mirakkel Akkel Challenger, Zee Bangla, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfqB50bovd0. Sayeedi, Delwar Hossain. 2003. Āmi kena Jāmāyāte Islāmī kari. Dhaka: Global Printing and Publishing Network. ———. 2014. ‘Bangla Tafseer Mahfil – Delwar Hossain Sayeedi at Chittagong 1980s [Full] Rare Waz’. YouTube video of Delwar Sayeedi’s sermon (filmed in 1987), 2:12:31, posted by ‘Matrivashai’, 21 May, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=f2CG8UoTM_M. Shehabuddin, Elora. 2011. ‘Bangladeshi Civil Society and Islamist Politics’, in Ali Riaz and C. Christine Fair (eds), Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh, pp. 91–114. New York, NY: Routledge. Siegel, Lee. 1987. Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stewart, Tony K., trans. 2004. Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Stille, Max. 2013. ‘Metrik und Poetik der Josephsgeschichte Muhammad Sagirs’. Working Papers in Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures, no. 1. Heidelberg: Südasien-Institut. ———. 2014. ‘Islamic Non-Friday Sermons in Bangladesh’, Südasien-Chronik/ South Asia Chronicle, 4: 94–114. ———. 2016a. ‘Conceptualizing Compassion in Communication for Communication: Emotional Experience in Islamic Sermons (Bengali wa‘ẓ mahfils)’, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 11(1): 81–106.

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———. 2016b. ‘Sufism in Bengali wa’z mahfils’, in Deepra Dandekar and Torsten Tschacher (eds), Islam, Sufism and Everyday Politics of Belonging in South Asia, pp. 294–313. London: Routledge. Traïni, Christophe. 2009. Émotions . . . Mobilisation! Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Ueding, Gert. 1996. ‘Rhetorik Des Lächerlichen’, in Lothar Fietz, Jörg O. Fichter and Hans-Werner Ludwig (eds), Semiotik, Rhetorik Und Soziologie Des Lachens: Vergleichende Studien Zum Funktionswandel Des Lachens Vom Mittelalter Zur Gegenwart, pp. 21–36. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. Verkaaik, Oskar. 2003. ‘Fun and Violence: Ethnocide and the Effervescence of Collective Aggression’, Social Anthropology, 11(1): 3–22.

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Part V THE EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS OF PUBLIC CONTROVERSIES

13 HURT AND CENSORSHIP IN INDIA TODAY On communities of sentiments, competing vulnerabilities and cultural wars Laetitia Zecchini

Arjun Appadurai’s (2006) observation that the cultural field has become the arena in which fantasies of purity, authenticity, borders, and security are enacted seems especially relevant in the Indian context, where what stands for ‘Indian culture’ is often sanctuarised or sacralised in the name of the passionate and vulnerable sentiments it provokes. When the leader of a Mumbai fringe Catholic group, Joe Dias, was asked why a play featuring a pregnant nun seemed to hurt Catholic sentiments only now, in 2015, and had to be banned, he responded: ‘Even if it had been staged before, today sentiments are running high’ (Chari 2015) – as if the currency of sentiments and their pre-inscribed inflammability was justification for censorship. By engaging with the work of legal scholars, historians, anthropologists, writers, and philosophers on issues of censorship and emotions, and by examining recent cases of censored works and artists, I would like to discuss the specificity of the entanglement of the rhetoric of censorship with the language and performance of emotions in India today. By closely examining the discourses and documents produced by different groups, in particular, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) collective of artists and intellectuals,1 my objective is to analyse how ‘hurt’ – both the term itself and the emotion that is claimed – is mobilised, strategised and distributed in practices and discourses of cultural regulation and cultural ‘resistance’.2 Although it is debatable to suggest – as some critics do – that art was one of the most secure and autonomous edifices of the secular Indian nation (see Guha-Thakurta 2011), it is clear that art has come increasingly under attack over the last 30 years.3 The connection between the consolidation of the Hindu Right and growing attacks on works of art and freedom of expression is inescapable. But the climate of censorship must also be understood

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in the context of the rise of communal politics and its criminalisation, for which the Congress, as Maheshwari (2011) points out, must be held accountable as well.4 The greater visibility of artists, the increasing democratisation of art and the role of new media in the circulation of images and texts has also increased the chance of hurting those publics to which art was previously inaccessible. Censorship, according to Mazzarella (2013a), is heightened by the coming of mass publicity and by the anxiety produced once it becomes impossible to harness mass-mediated image-objects. If, as he suggests, censorship was an obsessive topic in India in the 1990s when the feeling of ‘cultural emergency’ was widely shared, it seems as much an obsession in 2014 and 2015, if not more. Hardly a week goes by without a case of violent cultural regulation being reported in the Indian media. Between August 2013 and August 2015, three influential writers, activists and rationalists – Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M. M. Kalburgi – were permanently silenced when they were gunned down in Maharashtra and Karnataka. In India, the pervasiveness of censorship (of which assassination is an extreme form) is accompanied by the pervasiveness of the language of ‘hurt’, and both issues have increasingly become objects of academic study.5 ‘Ban Art that Hurt People’s Feelings’ is the title of a 2010 newspaper article quoting the words of a Bharatiya Janata Party leader in Maharashtra (see Singh 2010). The statement could not be any clearer. Instances of legal cases where ‘hurt feelings’ were enough to censor works of art, literature and scholarship are too numerous to list and the catalogue would be tedious.6 Suffice it to say here that artists, writers, scholars, publishers, and curators are made to answer charges of obscenity, defamation or sedition and cases are filed against them for having hurt sentiments, threatened public tranquility and incited violence. Anticipated hurt and the use of legal and extra-legal threats have frightened many cultural practitioners into silence. Two recent and widely publicised examples concern the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan and the American scholar Wendy Doniger. In January 2015, Perumal Merugan announced his literary death on Facebook (‘Writer Purumal Murugan is dead’) after being harassed by members of the Sangh Parivar. In February 2014, Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History (2008) was pulped after a four-year legal battle launched by Dinanath Batra, a long-time activist of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and head of the Hindu organisation Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti [Committee to Save Education], who had filed a lawsuit against Penguin, claiming that Doniger had hurt the sentiments of ‘crores [millions] of Hindus’. ‘The New Hypersensitivity is everywhere’, suggests the writer Palash Krishna Mehrotra (2012). Expressions such as the ‘industry of hurt’ or ‘the marketplace of outrage’ flood the media, where India is repeatedly defined as a ‘republic of hurt sentiments’.7

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Two points need, however, to be clarified at the outset. First, it is important to keep in mind that censorship cannot be understood only in terms of silencing, since censorship is also a performance that needs to be staged and censors are ‘locked into a negotiation’ (Holquist 1994) with the things they want to censor. They necessarily focus attention on what they try to suppress. Censorship is also predicated on the power of language, art or literature and on its agency. ‘When we claim to have been injured by language . . . we ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure. . . . We exercise the force of language even as we seek to counter its force’, writes Judith Butler (1997: 1). Censorship may be considered ‘productive’ in the sense that it generates discourses – over, for instance, what works of art do, whose offences or injuries are ‘real’, if it is possible to draw a line between free speech and hate speech, and so on. Censorship also generates various types of mobilisations to counter its effects. The academic and public spheres in India are simmering with calls for action and protest, with petitions, rallies and marches by artists, writers and intellectuals. Although several reports rightly point to the ‘silencing’ of liberal and artistic India (see, for example, Tang et al. 2015), countless conferences, debates and seminars have nonetheless been organised around free speech – for instance, in February 2015, both at the Gateway Literary Festival in Mumbai and for the Times of India annual debate in Kolkata. Second, as more and more critics have argued, it is imperative to challenge the predictable divisions between excitable crowds and reasonable intellectuals, or between religious emotion and legal reason (Post 1998; Mazzarella 2013a; Stephens 2014). Debates over censorship and freedom of expression have, traditionally, revolved around a series of oppositions such as the ‘work of art’ versus the ‘religious icon’ or the ‘freedom of the artist’ versus the ‘sentiments of the community’ (Juneja 2011). As Mehta (2014) illustrates: ‘The argumentative Indian is being replaced by the offended Indian, the tolerant Indian by the intolerant mob, the reflective citizen by the hurt communal mobiliser’. And yet, if the work of Indian artists and writers is increasingly attacked in the name of the ‘hurt sentiments’ of certain publics or communities, artists and writers can also stage their struggle against censorship and intimidation in those very terms. They may even construct themselves as a community constituted and mobilised through a shared feeling of vulnerability (that is, etymologically, ‘woundability’). By analysing the discourses of groups that mobilise for and against censorship, my aim is to understand how agency can be derived from injury and how claims of hurt have been transformed into an ‘entitlement’ (Ahmed 2004) that helps secure certain ‘rights’ and generates a form of emotional competition. Cultural wars are discursive wars and emotional wars as well. I would also like to understand what it means, in the Indian context, to say

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that words ‘wound’ or that works of art ‘hurt’ feelings, and thus examine how the image of the body (of a nation, of a community, etc.) is mobilised in these emotional discourses.

The entanglement of hurt and censorship: elements of context, history and theory Definitional excursions in the meaning of censorship ‘The punitive gesture of censoring finds its origin in the reaction of being offended’, argues the South African writer J. M. Coetzee (1996: IX). Censorship was traditionally understood as the curbing of free speech by the state that suppresses expression deemed offensive or ‘undesirable’ – a notion under which the censor ‘assimilates the subversive (the politically undesirable) and the repugnant (the morally undesirable)’ (ibid.: VII). Today, the understanding of censorship has expanded radically to include techniques, tactics and practices other than those sanctioned by the state. Terms such as ‘cultural regulation’ and ‘cultural administration’ have, therefore, been given preference over the term ‘censorship’ itself (Burt 1994; Kaur and Mazzarella 2009). As Kaur and Mazzarella remark, if censorship ‘alludes to the institutionalized frames of a legalistic discourse, the concept of “cultural regulation” points to the performative, the productive, and the affective aspects of public culture’ (2009: 9). This seems particularly relevant in the case of South Asia, where the legal sovereignty of the state is challenged by competing repertoires of authority and violence anchored in communities and localities – local ‘big men’, pressure groups or organisations of activists (Hansen 2005: 141). Censorship also operates outside the framework of direct regimentation, state institutions, courts or official authorities such as the Central Board of Film Certification, in various informal, extra-legal and extra-constitutional practices. The lawyer Rajeev Dhavan (2008) talks of the goonda raj to describe how cultural production and cultural circulation are violently policed by thugs. What, then, draws all these regulating practices together? I would suggest that censors are concerned with what Jacques Rancière (2004) calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’, by which he means the system of divisions that define what is visible, audible or ‘sayable’ in the aesthetic-political regime, as well as who and what counts, is worthy or valid. If we follow Rancière, modern art and literature are necessarily offensive or undesirable, and thus necessarily targeted by censors because they aim to reconfigure this hierarchical distribution and open up to new subjects, contexts or meanings. As Holquist (1994) demonstrates, if censors must ascribe definite meanings to works of art or literature (otherwise interdiction would make no sense), they must also fix what ‘art’ or ‘literature’ is or is not. Yet modern artistic and literary practices keep evading definite assignations of what ‘art’ or 246

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‘literature’ are supposed to be, and interrogating strict boundaries between art and non-art, artists and non-artists or ‘literature’ and everyday speech.8 The ‘distribution of the sensible’ must also be understood as the distribution of sentiments: which sentiments are valid and which subjects can express them, which emotions can be voiced, to what level and where. The management of affects is essential to the exercise of power. Censorship in India, which is often predicated on the need to protect the religious or communal sentiments of excitable crowds and moderate affects to preserve public order, highlights this to an extraordinary degree. In India, emotions enter politics through the law How do emotions enter politics? A first way to respond to the question raised by Sara Ahmed (2004) would be to say that emotions, such as hurt, enter politics through the law. The Constitution of India guarantees the right to freedom of expression in Article 19(1), but this right is restricted in Article 19(2) on several grounds such as ‘the security of the State’, ‘public order’, ‘defamation’ and ‘incitement to an offence’. The Indian Penal Code (IPC), which was established after the 1857 Rebellion and drafted by Macaulay, actualises these restrictions. The apparatus of censorship in South Asia is inherited from the British Raj. Asad Ali Ahmed (2009) shows that Macaulay assumed Indians’ fundamentally religious sensibilities and vulnerability to (religious) offence, thus emphasising ‘hurt’ as the basis of criminal offence and, by the same token, emphasising the necessity of censorship in India. Sections of the IPC concerned with these issues are known as ‘hate speech laws’.9 Section 153 makes a criminal offence of anything that promotes ‘enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony’. Sections 295A and 298 deal, respectively, with the legal consequences of committing ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings’ [italics mine] and of uttering words with ‘deliberate intent to wound religious feelings’. These amendments, which laid stress on the religious feelings of a group of people, were introduced to deal with the violent communal tensions triggered by the 1927 publication of a satirical pamphlet on the Prophet Muhammad, titled Rangīla Rasūl (see Nair 2013; Stephens 2014). If words such as ‘deliberate’ and ‘malicious’ were introduced to reduce the scope of application of these laws, their misuse has, increasingly, been commented on. In February 2014, Penguin India released a statement on its decision to recall copies of Doniger’s book, saying that Section 295A of the IPC would ‘make it increasingly difficult for any Indian publisher to uphold international standards of free expression without deliberately placing itself outside the law’ (see Penguin India 2014). During the same period, a petition signed by Martha Nussbaum, Romila Thapar and 247

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Partha Chatterjee, among other academics, asking for Sections 153(A) and 295(A) of the IPC to be revised, was addressed to the Indian law minister. Asad Ali Ahmed (2009) shows that, since the laws require the plaintiffs to prove that their sensibilities have been wounded and thus to demonstrate their emotionality for charges to be laid, they can constitute wounded feelings. To a certain extent, the law contributes to creating emotional subjects, and instead of containing emotions, may thus be inciting them. The more public or vocal your hurt, the more valid your claim to compensation and reparation becomes. Violence – supposedly triggered by an offence – confirms, in a retroactive way, the tangibility of the injury. ‘Once you have a law that allows for the making of legal claims on the basis of charged emotional states’, argues the lawyer and activist Lawrence Liang (2012), ‘you begin to see the emergence of cases that steadily cultivate a legal vocabulary of hurt sentiments’.10 Instead of safeguarding freedom of speech, the law risks becoming an ally of violent ‘goons’ and complicit in censorship. Democracy, the differential attribution of sentiments and emotional wars But if hurt becomes ‘an entitlement’ that secures certain rights, it can also be claimed by any one. As Gilmartin and Metcalf (2011: 69) argue: If a vision of religion as an identity (and a set of ‘feelings’) allowed individuals to lay claim to the law to protect the emotional core of their identity from external ‘wounds’, it also suggested a culture defined by the fundamental equality that reliance of ‘feelings’ represented. To a certain extent, democracy can be understood both as a means of ‘counting’ those who did not count and acknowledging hurts or injuries that were not counted.11 As Rao (2011) shows, the political subjectivity of the Dalits is based on a recognition of their vulnerability. But that is also the whole conundrum of democracy. If the historian Janaki Nair (2014) differentiates the claims of ‘hurt sentiments’ made by Hindutva watchdogs from the democratic demands based on the truly disabling ‘historical wounds’ of the underprivileged, it may sometimes be difficult to discriminate between authentic injuries and unworthy or engineered ones. Are the ‘hurt feelings’ of those who claim they have been injured by certain works of art or literature necessarily fake and/or illegitimate? Is passion, as Asad Ali Ahmed (2009) suggests, only permissible in defence of secular reason? Whose hurt is ‘real’ or acceptable, and who decides? Two recent controversies are good cases in point. At the 2013 Jaipur Literature Festival, the political psychologist Ashis Nandy made the controversial comment that most of India’s corrupt were from the Other Backward 248

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Classes and Scheduled Tribes, but that (or so his argument went) corruption was a good thing because it worked as a class equaliser. A few months earlier, virulent debates had surrounded the publication of a cartoon in a textbook12 (subsequently removed from later editions) that showed B. R. Ambedkar riding a snail that represented the Indian constitution, being driven on by Jawaharlal Nehru brandishing a whip, amid a sneering crowd. Both controversies sparked outrage, notably from members of Dalit groups, and a criminal case was filed against Nandy. Many progressive intellectuals spoke out in defence of the academic and of the authors of the textbook. They also expressed their own sense of outrage over the way ‘hurt’ was strategised by some communities to ‘suppress free speech’. It is, however, worth reflecting on the possibility that the same injuries are always legitimised and that some hurts, which have been systematically ignored, must be displayed to claim inclusion in the public or political sphere. Dalit literature was born precisely from this imperative.13 In June 2012, several Dalit intellectuals published a column carrying this message and made a clear link between the words or images that wound and the very real wounds suffered by Dalits who continue to be subject to discrimination and violence: ‘It is time we realised that there is a permeable boundary between the symbolic violence of such a cartoon and the tolerance of such cartoons by academics on the one hand, and atrocities’ (Hindu 2012). If some hurts remain unrecognisable, others are amplified or consecrated to the point that they become ‘acts of nation building’ (Butler 2004). Sundar (2012), who analyses the Indian state’s performance of emotion as part of its battle for legitimacy in its ongoing civil war with Maoist guerrillas, has coined the useful term ‘emotional wars’. Groups or communities are locked in a contest over the public recognition of their respective injuries by the state, which often acts as a ‘manager’ or ‘arbiter’ of sentiments. As the selfappointed Catholic spokesperson Joe Dias acknowledges: ‘If you can ban [The] Satanic Verses, M. F. Husain’s paintings, then why would you have double standards for the play which the Church is asking to be banned? Christians are being made a soft target’ (Chari 2015). Dinanath Batra makes a similar point: ‘If someone makes a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed, Muslims are outraged around the world. So why should anyone write anything against Hinduism and get away with it?’ (Bhowmick 2014).

‘Is he an artist or a butcher?’: the case of M. F. Husain To say that acts or words ‘hurt’ or ‘wound’ feelings, as sections of the IPC indicate, is to conflate linguistic and symbolic, psychological and physical registers, and to relocate emotions in the body. This is all the more relevant in a country where the nation is often represented as an assaulted (female) body, and where bodies can be butchered physically in the name of present or past injuries.14 Sara Ahmed (2004) shows that pain is crucial to the 249

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formation of the body as a perceiving surface because it involves transgressing the border between inside and outside. It is the perceived intrusion of something from outside ‘that creates the desire to re-establish the border, to push out the pain, or the (imagined, material) object we feel is the “cause” of the pain’ and which is transformed into the ‘hated’ through a discourse of pain (Ahmed 2004: 27). If hate-speech laws were designed to prevent hatred between different communities, it is here useful to remember the term ‘agonistic intimacy’, coined by Veena Das (2011) to define the relationship between Hindus and Muslims – an intimacy constituted by the capacity of the other community to hurt and be hurt. The predicament in which the Indian and Muslim painter M. F. Husain found himself illustrates how the rhetoric of hate and hurt – especially hurt claimed to have been inflicted on the ‘body’ of a whole nation – has been mobilised by Hindutva activists to constitute ‘the Hindus’ as an injured community, and to terrorise an artist constructed as an outsider/offender. ‘Is He an Artist or a Butcher?’ (‘Yih chitrakār hai yā kasā’ī?’) is the title of a 1996 article published in a Hindi magazine from Bhopal (Vichar Mimansa) to protest against a 20-year-old sketch outlining the contours of a nude Saraswati. The article also signalled the start of a virulent campaign against Husain (with eight criminal complaints filed against him across the country under Sections 153 and 295A of the IPC). This emotional title, which draws its effects from the jarring parallel between two professional categories as seemingly antithetical as ‘butcher’ and ‘artist’, is framed as an alternative. Is he this or that? The rhetorical thrust of the title leaves little doubt as to the journalist’s conclusion. M. F. Husain is assigned the place of the butcher – a well-known Muslim stereotype dating back to the colonial period.15 Muslims are represented as beef eaters, cow slaughterers and, almost by contagious implication, as Hindu persecutors. But if the ‘real’ nature of M. F. Husain seems unquestionable, then the title remains symptomatic of an underlying anxiety. Various forms of uncertainty, as Arjun Appadurai has shown – who exactly are among the ‘we’ and who are among the ‘them’; who is inside and who is outside? – can create intolerable anxiety that is sometimes resolved through violence. In a globalised environment, this anxiety is exacerbated by the slippery two-way traffic between the categories of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’. Hindu nationalists in India see themselves as being marginalised and victimised in a pan-Islamic context. It is the premonition of their powerlessness and their feeling of being vulnerable to Muslims/offenders/outsiders disguised as insiders that seems intolerable. Hindu nationalists also see themselves as victims of a secular Indian state and a secular elite – of which artists are a part – that are accused of being disproportionately tolerant towards minorities and excessively sensitive to their injuries. Sara Ahmed makes a similar point in a different context when she analyses how the metaphor

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of ‘soft touch’, which suggests that the nation’s borders are like skin, can become a national character: ‘the soft nation is too emotional’, she says, too easily moved or bruised by the demands of others (2004: 1). If Husain has consistently refused to conflate his identity with his religion and always defined himself as a painter and as an Indian, but never as a Muslim,16 those who campaigned against him have stubbornly refused to define him as anything but a Muslim. The Indian/Hindu nation is construed as a ‘soft’ body, damaged by the invasion or contamination of offending hands, which are ‘foreign’ hands in different guises: the Muslim painter; the Western scholar warned by former Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee not to ‘play with our national pride’ (BBC 2004); the secular, modernist, i.e., ‘Westernised’ artist. They represent all those who must indeed be driven out to expel the cause of the pain,17 to re-establish and produce the border; to restore the ‘skin’ of the nation in a sense, its (hardened) frontiers, the completeness and purity of the national ‘body’. If, in the eyes of Hindutva activists, Husain is only masquerading as an artist, their definition of what an artist is or should be is extraordinarily reductive and definitive. Indian artists are harnessed to the devotion or promotion of ‘India’, to assigned feelings and prescribed representations that are fixed as innate, univocal and intangible – save betrayal or injury. The same rhetoric is played out in cases involving scholars of India or Hinduism, such as Wendy Doniger. In his legal notice to Penguin, Dinanath Batra accuses Doniger of perverting the ‘eternal’ principles of Hinduism and insists that her book was written intentionally to ‘humiliate, and defame the Hindus’.18 She, too, is masquerading as an academic, but is really another ‘butcher’ of Hinduism. Hindutva activists assert their patrimonial relationship to the nation and set themselves up as the custodians of Indian (i.e., Hindu?) culture. The underlying assumption is that ‘foreigners’ have no right to represent Hinduism and may not even have the right to love Hinduism. Das (2011) talks about Husain’s ‘impossible love’ for Hindu gods and possibly for India as well.19 The artist is assigned the place of the butcher because he is assigned to one emotion, hate, and to one intention, hurt. If Husain’s paintings have been vandalised and bounties issued to kill him, gouge out his eyes or cut off his hands, the painter is always represented as being accountable for the original wound and for the resulting violence. Brass shows that the same archetypal rhetoric is played out in Hindu-Muslim riots, where the deliberate assault on Muslim bodies is characterised as long overdue retaliation ‘for the original sin of vivisection of the Hindu body’, i.e., the creation of Pakistan (2005: 61). ‘Butchering’ Husain or his work can, therefore, be sanctioned as a form of righteous compensation.20 The painter is seen as a butcher of Hinduism, a butcher of the nation (conspiring to cause communal unrest and a potential traitor whose loyalties reside outside India) and a butcher of Indian women (given

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the charges of obscenity and insinuations of rape or lechery also levelled against Husain). All these injuries are correlated with the injury to ‘motherIndia’ or Bhārat-Mātā [mother-deity-nation] – the name given to another of his paintings, for which charges were levelled in 2006 under Section 298. The painting represents the red body of a naked woman whose contours are mapped onto the boundaries of India. Interestingly, and I will come back to the mirror pattern that often operates in mobilisations over hurt, the painter has borrowed from the same emotional images and registers as his attackers. In ‘Rape of India’ (2008), which Husain painted to express his deep sense of pain and assault after the Mumbai terror attacks, India is allegorised as a woman raped by a bull. The painting ignited a furor among Hindutva militants who claimed that it ‘hurt’ and ‘raped’ the sensibilities of Hindus (see Hindu Janajagruti Samiti n.d.). Husain’s ‘impossible love’ for the nation is also his impossible hurt for the nation.

SAHMAT: the mobilisation and the hurt of artists In order to defend themselves and secure their rights, artists and writers may be forced to claim publicly and collectively their own sense of hurt, and also to constitute themselves as a minority under threat, an injured community. The SAHMAT collective, whose founding members were close to the Communist Party of India (Marxist),21 highlights the point admirably. The collective was created in 1989 in the wake of the murder of 34-year-old playwright, poet and activist Safdar Hashmi, who was killed outside Delhi during a performance (in support of a trade union candidate and a workers’ strike) of his street theatre group, Jana Natya Manch. If Hindutva has become SAHMAT’s main adversary and if Hashmi’s assassination has come to represent one of the most powerful symbols of artists’ vulnerability, it is important to keep in mind that he was killed by Congress goons and was attacked for being a militant and a communist, rather than as an artist per se. The collective was born from an increasing sense of urgency and anxiety and from the conviction that, since culture had become the central battleground for a new communalised politics, it was imperative to wage the fight on the cultural front by disseminating progressive art and mobilising public opinion through various campaigns and events (exhibitions, performances, festivals, lectures, seminars, rallies, and press conferences) as well as publications, posters and video tapes.22 The collective issued countless statements in defence of free speech, of India’s ‘secular tradition’ and of various cultural practitioners or institutions under attack. Through SAHMAT, artists and writers strove to reassert their agency and reclaim their freedom of expression and intervention in the public sphere. 252

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Operating from its headquarters in Delhi, SAHMAT has been described somewhat emphatically as ‘the largest ever voluntary collective of artists coming together to share a single political platform’ (Dutta 2005: 199). Many of its activities were meant to symbolise this unity by travelling all over the country. The Images and Words campaign (1991), for instance, which consisted of visual/textual statements against communalism designed by 400 different artists, was exhibited at 40 locations in Delhi and in 30 other cities. SAHMAT aimed at reclaiming a space for art in the public sphere that could also bridge the gap between ‘art’ and the ‘street’, between ‘artists’ and the ‘people’. It also sought to reclaim specific spaces that had been gradually communalised by Hindutva forces, such as Shivaji Park in Mumbai, where Shiv Sena rallies were held, or the city of Ayodhya (see, for instance, Muktnaad: Hum Sab Ayodhya, SAHMAT 1994b). As I suggest below, the collective also aimed at reclaiming an emotional space. SAHMAT: a ‘community of sentiment’? According to the photographer Ram Rahman, a current trustee of SAHMAT, the projects of the collective reflect the ‘close-knit sense of community and purpose’ of the Indian art scene (Rahman 2013: 17). After all, doesn’t sahmat literally mean ‘in agreement’ or ‘together’? Hansen (2005) has argued that the notion of community in South Asia is ‘traditionally separated from, and conceptually opposed to the state’, although it is often locked in negotiation with the latter. This definition could apply to the collective, for which the state was both a target (at least in the first few years of its existence, when Hashmi’s murder exposed the state’s failure to protect artists, writers and cultural practitioners) and then a patron or sponsor – a collusion for which SAHMAT has been heavily criticised (see Deshpande 1996). At times, it may have aspired to become a community beyond the state. The celebration of sufi-bhakti traditions in performances that brought singers from India, Pakistan or Afghanistan together, and invocations of figures such as Amir Khusrau or Faiz Ahmed Faiz, were meant to invoke or constitute a transnational community of artists who recognised themselves in the same syncretic and secular culture. But I would argue that SAHMAT can, first and foremost, be defined as a ‘community of sentiment’ whose sense of ‘we-ness’ was born from a shared feeling of hurt in front of a common enemy and whose agency is also derived from injury. ‘With the tragic death of Safdar Hashmi, the time has come for us to organize ourselves against these near-fascist forces of disruption so that we are no longer brittle, vulnerable and alone’, proclaimed artists and writers in their first statement after Safdar Hashmi’s murder (SAHMAT 1989b). In 2007, after the ‘outrageous arrest’ of an arts student at the Fine Arts Faculty in Baroda, who was charged 253

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with making obscene religious images and hurting Hindu sentiments, the poet and curator Ranjit Hoskote (2007) claimed it was high time ‘to add another minority to India’s social fabric: the vulnerable minority of cultural practitioners’. Against highly organised ‘communities of sentiments’, artists seemed to realise that their individual struggle was doomed to fail: The group is everything, even if it is a fiction or a fraction; the individual is nothing. Paradoxically, in a Republic built to safeguard individual rights, one can bargain with the State and even force State action (or secure State inaction) by citing the sensitivities of a group. But one cannot make the same effective claim on behalf of an individual’s cultural freedom. (Hoskote 2007) Artists must, therefore, also claim their collective hurt and recognise themselves as members of the same injured community. If SAHMAT has been particularly vocal in defending M. F. Husain, it is also because the vulnerability of the individual artist, who was over 90 when he was forced into exile, seemed to speak for the vulnerability of a whole group. In 2008, the artist acknowledged that he could not return to India to ‘take on the fight’ because he was an old man and vulnerable to physical danger: ‘It’s not just the cases. If I came back, given the mood they have created, someone could just push or assault me on the street, and I would not be able to defend myself’ [italics mine], he said in an interview (see Chaudhury 2008). As I have suggested earlier, this ‘mood’, which is created by the insistent performance of ‘hurt’, is the catalyst of a Hindu ‘community of sentiment’, but it has also been instrumental in fashioning an artist community. Arjun Appadurai first used the expression ‘community of sentiment’ when discussing the public negotiation of certain gestures and responses that could, when successful, create such a community (in Lutz and AbuLughod 1990). A chain of communications in feeling is created by recourse to a shared and relatively fixed set of public gestures. Appadurai draws, in particular, on the classical rasa theory: feelings (bhava), such as grief, each correspond to a mood (rasa), i.e., an impersonal feeling also expressed in a set of gestures that are publicly understood. Questions regarding the emotional authenticity of a person’s feelings are irrelevant here. Appadurai’s remarks may help us understand why Husain could talk of being the victim of a ‘mood’ or why controversies over freedom of expression or ‘hurt sentiments’ in India have, as some critics suggest, a formulaic and ritualistic dimension, as if actors on either side of the controversy were modelling themselves on a script already written. In a sense, it is, since the apparatus of censorship that makes wounded sentiments cause for action is inherited from the British Raj. 254

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And that’s also the point made by Veena Das when she suggests that the sentiments of hurt are not so much fake as much as they are already ‘worked over by a legal imagination of the colonial period’. Viewers have ‘inherited a template in which the name Husain is a signifier of nothing more than a Muslim, and the names Saraswati or Durga are nothing more than an index of “religious sentiments”’ (Das 2011: 125). To a certain extent, SAHMAT has been forced to capitalise on such a mood and organise itself in another ‘community of sentiment’, while it also tries to rewrite and at times invert the Hindutva ‘script’. SAHMAT, foundational emotions and the performance of hurt What has brought all these artists together, argues Rustom Bharucha, is not a set of shared values, but the recognition of an ‘enemy’ often equated with communalism, ‘provoking a wide range of conflicting emotions – fear, anger, loss, a sense of shame, and a need for solidarity’ (Bharucha 1998: 55). Hurt is established as a foundational attribute of the collective. ‘We, the artists’ community of India, are deeply pained by the growth of communalism which has assumed unprecedented proportions in recent days’ [italics mine]: these words open the statement issued by SAHMAT at the launch of Artists Against Communalism (1994a: cover). Madan Gopal Singh notes that SAHMAT was born from a desire to ‘convert the profundity of emotion stirred by Safdar’s assassination into effective and meaningful resistance’ (Singh 2013: 255). He also talks of the need for SAHMAT members to ‘symbolically reaffirm [their] solidarity with the wounded’, by which he means the victims of Ayodhya. If SAHMAT was created in the emotional aftermath of an assassination, it was also consolidated in the emotional aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. The demolition of the mosque, declares Rahman, ‘is analogous to the psychic trauma caused to the American nation by the 9/11 attacks’ (2013: 17). In the different statements issued by SAHMAT over the years, the vocabulary of emotions is pervasive. Artists acknowledge their anguish, alarm, shock, dismay, and pain. ‘The controversy concerning the exhibition Hum Sab Ayodhya raised in Parliament has caused us great pain . . . it has dismayed and hurt the sentiments of all sensitive citizens’, writes SAHMAT in the statement issued over the controversy (2009b: 73).23 Words such as ‘we condemn’, ‘protest’, ‘deplore’, and ‘urge’ emerge again and again. The feelings of urgency and emotional intensity are also conveyed by the titles of many of SAHMAT’s projects such as the Artists Alert exhibition (1989a), Secularism Alert (1998) and the ICONOGRAPHY NOW! symposium (2006). Their posters display the same emotional appeal and strategic dramatisation: ‘Be on guard! Be alert! Be vigilant!’ If SAHMAT members present themselves as ‘watchdogs of secularism’, they are also masters of 255

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the vocative and the affective. As Mazzarella (2013b) argues in his chapter on the collective, to which I am deeply indebted for this part of my essay, SAHMAT members have also become masters at mobilising, publicising and inciting affect. The debate, then, partly misses the point if it is framed in terms of ‘freedom of expression’ versus ‘hurt sentiments’; rational artists claiming their right to unregimented creativity versus emotional crowds claiming their right to take offence. The feelings of hurt and vulnerability as well as a deep sense of assault are claimed by both ‘sides’ of the controversy. In front of the ‘injured’ Hindu community, artists and intellectuals must reclaim their right not just to imagination, freedom or dissent but also to having been injured themselves – and they mobilise accordingly. Sometimes, they seem to fashion themselves on the discourse of other victimised communities or are locked into an emotional contest with the latter. Bharucha argues that ‘the secular’ has become ‘the most contentious, maligned and vulnerable category of our times’ and that it received its ‘most ignominious blow with the demolition of the Babri Masjid’ (1998: 2). Secular India is also represented as an assaulted body. One of SAHMAT’s campaign posters features the slogan ‘Secularism Alert’ in bright, bold letters, with the bleeding body of Mahatma Gandhi sprawled in the background. The message is clear: Gandhi’s legacy and Gandhi’s nation are being butchered by anti-secularist goons. As Mazzarella (2013b) shows, the much-talked-about ‘crisis of secularism’ might mean less that India is less and less secularist, than express the ‘affective deficit that seems to afflict the very idea of secularism’. If SAHMAT cannot be understood apart from the rise of the Hindu Right and its ‘ability to mobilize passionate engagement’ (ibid.), then we understand how important it is for Geeta Kapur to claim SAHMAT’s ‘staggering mediatic success in galvanizing opinion’ (Kapur 2013: 269). A certain mimeticism is discernible in the vocabulary used by SAHMAT, which borrows from the highly emotional lexical fields of sacrifice, martyrdom and blasphemy. In the two-page biography of the movement that begins a document commemorating 20 years of SAHMAT’s activities, Safdar Hashmi is identified as a ‘revolutionary martyr’ (SAHMAT 2009b: 6). Bhisham Sahni talked about SAHMAT as ‘a name sanctified by the sacrifice’ of Hashmi and refers again to his ‘martyrdom’ (see SAHMAT 1994a). In the catalogue published for Husain’s 94th birthday, Ram Rahman begins with lines that evoke the injured body of the republic and the festering wound of Partition, and talks about those who ‘blaspheme’ against art (SAHMAT 2009a): The cynical stoking of religious hatred by political groups is not new to us. The experience of the partition is still raw and festering.

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Yet, the Ayodhya mobilization in the 1990s opened a new wound on the body of the republic. . . . Now, when he turns 94, artists are coming together in this project to make or contribute an artwork as their gift to Husain. This is, in a way, a creative protest against those who blaspheme [against] Husain’s art.

Conclusion Public discourse in India often frames the violence of emotional audiences targeting a specific artist as ‘spontaneous’ and un-restrainable. This spontaneity confers a form of impunity (Hansen 2008).24 The same automatic response is attributed to certain representations (alternative stories of the Ramayana,25 ‘nude’ portrayal of divinities, ‘Hindu’ subjects in the hands of Muslim artists or vice versa), which are said to mechanically provoke injury and incite violence. What must be challenged, argues Butler (1997), is precisely the clear link between the words that are uttered, or the work of art exhibited, and their putative power to injure – the link between speech as injury and an ‘unequivocal form of conduct’. Art and literature face up to the challenge because they work to show that one cannot arrest the meanings of words, images or representations once and for all; that there isn’t one story or one interpretation to safeguard, one way of seeing, one voice to speak in, or one position to occupy. ‘To insist on the gap between speech and conduct . . . is to lend support for the role of nonjuridical forms of opposition, ways of restaging and resignifying speech in contexts that exceed those determined by the courts’, writes Butler (1997: 22–23). Indian artists and writers may perhaps resist the ‘tyranny of hurt’ less by engaging in these emotional wars, by asserting their position as ‘rightful victims’ or by claiming they are the custodians and interpreters of the ‘real’, authentic (i.e., secular) India.26 They may instead elude this binary confrontation to continue producing works of art and literature that are open to an inexhaustible plurality of interpretations, representations and reactions that foster, probe and provoke complexity – that show how Durga, Ram or Sita, to echo Das (2011), are more than an ‘index of religious sentiments’ and Husain much more and other than ‘just’ a Muslim or a victim. These creative forms of opposition fracture ‘unequivocal forms of conduct’, feeling and meaning; they disrupt assigned places and emotions. The question for artists ‘is to make [their] identity or [their] practice sufficiently complex that it is not easily appropriated nor easily destroyed by antagonist forces’, writes Kapur (2013: 44). The work of the Bombay poet Arun Kolatkar provides a relevant concluding illustration. His collection Bhijki Vahi (2003) revolves around the motif of the weeping woman. One hears, among other painful voices, the laments of the three biblical Marys; Dora Maar and Helen of Troy; Susan

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Sontag, aged 12, looking at Holocaust images; Nadejdha Mandelstam and Majnūn’s Laila; Isis and Cassandra; Kannagi, a character from a Tamil epic, mourning her husband; Kim, the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack (in Nick Ut’s iconic 1972 photograph); Jaratkaru, a serpent victim of the Vedic holocaust with which the Mahabharata opens (in Sarpa Satra); or Maimum, a young girl gang-raped in Haryana in 1997. The succession of laments across ages and contexts prevents us from finding refuge in one narrative of victimhood. Grief is shared.27 The mass killings in Sarpa Satra echo Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, and other genocides, including the anti-Muslim pogroms conducted at the hands of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai. The poet conflates all ethnic cleansing through the ages and challenges the monological rhetoric of totalitarian ideologies that isolate outsiders or offenders; bodies, voices, injuries, and narratives in excess. ‘What can be made of grief besides a cry for war?’ asks Butler (2004: XII). Artists and writers show that, out of grief or hurt, one can ‘make’ poems and stories – and by relating these stories, narrating them and connecting them to each other, one may stop seeing the world through the ‘dark prism of a wound / infected / by the dirty bandage of history’ (Kolatkar 2004).

Notes 1 Some of these documents are available online at www.sahmat.org. 2 A preliminary version of this chapter was presented at the EMOPOLIS workshop in Paris in 2014, titled ‘When Books and Art Hurt: Censorship, Emotions and Cultural Regulation in India’. I would like to thank Amélie Blom both for helping me organise the workshop and for her insightful comments on this version of the chapter. I am also grateful to the following speakers at the workshop: Debaditya Bhattacharya, Mira Hashmi, Lotte Hoek, William Mazzarella, Sandhya Devesan Nambiar, and Rina Ramdev. 3 See, for instance, the controversies over modern art after Indian independence and the painter Akbar Padamsee’s trial for obscenity in 1954. 4 Most cases of censorship or violent cultural regulation have been reported in Maharashtra and Gujarat, however, where the Hindu Right has been in power and where there is also a high occurrence of Hindu-Muslim clashes. 5 Two publications worth mentioning in this context are Gautam Bhatia’s book Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech Under the Indian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Rina Ramdev, Sandhya Devesan Nambiar and Debaditya Bhattacharya’s edited volume Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt (SAGE, 2016); neither was yet in print at the time of writing. The nationwide protests by writers, academics and artists, following the murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M. M. Kalburgi; the protests triggered by the mob lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq in September 2015 ‘for eating beef’ (when many writers in India returned their national awards in protest); and the founding of the Indian Cultural Forum also fall, unfortunately, outside the scope of this chapter. 6 On the different cases, see the yearly reports of the Index on Censorship (www. indexoncensorship.org/) or the censorship timeline developed by Roy (2012).

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7 In 2004, the writer Dilip Chitre published an article titled ‘The Republic of Hurt Sentiments’ in Outlook. The expression was taken up again in different newspapers, including The Hindu, BusinessLine, Mumbai Mirror, and DNA. 8 See, among countless other examples, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘poèmes-conversations’ or Arun Kolatkar’s ‘found poems’. 9 In Bangladesh and Pakistan, which have added sections criminalising insult to the Prophet or his family and desecration of the Qur’an, these laws are known as ‘blasphemy laws’. 10 As a Tehelka investigation shows, cases of ‘engineered hurt’ and contract rioting have been registered, with members of Hindu brigades paid to stage their offence (see Sharma and Chappalli 2010). 11 This is also where, according to Jacques Rancière, modern literature (or modern art) connects to democracy. The advent of modernity in literature is the advent of a regime where the writer and the reader can be anybody; where those who have been excluded from the aesthetic-political regime are now included. 12 Published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training. 13 Of course, the term dalit itself, which translates literally as ‘ground down’, ‘crushed’ or ‘broken to pieces’, demonstrates how agency can be derived from injury. In a different context, Butler shows that ‘hate speech’ can be ‘returned’ to its speaker in a different form: ‘the word that wounds becomes an instrument of resistance in the redeployment that destroys the prior territory of its operation’ (1997: 163). 14 Brass (2005) remembers meeting Hindu activists in Aligarh who talked about ‘butchering’ Muslims. 15 ‘[A] meat eater like the British . . . the Muslim in the Hindu imagination provokes images that . . . connect Muslims to the European invaders and, more generally, to the global category of barbarians or mlecchas [the radically foreign]’ (Zins 1998; translation mine). 16 In an interview for Frontline, M. F. Husain apologises for the hurt he may have caused, but does not utter the word ‘Muslim’ once (see Bavadam 1996). 17 Husain was effectively driven out of India in 2006. He died in exile, as a Qatari national. 18 From Batra’s legal notice to Wendy Doniger, dated 3 March 2010, ref. 254/ LN/0310 (available on websites such as www.bharatiyashiksha.com/?p=217). 19 Sumathi Ramaswamy’s (2011) anthology, Barefoot Across the Nation, engages critically with Husain’s artistic engagement with India over the course of more than half a century. 20 Similarly, all the stories of Ayodhia, writes the critic Tapahi Guha-Thakurta are framed in one archetypal account of past dispossession and depredation, that demands present rectitude or ‘redressal’ (2004: 280). 21 Prominent figures such as writer Bhisham Sahni, theatre director and actor Habib Tanvir and playwright G. P. Deshpande were among the founders of SAHMAT. 22 For a comprehensive description of the different agendas and activities of SAHMAT, see Deshpande (1996); and Moss and Rahman (2013). 23 In 1993, SAHMAT organised an exhibition called Hum Sab Ayodhya [We are all Ayodhya] to foreground both Ayodhya’s syncretic culture and the polyphony of the Ram-Katha tradition. The exhibition was vandalised by Hindutva squads on false rumours of a poster depicting incest between Rama and Sita. Charges were laid against SAHMAT for hurting religious feelings. 24 See also Blom and Jaoul’s (2008) introduction to the ‘Outraged Communities’ special issue of the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.

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25 Violence has often been unleashed in India over the (threatening) diversity of the Ram-Katha tradition. The spirit of Hindutva was certainly boosted by the serialisation of the Ramayana and Mahabharata on Doordarshan in 1987 and 1988, which crystallised a standardised, national version of the narrative, construed as a totalising invariant. For a discussion of the anxiety of diversity from a literary perspective and an exploration of the ‘multivocality’ of certain works of literature against the ‘straightjacketing’ of Indianness, see Zecchini (forthcoming). 26 ‘The recovery of the authentic in Indian history and culture has been the leitmotiv of SAHMAT’s political and social engagement’ (SAHMAT 2009b: 11). 27 See Zecchini (2014), especially chapter 6, ‘Voices of History, Voices of Sorrow: The Poet, the Storyteller and the Unforgetful’.

References Ahmed, Asad Ali. 2009. ‘Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, the Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament’, in Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella (eds), Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, pp. 172–205. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay in the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bavadam, Lyla. 1996. ‘In Defence of Freedom in Art: Against the Hindutva Attack on M. F. Husain’, Frontline, 15 November, pp. 4–13. BBC News. 2004. ‘India Seeks to Arrest US Scholar’, 23 March, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3561499.stm (accessed on 1 October 2013). Bharucha, Rustom. 1998. In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bhowmick, Nilanjana. 2014. ‘Sex, Lies and Hinduism: Why a Hindu Activist Targeted Wendy Doniger’s Book’, Time, 12 February. Blom, Amélie and Nicolas Jaoul, eds. 2008. ‘“Outraged Communities”: Comparative Perspectives on the Politicization of Emotions in South Asia’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2. doi:10.4000/samaj.234. Brass, Paul R. 2005. ‘The Body as Symbol in the Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence’, in Ravinder Kaur (ed), Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia, pp. 46–68. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Burt, Richard, ed. 1994. The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Chari, Mridula. 2015. ‘“The Play Is a Hate Crime”: Joe Dias Explains Why He Wants Drama About Pregnant Nun Banned’, Scroll.in, 7 October, http://scroll.in/ article/760070/the-play-is-a-hate-crime-joe-dias-explains-why-he-wants-dramaabout-pregnant-nun-banned (accessed on 7 October 2015).

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Chaudhury, Shoma. 2008. ‘In Hindu Culture, Nudity Is a Metaphor for Purity’, Tehelka, 2 February, www.tehelka.com/story_main37.asp?filename=Ne020208in_ hindu_culture.asp (accessed on 15 February 2013). Chitre, Dilip. 2004. ‘The Republic of Hurt Sentiments’, Outlook, 2 April. Coetzee, John Maxwell. 1996. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Das, Veena. 2011. ‘Of M. F. Husain and an Impossible Love’, in Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed), Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, pp. 116–29. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Deshpande, Sudhanva. 1996. ‘Sahmat and Politics of Cultural Intervention’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31(25): 1586–90. Dhavan, Rajeev. 2008. Publish and Be Damned: Censorship and Intolerance in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Dutta, Arindam. 2005. ‘Sahmat, 1989–2004: Liberal Art Practice Against the Liberalized Public Sphere’, Cultural Dynamics, 17(2): 193–226. Gilmartin, David and Barbara D. Metcalf. 2011. ‘Art on Trial: Civilization and Religion in the Persona and Painting of M. F. Husain’, in Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed), Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, pp. 54–74. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 2004. Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ———. 2011. ‘Fault-lines in a National Edifice: On the Rights and Offences of Contemporary Indian Art’, in Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed), Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, pp. 172–97. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2005. ‘Sovereigns Beyond the State: On Legality and Public Authority in India’, in Ravinder Kaur (ed), Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia, pp. 109–44. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. ———. 2008. ‘The Political Theology of Violence in Contemporary India’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 2. doi:10.4000/samaj.1872. Hindu. 2012. ‘Humour Is by No Means Exempt from Prejudice’, 8 June. Hindu Janajagruti Samiti. n.d. ‘Hindu Furor Against Husain’s Painting Titled “Rape of India”’, Hindujagruti.org, www.hindujagruti.org/news/8961.html (accessed on 1 April 2014). Holquist, Michael. 1994. ‘Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship’, PMLA, 109(1): 14–25. Hoskote, Ranjit. 2007. ‘Painting the Art World Red’, Hindustan Times, 14 May. Juneja, Monica. 2011. ‘Preface’, in Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed), Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, pp. XVII–XXII. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Kapur, Geeta. 2013. ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, in Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman (eds), The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989, pp. 266– 77. Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art. Kaur, Raminder and William Mazzarella, eds. 2009. Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kolatkar, Arun. 2003. Bhijki Vahi. Mumbai: Pras Prakashan. ———. 2004. Sarpa Satra. Mumbai: Pras Prakashan.

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Liang, Lawrence. 2012. ‘Love Language or Hate Speech’, Tehelka, 3 March, www. tehelka.com/2012/03/love-language-or-hate-speech/2/ (accessed on 1 April 2014). Lutz, Catherine A. and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds. 1990. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maheshwari, Malvika. 2011. ‘Violent Regulation and Artists in India: The Transformation of Freedom of Expression’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, IEP. Mazzarella, William. 2013a. Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2013b. ‘Mind the Gap! Or, What Does Secularism Feel Like?’ in Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman (eds), The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989, pp. 258–65. Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art. Mehrotra, Palash Krishna. 2012. ‘Climate of Touchiness Augurs Ill for India’, India Today, 22 April. Mehta, Pratap Bhanu. 2014. ‘Silencing of Liberal India’, Indian Express, 12 February. Moss, Jessica and Ram Rahman, eds. 2013. The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989. Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art. Nair, Janaki. 2014. ‘Terrorized by the Past’, Telegraph, 22 February, www. telegraphindia.com/1140222/jsp/opinion/story_18006525.jsp#.UwmSKOOSwVl (accessed on 22 February 2014). Nair, Neeti. 2013. ‘Beyond the “Communal” 1920s: The Problem of Intention, Legislative Pragmatism, and the Making of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 50(3): 317–40. Penguin India. 2014. ‘Penguin India’s Statement on “The Hindus” by Wendy Doniger’, www.penguinbooksindia.com/en/node/4090.html (accessed on 1 March 2014). Post, Robert C., ed. 1998. Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute. Rahman, Ram. 2013. ‘A Journey of Resistance’, in Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman (eds), The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989, pp. 14–17. Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ed. 2011. Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rao, Anupama. 2011. ‘Violence and Humanity: Or, Vulnerability as Political Subjectivity’, Social Research, 78(2): 607–32. Roy, Nilanjana S. 2012. ‘Timeline of Censorship’, Nilanjanaroy.com, 8 July, http:// nilanjanaroy.com/2012/07/08/timeline-of-censorship/ (accessed on 10 July 2012). Sharma, Pushp and Sanjana Chappalli. 2010. ‘Rent a Riot: Cash for Chaos’, Tehelka, 20 May, www.tehelka.com/2010/05/rent-a-riot-cash-for-chaos/ (accessed on 27 November 2013). Singh, Madan Gopal. 2013. ‘Song of the Unvanquished: Beginning(s) and Continuities of Sahmat; A Brief Personal History’, in Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman (eds), The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989, pp. 254–57. Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art. Singh, Varun. 2010. ‘Ban Art That Hurts People’s Feelings’, Mid-Day, 13 July.

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Stephens, Julia. 2014. ‘The Politics of Muslim Rage: Secular Law and Religious Sentiment in Late Colonial India’, History Workshop Journal, 77(1): 45–64. Sundar, Nandini. 2012. ‘“Winning Hearts and Minds”: Emotional Wars and the Construction of Difference’, Third World Quarterly, 33(4): 705–20. Tang, Amy, Evan Rankin, Brendan de Caires and Drew Beesley. 2015. Imposing Silence: The Use of India’s Laws to Suppress Free Speech. Toronto and London: PEN Canada, International Human Rights Program and PEN International. Zecchini, Laetitia. 2014. Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines. London and New Delhi: Bloomsbury. ———. Forthcoming. ‘“Let Us Govern Those Who Undertake the Telling of Stories”: The Multivocality of Storytelling Against the “Straightjacketing” of Indianness’, in Oishik Sircar (ed), Human Rights Beyond the Law: Politics, Practices, Performances of Protest. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Zins, Max-Jean. 1998. ‘Cuisine et politique en Inde: La politique culinaire des Kayasthes, caste de scribes’, Revue française de science politique, 48(3): 409–36.

SAHMAT documents SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust). 1989a. Artists Alert: An Exhibition of Painting, Sculpture, Graphics and Photography. New Delhi: Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust. ———. 1989b. Safdar. New Delhi: Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust. ———. 1994a. Artists Against Communalism. New Delhi: Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust. ———. 1994b. Muktnaad: Hum Sab Ayodhya. New Delhi: Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust. ———. 2009a. For Husain at 94. New Delhi: Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust. ———. 2009b. Sahmat, 20 Years, 1989–2009: A Document of Activities and Statements. New Delhi: Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust.

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14 DEATH, DESPAIR AND DEMOCRACY IN BANGLADESH Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury*

‘#shahbag is nothing but a Twitter tag now’, tweeted a young man sporting a Che Guevara bandanna the day before Bangladesh celebrated its 42nd year of independence in 2013. The lament came after six weeks of spirited protests that had centred on a busy crossroads in Dhaka. Named for the physical space it had occupied, the Shahbag movement began as an ad-hoc congregation of blogger-activists. Many of them had spent years organising virtually around the demand for justice with respect to war crimes committed during the war of liberation in 1971. On 5 February 2013, they moved from their computers to a crowded street corner to express their anger and disappointment at a high-profile verdict passed by the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) set up by the Government of Bangladesh. Abdul Quader Molla – a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic political party, and a notorious ‘collaborator’ with the Pakistani state against Bengali nationalism – had been sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity committed during the 1971 war. In a matter of days, the crowd, which was populated primarily by young men and women, swelled to thousands of protesters who contended that the ruling was disproportionately lenient to the crimes of which Molla had been convicted. Reading into the tribunal’s sentence a government conspiracy, the protestors demanded that Molla be awarded the death penalty. A few weeks later, I was in Dhaka to explore these events that had unexpectedly revealed and reified the fault lines in Bangladeshi politics. Up until recently, many members of the Bangladeshi diaspora had been glued to their news feeds as the Shahbag movement unfolded. They – we – had avidly followed visual updates, often of great artistic merit, broadcast from thousands of miles away. Now, here in Shahbag, I was welcomed by fading street art, peeling billboards with pictures of the gallows and (but for a group of regulars milling around in the evenings and on weekends) a drastically thin crowd. Months later, another protest rally – this time led by thousands of religious activists in Dhaka – was demanding the government hang the 264

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‘atheist’ bloggers. The movement against the ICT had soon devolved into a conflict seemingly between ‘atheist’ bloggers and Islamic militants. At its peak, Shahbag was, at best, a rumour of a revolution in a country where a sense of political malaise has long been the norm. Armed with the seemingly unstoppable energy of youth, the movement had set out to rouse the conscience of a middle-aged nation lost in historical amnesia. But if hope and despair make an antagonistic pair, then Shahbag had stirred up both with a rare intensity. It was an eruption that carried echoes of the pro-democracy student uprising of the late 1980s and the anti-authoritarian uprising against the state of emergency imposed in 2007/08 – but the comparisons stop there. The euphoria surrounding Shahbag, however short-lived, was not only about envisioning a different democratic future, nor was it a demand for more transparency in the political process. Its core appeal lay in matters that were fundamental to the existence of Bangladesh as a nation. The idea of redeeming the past for the sake of the future had simmered through public political life for decades, but found its loudest voice in Shahbag, making both the desire and disappointment more palpable than for any other collective protest in the nation’s history. Unlike earlier youth-led movements, Shahbag took place in a different world. Keenly aware of recent democratic uprisings elsewhere, a younger, tech-savvy generation had connected with an international audience through blogs, tweets, Facebook updates, and images – Shahbag was, by far, one of Bangladesh’s most photographed political events. Yet, despite its large digital footprint, the movement left many of its supporters, critics and observers profoundly disappointed. Its rapid fall from grace is perhaps not all that uncommon among mass political events. From the Egyptian revolution and Greek anti-austerity showdowns to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the US, the dissipation of political energies has left disenchantment in its wake (Dean 2016; see also Shenker 2016). In the case of Shahbag, however, its afterlife, I argue, warrants as much critical attention as its emergence, if not more. This is due to the unusual nature of the movement itself as well as the surge in counter-revolutionary forces since. The same context compels us to consider despair as a significant political emotion. The ‘movement’ in ‘social movements’ points to a realm of bodily intensities, emotions, feelings, and passions (Gould 2009) – in short, what scholars have described more generally as ‘affect’ (see Berlant 2011; Clough and Halley 2007; Massumi 2007; Mazzarella 2009). Whose emotions and which affect are valued or dismissed depend on the contentious relationship between multiple cultural scripts. An anthropological focus on political affect, understood as a mix of corporeality and public feelings, shows how collective struggles are shaped by – and, in turn, produce – powerful and intricate webs of emotions. In using the term ‘public feelings’, I refer to the writings of Ann Cvetkovich and others who have explored how global 265

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politics and history manifest themselves at the level of lived affective experience (see Cvetkovich 2007; Helms, Vishmidt and Berlant 2011). Attention to the publicness of feelings such as despair or even depression helps depathologise negative affects so that they are seen as a possible resource for political action rather than as its antithesis. Although the affective landscape of Shahbag is commonly understood in terms of nationalist passions, this chapter focuses on the widespread, albeit sorely neglected affect – despair. As a political concept, it is akin to distrust, cynicism, crisis, and depression, each of which boasts considerable theoretical heft (see Cvetkovich 2007; Roitman 2012; Rosanvallon 2008; Sloterdijk 1988). My thinking on political despair looks beyond crisis and, in so doing, partly follows what Gould (2012) has identified as one of the predominant affects shaping the course of radical AIDS activism in the US. Despair, in Gould’s case, relates to a sense of hopelessness in the face of uncontrollable disease and death, and to the sense of failure to intervene. Yet, while flattening political possibilities and encouraging political withdrawal, she suggests that despair can sometimes work to open new political horizons, or alternative visions of what is to be done and how. Analytically, my understanding of despair resonates with that of Gould as well as Marasco (2015), who approaches despair as a philosophical concept; it is a dialectical passion that can never fully let go of hope, its familiar, estranged other.1 Despair, as Marasco points out, is not a pathology or paralysis, but is connected to the passions of critique and the energies of everyday life instead. While Shahbag was fuelled by suspicions of foul play in the judicial process, the electoral system and the state, it subsequently became a source of despair among some participants and many outside observers. Rather than seeing this as an anomaly, this chapter seeks to gauge the paradox and potential of despair for democratic politics by examining how my interlocutors described and qualified their involvement in the movement. Foregrounding despair does not mean ignoring Shahbag’s continued relevance to Bangladeshi public life. To the contrary, it has created ideological fissures that have gained exceptional affective density on questions of history, religion, justice, and democracy. The demonstrations against the ICT verdict were followed by a politicoreligious backlash, part of which entailed the ritualised murder of bloggers, violent state intervention against Islamist opposition, government repression of online activities, and sporadic attacks on Hindu minorities. Moreover, the insidious discursive divide that developed around the terms ‘atheist’ (nāstīk in Bangla) and ‘blogger’ had just enough currency to change the terms of national politics. This was a remarkable volte-face from the heady days of early February. What is it about Shahbag that rests on the oscillation between hope and despair, intrigue and indifference, identification and palpable disappointment?

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Research methods The analysis here is rooted in my conversations with activists, bloggers and political workers involved in the protests against the ICT verdict. These interviews and discussions took place in Dhaka in March 2013, several weeks after the Shahbag movement erupted. The interviews were openended and most were conducted in Shahbag itself, often sitting at a tea-stall or on the grass at the nearby public park, called Suhrawardy Udyan. Supplementing these conversations was my experience of participating in rallies at Shahbag and observing activists speak, perform and socialise. While various emotions – patriotism, pride, disgust – ran high among the people who took part in these events, this chapter focuses on what I call ‘political despair’, which has had a far wider reach. Some of the people to whom I spoke in Dhaka were friends or acquaintances. I had collaborated with a few of them on a long-term research project on environmental activism in Bangladesh. Many, however, were people I was meeting for the first time. The conversations that ensued were not reducible to politically motivated denunciations of the movement. Indeed, there was no shortage of these: the print and broadcast media were in a constant flap in the movement’s aftermath. Nor were these conversations limited to human rights and feminist concerns with the death penalty, the procedural flaws of the ICT or the nationalist chauvinism visible in the movement’s signs and slogans (Ahmed 2015; Bergman 2016; Amnesty International 2015). These were contested issues even when Shahbag was at its peak. In contrast, what stood out in the words and actions of my interlocutors was a general sense of despair. This was strikingly different from the excitement I had felt in many of the same people in early February, gleaned from personal communications, media coverage and social media updates. By the time I reached Shahbag, the conflict between the atheist-blogger (the nāstīk) and the Islamist militant (the jongī) had taken centre-stage. The myriad ways in which this has affected Bangladeshi politics is Shahbag’s unique, if unforeseen, legacy (Wasif 2015). The despair associated with this ideological cleavage – the we and they in many of our conversations – focused on the body. In the first instance, this was provoked by the controversial murder of a blogger. The dead-body politics that followed assumed and occasioned the atheist/believer divide, giving way to more violence (several religious activists and secular bloggers were killed in the months that followed). A second area in which the body captured popular imagination was the presumed corporeal nature of nonsecular politics. The difference between the Shahbag protesters and their ideological opponents lay seemingly in the latter’s physicality, irrationality and what constitutes so-called religious affect. This polarity, I suggest, echoes the analytical boundary between the people and the crowd in canonical

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writings on mass society (see Canetti 1984; Dean 2016; Jonsson 2013; Le Bon 1960; Mazzarella 2010). These two ways of foregrounding the body urge us to look beyond the immediate context of the Shahbag protests. They reflect some of the tensions underlying the carnal dimension of popular democracies – what Santner (2011) calls ‘the flesh’. That democratic societies cannot eliminate the problem of the bodily dimension of representation is clear from the visual import of political assemblies. In thinking through transient and critical gatherings, Butler argues, what matters is that ‘bodies’ assemble (2015: 8). Acting in concert, she explains, can be an embodied form of dissent against reigning notions of the political. Still, she dismisses collectivities that are not necessarily galvanised by the increased material vulnerabilities of everyday life. In other words, Butler is interested in finding a more familiar concept of ‘the people’ behind the demands that bolster a democratic ideal of equality and inclusivity. How, then, is one to situate Shahbag, the scope of which ranged from the bodily occupation of public space to a desire to seek justice by managing the bodies of the collaborator, the blogger or the Islamist radical? How does one move beyond the theme of arrested modernity, signalled by terms such as ‘lynch mob’ and ‘fanatic’ that were used to describe the movement and its detractors, respectively? How do the antics and ambivalence that surfaced in the wake of Shahbag expose some of the constitutive disappointments that riddle the project of modern democracy in Bangladesh as elsewhere?

‘The young people had had enough’ The Shahbag protestors’ initial target was the ICT. Contrary to its title, the ICT was set up in 2010 as a domestic tribunal.2 It realised the Bangladesh Awami League’s electoral pledge to try war criminals – a move deferred since 1971 by all those in power, including the Awami League. The party had won the national elections in 2008 with an enthusiastic endorsement from women and youth.3 This post-1971 generation has been the most vocal in demanding that collaborators (known variously as dālāl or rājākar)4 who had sided with the Pakistani junta to oppose Bengali nationalism be tried for war crimes. A number of them were members of the Jamaat-e-Islami in independent Bangladesh. The topic of bringing them to trial has been the subject of anger, confusion and complicity at political and personal levels since the war, the political status of many of these individuals shifting with each new regime – democratic or authoritarian (Mohaiemen 2011; Mookherjee 2015). To some extent, Shahbag continued the mission of the Gono ‘Adālat or ‘people’s court’ led by Jahanara Imam in the 1980s and 1990s. Imam, whose son was killed as a guerrilla fighter during the war, had published a well-known account of 1971 based on her diaries and advocated justice 268

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for war crimes for the rest of her life.5 But Shahbag’s appeal surpassed even that of the Gono ‘Adālat – that this generation had not witnessed the war added poignancy to its struggle for justice. In 2012, nine members of the country’s largest religious party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, and two members of the largest opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), were indicted as war criminals. The Shahbag protestors had originally demanded capital punishment, but eventually extended this to a ban on all religious politics (dharmabhittic rajnīti). The government responded by proposing further amendments to the ICT law of 1973 (already amended in 2009) that would allow the prosecution to appeal against the sentence as well as shortening the period in which to complete an appeal. In Molla’s case, this enabled the Supreme Court to change the verdict to the death penalty seven months after the protests began. I may have reached Shahbag a few weeks too late, but its last whimper, as it were, was symptomatic of the political culture that had engendered the movement and one that persisted – for better or worse – in its wake. For about 22 days, the Shahbag protestors occupied a busy thoroughfare in one of South Asia’s most crowded cities while keeping their distance from direct party politics. The movement eschewed picketing, vandalism, arson, and violent strikes – all familiar strategies of street protest. Instead, the demonstrators, primarily students, activists and intellectuals, formed human chains, took oaths, lit candles, sang, collected signatures and, on one occasion, wrote public letters to the martyrs of the war in whose name they were fighting (Khatun 2013). However spontaneous their actions and staunch their conviction, the protestors’ restraint made their demands appear reasonable, no matter the disjuncture between the form of the movement (a peaceful demonstration) and its content (the call for capital punishment). Shahbag sits uncomfortably within a familiar framework of political movements in another sense. Public protests across South Asia are scripted as either opposition to the state and/or as a collective struggle for rights. Shahbag might have started as the former, but it was later criticised for not accommodating broader social issues. The movement’s core demand captures its awkwardness as a progressive formation because left-liberal sensibilities are offended by the practice of the death penalty (Khan 2013; Mohaiemen 2013). The same sensibilities shape secular scholarly work and progressive politics broadly conceived. Popular agitation to influence the judiciary also raised concerns about the neutrality of the tribunal and lack of respect for law and due process in the name of ‘the people’. The human rights discourse that flourished parallel to Shahbag had reservations about its central slogan, ‘Phānsī chāi’ [We want the noose]. It is important to note that the religio-political response to Shahbag’s purported atheism did not question the practice of the death penalty, which remains the severest form of punishment in Bangladeshi law. Nor can Shahbag’s distinctiveness be reduced to its class composition, although 269

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socioeconomic factors undoubtedly limited the physical and ideological reach of the movement. People gathered near the Dhaka University campus after the second verdict was announced. Molla was found guilty on five out of six counts of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life. The tribunal’s first verdict, incidentally, was the death penalty, which was handed down in absentia because the accused, Abul Kalam Azad (another Jamaat leader), had absconded a week before the court’s ruling. Azad’s disappearance and Molla’s seemingly lenient sentence raised suspicion among those following the trial. A veteran activist shared her generation’s perspective: ‘The young people [had] had enough of compromises and underhand dealings and wanted to state that though they were born after the liberation war, they were sick of major political parties playing politics of convenience with our own history’ (Kabir 2013). The year 2013 was to have been an election year. The stakes were high, as were speculations regarding a secret deal between the ruling party and the Jamaat.6 Yet Shahbag’s appeal and impact went beyond these electoral equations. The paradoxes of popular politics that the movement embodied challenged standard critiques of political expediency, nationalism, human rights, and secularism. Their entanglement appealed to certain publics even as it left others disenchanted.

A death foretold In February 2013, as the crowds began to disperse after about 10 days of agitating, a death changed the course of events, perhaps irrevocably. On 15 February, Ahmed Rajib Haider, a blogger in his early 20s, was murdered for the antireligious sentiments expressed in his Bangla blog. Rajib’s death would be the first of many. Between February 2013 and April 2016, seven other people were killed and many more threatened or critically injured for posting blogs and publishing books written by the ‘atheist-bloggers’.7 Despite some arrests and a verdict of capital punishment for two of Rajib’s murderers, the ideology, affiliation and whereabouts of the other perpetrators remain unclear – a fact that has only encouraged political fingerpointing (Barry 2015; Bergman 2015; Hammer 2015; Subramanian 2015). Rajib’s death revitalised the movement. His body was brought to Shahbag. Draped in the national flag, his coffin was at the centre of a large procession. It gained quasi-totemic significance as the crowd reiterated its demand that war criminals be punished. Around the time of Rajib’s death, the term ‘blogger’ became a household word in a country of 160 million with only 15 million active Internet subscribers (Hammer 2015). The backlash against Shahbag rode on the alleged atheism of the bloggers who were the primary organisers of the movement. In May, members of Hefazot-eIslam occupied a major roundabout at Motijheel, Dhaka’s business hub.8 270

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Hefazot is a coalition of about a dozen religious associations which are based in more than 25,000 qaumī madrasas [seminaries]. It was founded in 2010 to oppose the government’s secular education policy. In 2011, it agitated against a pro-women policy that ensured equal inheritance rights for women and men. By 2013, its collaboration with the main opposition to Shahbag had made it a force to reckon with. Emboldened by support from the BNP and the Jamaat, Hefazot began to intervene in national politics with unforeseen vigour. Mirroring the very incitement that they claimed to oppose, the Hefazot protestors demanded capital punishment for the atheist-bloggers. The form of their opposition ranged from frenzied demonstrations by thousands of activists and the presentation of a 13-point manifesto condemning bloggers and women in the public sphere to cases of vandalism and arson. As strategy, the Hefazot protests were not unlike most oppositional politics performed in the streets of Dhaka. While Shahbag was resolutely non-violent, the Hefazot activists organised anti-government showdowns that relied on well-known strategies of urban unrest, such as pillaging and arson. The state came down hard on this backlash; the exact number of activists killed in a night-time operation remains undisclosed. To prevent any potential accusations of furthering an atheist agenda, the government arrested four bloggers under the Information and Communication Technology Act. One evening in March 2013, I was speaking to a dedicated participant in the protests who expressed his ambivalence about the specifics of Rajib’s death. He recollected the day Rajib was killed: Around 9.30 at night, the news came that a blogger named Rajib was poached to death. . . . Our plans of phasing out didn’t take off. I realised right away, on that very evening, what’s going on. We are trying to leave [Shahbag], but somebody wants us to stay. They want to push Shahbag towards terrorism: meaning, having shed blood, they want to turn Shahbag towards fanaticism. [italics added to signify where the speaker’s stress falls]9 On hearing the news, he text-messaged Imran Sarkar (a medical doctor, digital activist and Shahbag’s most visible spokesperson), advising him not to take charge of Rajib’s body. ‘Just say this’, he had reportedly told Sarkar, ‘that [Rajib] was an atheist; he [had] donated his body to medical science as a service to humanity. Don’t take the body.’ By then, plans to organise around Rajib’s death, thereby claiming him as one of Shahbag’s own, were already underway. The activist continued with regret: But thus, the Trojan horse named Rajib was inserted. We took him, and having done that, we got into trouble. We couldn’t explain anything. . . . A defensive speech was offered. We went on the back 271

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foot. They took us to the field of religion. [italics added to signify where the speaker’s stress falls] Rajib’s family denied his authorship in some of the blog’s more controversial writing against Islam or the Prophet. Fellow bloggers posted screenshots of his blog, Thaba Baba. They offered a technical analysis of his virtual presence as evidence of the ‘hacking’ suspected to have taken place after his death. His last rites came under heavy scrutiny from all quarters. Some expressed sincere reservations about giving a self-proclaimed atheist a religious burial. Others questioned the use of the national flag to honour the dead body and turn a young, insensitive blogger into a national hero. Despite the repeated invocations of ‘we’ and ‘they’, the polarisation these words emphasise is not as well defined as it might seem. There are at least two sets of binaries in the activist’s recollections. The ‘we’ represents the collectivity of Shahbag, whose reputation could be jeopardised by either taking custody of or disowning Rajib’s body. ‘They’ in this instance refers not to the Islamists, but the state and its disciplinary apparatus. Similar speculations also often included the army intelligence wing, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, as a possible player. This kind of fractal recursivity is self-perpetuating: it creates further cleavages that involve projecting an opposition onto other levels. The resulting binaries provide the actors with discursive resources to claim, and thereby create shifting ideas of communities, selves and identities within a cultural field (Irvine and Gal 2000: 38). The activist I spoke to was worried that Rajib’s death would help redraw this distinction, which would prove profitable for those trying to sabotage the movement as well as for the state, which might gain from the rift. With much prescience, he said that fuelling the conflict between the Islamists and bloggers – the ‘we’ and ‘they’ – would likely harm the movement. The despair was palpable. A young woman not much older than Rajib spelled out a similar fear. She was at Shahbag on the first day and had remained an active participant even when the end of the movement was imminent. We spoke the evening before Independence Day in 2013 as she gathered empty milk cans and bamboo sticks for the torchlight procession that was about to start. Her thoughts on the subject were very clear: Shahbag couldn’t avoid Rajib’s death. The opponent targeted him because of two reasons. First, they needed somebody who was controversial. And second, he had to be indispensable for Shahbag. These two requirements were fulfilled by Rajib’s death. You know, all kinds of people – Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians – came here. Women, men and hijrās [transgender persons] came. Believers came; non-believers came to Shahbag. They came with a specific agenda – the verdict of war criminals and the ban on Jamaat-Shibir 272

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[the Jamaat-e-Islami’s youth wing]. At this moment, Jamaat-Shibir did the calculated killing to crush the spirit of Shahbag. They did more fieldwork than we did. She was certain that the perpetrators were Islamists and, most likely, Jamaat workers. While this was, at the time, the most common view of Rajib’s death, she quickly strayed from the standard version: Personally, I believe it was not necessary to bring Rajib’s dead body here in Shahbag to show that he was a believer. We could have avoided adding more significance to Rajib for the Shahbag movement. His religious belief was not our headache, and it should have been kept separated from the movement. Yes, he joined us. I appreciate it. But it was unwise to try to prove that he was a believer. That was a wrong decision for the movement. Whoever said it for whatever reason, I don’t care, but Rajib was an atheist. Note the ‘we’ in her account. Retrospectively, Rajib became an outsider to the ‘we’ of the movement despite his clear sympathies for its cause. In hindsight, his faith or lack thereof was a source of concern. Regardless of the debate his body had engendered, to her Rajib ‘was an atheist’ and dealing with this fact would have helped their cause far more than the politics around his corpse. This preoccupation with Rajib’s body drew a paradoxical response from the Shahbag protesters. In wanting to deny the importance he had gained posthumously, my friends reified the body as a mediator of political affect, as both the means and the meaning. Referring to the ‘properties of corpses’, Verdery (1999: 28) explains why they become ‘in Lévi-Strauss’s words, “good to think” [of] as symbols’. Death accounts for meanings, feelings and ideas of the sacred and the non-rational that extend beyond the discourses of democratic procedure, electioneering, state institutions, and political parties (Hertz 2006; Klima 2002; Verdery 1999). The corporeality of the dead body is an important means of localising a claim, as in the case of Rajib’s corpse. Rajib’s public funeral made evident that religious reburial endowed the dead person with religious associations (Verdery 1999).10 His body became the pivot on which the boundaries between āstīk [believer] and nāstīk were drawn and redrawn. That Rajib’s body was crucial to his re-signification as a martyr is not surprising. Globally, the spectacles that surround corpses in sectarian strife, political demands and nationalist struggles fortify claims to martyrdom and sacrifice, both of which are powerful cultural tropes (Chatterjee 2006; Hage 2003). On the significance of death and the Arab Spring, Amira Mittermaier (2015) notes that the lens of death allows us to think about the uprisings beyond the framework of a this-worldly politics (2015: 588). In the 273

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Egyptian case, political demands were never far removed from supplications addressed to God or to the martyrs themselves. Rajib’s example, curiously, highlights the same by showing how his lack of faith became a hindrance to his becoming a proper martyr for the nation. What is relevant here is that Rajib’s body was retrospectively co-opted or excluded, depending on whether one interpreted his blogging as patriotic/ progressive or anti-Islamic. By bringing the body to the physical and moral centre of the Shahbag movement, the activists made themselves vulnerable to accusations of fostering atheism or, worse, being atheists. Rajib’s atheism, inscribed on his dead body, was now an index for the atheism of the movement at large. Clearly, the ‘we’ of Shahbag activism was as fluid as the ‘they’. A few regular participants described the division primarily as one between the Gonojagoron Moncho (or ‘platform for the people’s uprising’ as it was officially known) and the rest of the participants. This was another source of disenchantment among those involved closely with the protests. Over time, the Moncho had changed shape, or at least its focus, suggesting some allegiance to the ruling party’s agenda. For many people, the idea that the government had co-opted part of the movement’s leadership signalled the beginning of the end. That public gatherings as large as these were subject to metal detectors and closed-circuit surveillance, and the fact (equally, the rumour) that free food was being distributed among protestors, led others to suspect powerful third-party involvement. Meanwhile, the body – here, the bodies of Rajib, the ‘collaborators’ and the people who had assembled at Shahbag and Motijheel – became the site in which struggles for legitimacy and accountability were staged.

‘Bodies with beards’ The afterlife of Rajib’s body clearly set the terms of the debates that have wracked the Bangladeshi public sphere since. Thinking of the long-term implications of the ideological divide being mobilised by the secular bloggers and the Islamists, my activist friend cited the French theorist Alain Badiou when explaining their political import: I understand all this through Badiou. Ours is a historical riot and theirs is an immediate riot. They are not being able to turn immediate riot into historical riot. But we went there in the first leap. From there we have already gone to the event. [‘event’ in English; italics added to signify where the speaker’s stress falls] Badiou’s rather schematic classification of riots, taken at face value, rattles some of our ethnographic and historical sensibilities.11 Invoking him to comment on the protests demanding justice for war crimes and the Islamist 274

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backlash is, however, more than a theoretical reference; it is a symptom. Here in this opposition lies an echo of the distinction between the crowd and the autonomous citizen/subject, which is central to the liberal democratic imagination (Mazzarella 2010). The crowd, Mazzarella writes, represents a childish moment of savage indistinction – corporeal, affective and irrational (2015: 105). In this sense, the Hefazot uprising or the Islamist crowd more generally becomes the quintessential crowd of social theory. At an analytical level, they stand in opposition to the secular citizens of Shahbag. Both, incidentally, demanded the death penalty. Reporting on one of the Hefazot rallies in April 2013, Banglanews24, a mainstream vernacular news outlet, asked two 14-year-old madrasa students from Gazipur why they were there. The students replied: ‘They [the bloggers] have insulted our Prophet, they have insulted Islam, that’s why we came to the procession.’ When asked how they had been ‘insulted’, the students answered, ‘We don’t know. Our boro hūjūr [senior teacher] knows. He told us to come, so we came.’ This is in stark contrast to the image of urban middle-class children at Shahbag carrying placards or sporting painted slogans on their bodies in favour of capital punishment. The act of children lending their voice to a demand for death was celebrated as a sign that the nation had come of political age. The Hefazot activists, however (often quite young themselves), were seen as bereft of such innocence or potential. They were simultaneously criminalised and infantilised. Their naiveté stemmed from their backwardness, their lack of (secular) education and ‘proper’ political tutelage. While the ignorant madrasa student was dismissed as naïve or, in rare cases, shown sympathy, this reaction was tinged with another affect – that of fear. Chowdhury (2013), for instance, has observed that it was difficult for many Hefazot activists to get to Dhaka at all to participate in the protests. Ostensibly, the government had given permission to hold the rally, but its implicit support for a nationwide transport strike that day made it difficult for many madrasa students to attend. He (2013) explains this in terms of the urban bourgeois anxiety surrounding the jūjūbūrī [spectre] of Islamic militancy: The worried, educated TV audience of Dhaka, those who regularly give their opinion on politics but are far less eager to act, saw a rally that was incomplete. However, their imagination was filled with the image of all those Hefazot activists who couldn’t make it to Dhaka, whose arrival could have turned this into an enormous congregation. A cruel spectre indeed. Despite such representational politics, the strategies employed by the two camps – the so-called secular/atheist and the Islamist – tended to overlap, most notably online. During February and March 2013, secular and religious 275

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organisations alike found their websites being hacked regularly. The digital literacy shared by both groups was evident from the screen names of the digital activists, and their use of a common virtual platform showed that the activists were mostly of the same age group and ultimately pointed towards a difficulty, if not impossibility, at social distinction. While, visually speaking, the figure of the poor madrasa student was the opposite of the Shahbag activist – modern, middle class, and the personification of a national-secular utopia – in reality, the boundaries were far messier. The image-politics that emerged in the wake of Shahbag are symptomatic of the ideological and social differences that the protest movement of 2013 laid bare. Concepts such as insincerity, immediacy or authenticity that are used to gauge popular political formations have been tagged on to the disparate crowds that have come about in and through these protests. A stereotypical portrayal of religious crowds, with their quintessential skullcaps, beards and tunics, as irrational or expedient mobilised a highly potent ideological opposition. This iconography has fixed the coordinates of debate both within Bangladesh and internationally. It is no surprise then, that the Wikipedia entry on the ‘2013 Shahbag Protests’ ends the section on ‘Counter-demonstrations’ with the following lines: On 5 May, Hefazot-e-Islam protesters, aided by Bangladesh Jamaate-Islami and its youth wing Chatra Shibir, did violent protest activities in Dhaka that included arson, vandalism and burning of books. The protesters from Hifazat-e-Islam [sic] fought with police. Later, the government indicated an official death toll of 11. However, a gravedigger said he had counted 14 bodies with beards. [italics added]12

Conclusion This chapter has tried to locate the political potential of the widespread effect of despair in post-Shahbag Bangladesh. It shows how some of the movement’s strongest advocates articulated their despair in the face of what remains a violent and murky political present. The aftermath, with its calculated killings and careful management of fear, yielded the opposite of what many activists and their sympathisers had envisioned for the movement and for the nation at large. The body – that of the collaborator, the blogger or the religious radical – became central to demanding multiple versions of justice. The ensuing paradox of liberal strategies of protest in aid of a notoriously illiberal cause or the counter-revolutionary effects of a progressive assembly are not simply contradictions that define what is now known as the ‘Shahbag movement’. In their despair, the Shahbag activists revealed a deeper sense of disappointment that still haunts the project of mass democracy. 276

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It is equally important to remember, as Marasco suggests, that a sense of despair is not necessarily morose or unhappy – it is ‘a restless and energetic passion’ (2015: 3). As the examples of Dhaka activists show, this despair also carries within it the passion for critique. Rather than lacking political value, therefore, despair becomes an affect capable of confronting some of the challenges of popular democracy, as much in Bangladesh as elsewhere.

Notes * I thank Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal for including me in the EMSAP project and pouring their love and labour into the volume. I am grateful to Nazmul Sultan and Lotte Hoek for feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter, which has also benefited from the comments I received at the concluding session of the EMSAP conference held at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and the ‘Theory and Practice in South Asia’ workshop held at the University of Chicago (both in February 2016). Finally, I would like to thank Risalat Khan for his research assistance. 1 An ethnographic elaboration of political despair can be found in Serguei Oushakine’s observations about post-socialist Russia. In the absence of a ‘unifying cultural, political, or social framework’, he argues, ‘the trope of loss’ was ‘the most effective symbolic device’ for those facing the new reality after communism (Oushakine 2009: 2). 2 As of April 2016, two tribunals have convicted 26 individuals of crimes against humanity since they were founded in 2010. Four individuals have been executed following these trials, which, although popular in Bangladesh, have been criticised by international human rights organisations. 3 The same cannot be said of the January 2014 general elections: the incumbent Awami League went ahead with the polls despite a widespread political boycott led by its largest opposition, the BNP. Subsequently, the latter demanded a reelection under a caretaker government. The present Awami League government has not heeded this demand despite the ensuing controversy around the election results. 4 Dālāl, in the Persian from which it entered Bangla, means ‘agent’ or ‘broker’. More frequently, it is used disparagingly to mean ‘collaborator’, ‘pimp’ or ‘tout’ (Ghosh 1987; Huberman 2010). In contemporary Bangladesh, rājākar (derived from the Arabic razākar, meaning ‘volunteer’), commonly means ‘traitor’ and refers to the Razakar paramilitary force in former East Pakistan, which was organised to aid the Pakistani military against the independence of Bangladesh. 5 Led by Jahanara Imam, protests were held opposing the appointment of Ghulam Azam – then, still a Pakistani citizen – as chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami. The agitations resulted in the Gono ‘Adālat at which Azam was awarded a death sentence. The BNP government charged 24 organisers of the Gono ‘Adālat (including Imam) with sedition. 6 The Jamaat has a history of forming direct and indirect alliances with the Awami League and the BNP, the two bourgeois parties that dictate national politics in Bangladesh. 7 It also excludes the execution-style murder of more than 20 people (both foreigners and Bangladeshis) at a Dhaka restaurant in July 2016. 8 Variously known as Hefajot-e-Islam or Hifazat-e-Islam. 9 All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

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10 Perhaps the most striking – and literal – example of this is the scientific preservation of Lenin’s body during and after the Soviet era. Commenting on the curious case of ‘Lenin’s two bodies’, Alexei Yurchak makes a connection between the sovereign and his body, in line with Santner’s (2011) discussion of ‘the flesh’. Both have been influenced by Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous argument about ‘the king’s two bodies’. Yurchak (2015) looks at the relationship between the form and biological content of Lenin’s body. He concludes that the rigorous means through which the authenticity of Lenin’s bodily appearance is maintained have less to do with the corpse than with what Leninism meant for the former Soviet Union between the 1920s and the early 1990s. It is this figure of sovereign Leninism, he argues, that the Moscow Lab has been maintaining and improving for the last 90 years. 11 To be fair to Badiou, his argument is not about Islamist crowds. Rather, his book theorises the uprisings in the Middle East and Europe. Written in 2008, with this translation published in 2012, Badiou is also responding to the contemporary political and racial tensions across France. 12 Wikipedia, s.v. ‘2013 Shahbag Protests’, last modified 20 December 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2013_Shahbag_protests& oldid=696080507 (accessed on 30 December 2015).

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Mazzarella, William. 2009. ‘Affect: What Is It Good for?’ in Saurabh Dube (ed), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, pp. 291–309. New Delhi: Routledge. ———. 2010. ‘The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?’ Critical Inquiry, 36(4): 697–727. ———. 2015. ‘Totalitarian Tears: Does the Crowd Really Mean It?’ Cultural Anthropology, 30(1): 91–112. Mittermaier, Amira. 2015. ‘Death and Martyrdom in the Arab Uprisings: An Introduction’, Ethnos, 80(5): 583–604. Mohaiemen, Naeem. 2011. ‘Flying Blind: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971’, Economic and Political Weekly, 46(36): 40–52. ———. 2013. ‘Shahbagh: The Forest of Symbols’, Kafila (blog), 22 February, http://kafila.org/2013/02/22/shahbagh-the-forest-of-symbols-naeem-mohaiemen/ (accessed on 2 June 2014). Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2015. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2009. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Roitman, Janet. 2012. ‘Crisis’, Political Concepts, no. 1, www.politicalconcepts.org/ issue1/crisis/ (accessed on 11 April 2016). Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2008. Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santner, Eric L. 2011. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shenker, Jack. 2016. ‘The Future of the Egyptian Revolution’, Guardian, www. theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/16/future-egypt-revolution-tahrir-square-jackshenker (accessed on 26 January 2016). Sloterdijk, Peter. 1988. Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Subramanian, Samanth. 2015. ‘The Hit List’, New Yorker, 21–28 December, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-hit-list (accessed on 30 December 2015). Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Wasif, Faruk. 2015. ‘#SOSBangladesh: Who Is Behind Deep Politics?’ Alal O Dulal (blog), 5 December, http://alalodulal.org/2015/12/05/deep-politics-4/ (accessed on 27 January 2016). Yurchak, Alexei. 2015. ‘Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty’, Representations, 129(1): 116–57.

280

GLOSSARY 1

‘adālat  court akhanda bhārata  undivided India ākhir kām  lit. ‘final job’; the ‘āshiq’s undoing (in Mir Taqi Mir’s poem) ānanda  happy ānandamath  lit. the sacred brotherhood; the title of a nationalist novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee ānandamu  happiness ārzū  desire ‘āshiq  the suffering/aspiring lover ashrāf  noble-born (South Asian) Muslims who claim to be of Middle Eastern descent, often tracing their lineage to the Prophet’s family (of Syed descent) āstīk  believer āvēdana  suffering; anger; to make known; outcry ‘awām  public bābū  bureaucrat bāgh  garden bāhinī  battalion barē log  lit. ‘big people’; people in positions of power, wealth and/or influence bazm  assembly bhaktī  devotional love bhārat-mātā  lit. ‘Mother India’; the name given to one of M. F. Husain’s paintings depicting the ‘mother-deity-nation’ bhāva  feeling, emotion bidroha  revolt birhā’  dwelling in separation (Indic) birhinī  a woman dwelling in separation from her beloved bol  lit. ‘speak’; the title of a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz boro hūjur  senior teacher chāhat  eagerness

281

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chāk-e girībān  lit. the tearing of one’s shirt collar right above the breast; a motif from the ghazal that encapsulates acute despair, even insanity chaman  garden chārahgar  lit. the bringer of cures, healer chotē  small; younger; less significant crore  lit. ten million; used figuratively to indicate ‘millions of’ dakani   language and literature from the Deccan; in poetry, a direct precursor to classical Urdu dālāl  collaborator, mediator darbār  (royal) court darbārī  courtly dargah  sufi shrine dāstān  popular romance tradition in Urdu dastūr  prime minister, councillor, senator, ruler; the title of an Urdu poem by Habib Jalib desh  country dhandak (also dum, dujam)  mass demonstration expressing refusal to cooperate and/or collectively marching to a seat of authority to draw attention to an injustice dharma  the socio-cosmic order that organises the empirical world dharmabhittic rajnīti  a ban on religious politics dharmarājya  ideal kingdom or world order dharna  peaceful demonstration or sit-in; method of obtaining justice by sitting and fasting at the doorstep of an offender dhvanī   the power of suggestion and association dupatta  headscarf ehsās  feeling ethos  ‘lighter’ emotions, referring to the speaker firāq  separation firāq-i yār  separation from the Beloved in Islamicate lyric poetry firqa  doctrinal school, sect ghairat  the embodiment of, and/or desire to protect, one’s honour ghairatmand  honourable gham  sadness, sorrow gham-i dil  melancholy ghazal  lyric genre in classical Urdu poetry gono adalot  lit. ‘the people’s court’ gonojagoron moncho  lit. ‘platform for the people’s uprising’; a movement in Bangladesh goonda raj  lit. ‘thug ruler’; used to describe members of the political class who use violent or bullying tactics gopaniya sainik  secret soldier gram sabha  village assembly

282

G L O S S A RY

gulistān  garden hartāl  traders’ strike, restriction of public movement hāsya  laughter, humour heilsgeschichte  salvation history, history from the religious point of view hijrā  transgender person hindutva  Hindu nationalism, Hindu chauvinism hodā  fraud ‘īdgāh  public space in which the ‘Id prayer is held īmān  faith intizār  vigil, awaiting a beloved ‘ishq  passionate love ‘ishq-e majāzī  carnal love ‘ishq-e rasūl  love of the Prophet ‘izzat  honour jāhānnāme  in hell jan  the people jan sunwai  public hearing, a people’s hearing jana sena  lit. ‘the people’s army’; the name of a political party in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana janmasiddha  self-born, perfected being jānnāte  in paradise jazba  emotion jazbātī  displaying an excess of emotions that are hard to control jihad  in Islamic tradition, a strenuous effort in the path of Allah; can be military or strictly personal jihādī tanzīm  jihadist organisation jongī  militant josh  enthusiasm, zeal jūjūbūrī  spectre kalima  the Muslim profession of faith karācābuka  lit. ‘strong’ or ‘strict whip’; the title of the Santan Dal’s mouthpiece karuna  pity (one of the classical Sanskrit rasas) kavya  a lyric genre of Sanskrit poetry khaidi  lit. ‘prisoner’; the name of a Telugu film directed by A. Kodandarami Reddy khodā, khudā  God khush-sukhan  beautiful utterance kopam  anger kū-i yār  lit. ‘the Beloved’s lane’ kurukshetra  a war described in the epic poem Mahabharata lakh  a hundred-thousand

283

G L O S S A RY

lashkar-e taiba  lit. ‘army of the pure’; the name of a militant jihadist organisation lehja  tone, modulation love marriage  a colloquial term denoting a marriage contracted independently of one’s parents or family madrasa  Islamic seminary mahbūb  beloved mahfil  (often cheerful) assembly with poetry, music or religious performance; literary or artistic gathering majnūn  lit. ‘crazed’; the archetypal romantic hero of a 12th century folk romance who regresses into madness for love of the elusive Laila masla  problem masnavī  a romantic poetic genre more prosaic than lyric mizāj  temperament, character mleccha  the radically foreign mujahid  one who wages jihad in the way of God mushā’ira  a forum for poetry recitation muta mestri  lit. ‘community leader’; the name of a Telugu film directed by A. Kodandarami Reddy nafs  self nasīh  counsellor, friend nāstik  atheist nazm  20th century poetic genre netā  leader netājī  lit. ‘revered leader’; honorific title by which Subhas Chandra Bose is known nīchē  lower; below pagrī  turban pāncajanya  the name of the conch blown by Krishna in battle pandal   tent for cultural and religious activities, see sāmiyānā. paramapitā  divine Father phānsī chāi  slogan meaning ‘we want the noose’ (the institution of the death penalty) pīr  Muslim spiritual guide praja  people, subjects praja rajyam  lit. ‘the people’s rule’; the name of a former political party in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana pūja  Hindu worship qaum  nation qaumī madrasa  in Bangladesh, an Islamic seminary not financed and only partly overseen by the government qays  lit. moon; Majnūn’s given name qissa  folk romance

284

G L O S S A RY

rājākar  traitor, volunteer rasa  lit. juice or quintessence; in rasa theory: mood; aesthetic emotion, communicated by art rasika  enthusiast, connoisseur raudra  anger (a classical Sanskrit rasa) sādhanā  ascetic or spiritual practices sahmat  in accord, together sahridaya  one whose heart is at one with (the utterer of an expression) salwa judum  lit. ‘purification hunt’; the name of a vigilante group in Chhattisgarh, India samādhi  state of deep meditation in which one is completely identified with or absorbed into the Infinite sampādaka  secretary sampradāya  Hindu sect sanam  sweetheart, idol, lover, desired object sangham  village collective; the lowest unit of Maoist parallel government sanketī hartāl  token strike santāna dala  lit. ‘group of children’; devotees of the guru Balak Brahmachari in Bengal santosha  contented santoshamu  contentment sarpanch  elected leader/village headman satyāgrahā  non-violent resistance satyāgrahī  practitioner of satyāgrahā shahādat  lit. ‘to give testimony of one’s faith’; martyrdom in the way of God shahīd  martyr shahr ashob  lit. city in tumult; a genre of Persian and Urdu poetry shākti   divine power or energy shāmyānah  canopy, a pavilion-like tent often used for public events sharaʻī  legitimate under the Islamic sharia shikāyat  (the lover’s) complaint subbūh  praise subh-e āzādī  lit. ‘freedom’s dawn’; the title of an Urdu poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz sukhan  expression, speech sura  chapter of the Quran swarāj  [political] self-rule taklīf  problem tarannum  a mellifluous recitative style taras  pity tā‘zīa   representation of the tombs of Hasan and Husain topos  commonplace

285

G L O S S A RY

umma  pan-Muslim community upahāsita  ridicule ūpar  upper vaidika santāna dala  lit. ‘the Vedic group of children’; the name of a millennial movement in Bengal vande mātaram  lit. ‘hail to thee, Mother’; the title of a poem composed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, which was subsequently adopted as India’s national anthem in 1937 virahinī  formal use of ‘birahini’ vīramū  heroism, one of the nine emotional modes in rasa theory virya  heroism (a classical Sanskrit rasa) visāl  union visāl-i yār  union with the beloved, the attainment of (romantic) love vishālāndhra  [the idea of a] united or ‘greater’ Andhra Pradesh wa‘z  ‘free’ Islamic sermon that need not be held on Friday before prayer and is in Bangladesh often held after sunset, outside the mosque wuzū khānā  washing house zamīn  land

Note 1 The words listed here belong to four South Asian languages (Bengali, Hindi, Telugu, Urdu). The adopted spelling aims at the highest possible level of consistency across chapters, but there remains an inevitable degree of eclecticism. Words that are now included in British dictionaries have been spelt as they are commonly used in English. For other words, we have chosen, for the sake of simplicity, to use diacritics only to mark long vowels.

286

INDEX

19th-century sociology 88n3 accessing emotions 72–4, 82–3 aesthetic-political regime 246 affect 9–10, 16, 17, 21, 22, 37, 69, 70, 78, 83, 100, 109, 128, 169, 256, 265–6, 275, 277 affective dissonance 22 Ahmed, Asad Ali 247–8 Ahmed, Sara 247, 249 Alliance Against Sexual Harassment (AASHA) 21, 135–9, 141–4, 146 Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) 46, 53, 57 Andhra Pradesh: Congress campaign in 187; history of 188 anger 53–61, 139–40; devoid of 54; expression of 54; social construction of 55 Anglo-Indian press 20, 97, 98 anti-colonial movement 5 Anti-Corruption Force (ACF) 192, 193 anti-rape protests 8 Appadurai, Arjun 7, 8, 39, 243 appraisal theory 3 atheist bloggers 22 āvēdana 17, 189, 191, 193–4, 196, 200, 281 Bangladesh: contemporary 222; politician of 225; postcolonial states of 24; secular movements in 26 Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) 269, 271, 277 Banning, Marlia E. 171 Bate, Bernard 60 Bauman, Richard 62 Benei, Véronique 7

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 24, 188, 200 Bhattacharya, Debaditya 8, 24 Bhrugubanda, Uma Maheswari 190 Bhutto, Benazir 6 blasphemy laws 24 bloggers 222 Blom, Amélie 2, 5, 6, 8, 15, 18, 20, 22, 27n11, 48, 54, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 82, 83, 85, 88n4, 89n10, 89n15, 89n17, 89n23, 101, 106, 128, 143, 148, 165, 182, 217n2, 237, 258n2, 277 bodily urges 10 Bose, Subhas Chandra 206–9, 213–16 Brahmacārī, Balak 207 Brass, Paul 6 Briggs, Charles L. 62 British East India Company 52 British Raj 247 Brudholm 173 Burghart, Richard 60, 61 Butler, Judith 257, 258 Calhoun, Craig 38 Canning, Lord 52 caste pride 7 Cefaï, Daniel 54 censorship 246–7 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) 180, 181 Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS) 27n4 Chhattisgarh government 178 Chiranjeevi 190–6 Chowdhury, Manosh 275 Ciotti, Manuela 7 civility 7 civil society organisation (CSO) 151, 153, 154

287

INDEX

Coetzee, J. M. 246 collective action 2–4, 7, 16, 19, 22, 40, 41–4, 47–50, 54, 56, 63–4n8, 64n11, 73, 74, 105, 109, 151–2, 161–2, 165n3, 182, 205 communal riots 2, 6 Communist Party of India 252 Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI-M) 168, 170 community of sentiment 253–5 componential model 10 Congress regime 208 Corner, John 189 crowd behaviour 4, 49, 96, 98, 100, 101, 107–9, 245, 247, 256, 270, 276, 278 curiosity 82 Dahlgren, Peter 189 Dalit movement 8 Das, Chittaranjan 195, 207 Das, Veena 95, 250, 251, 256 demobilisation 225, 231–5 democracy 248 despair 3, 6, 22, 25, 28n15, 71, 83, 84, 116, 123, 124, 216, 265–7, 272, 276–7, 277n1 Dhavan, Rajeev 246 dramaturgical perspective 13–14 Dudas, Jeffrey R. 170 East India Company 53 electoral mobilisation 7 emotional discourses 12 emotional-institutional context 4 emotional involvement 18, 19 emotional politics of the state 4 emotional practices 12 emotional regimes 28n20 emotional variable 4 emotional wars 248–9 Emotion and Political Mobilisations in the Indian Subcontinent (EMOPOLIS) 27n4 emotion-based experience 141–3 emotion-centred analysis 25 emotion knowledge 96–8 emotion norms 96–8 emotions: accessing and documenting emotions 9–14; and collective action 47–8; contentious politics 22–6; in context 77–81; contextualising contentious emotions 14–18; definition 3–4, 9–14; enactment of 42;

experience of 13; expression of 13; importance of 1; of jihadist militants 70–1; management of 19, 157–60; of militants 15; mobilisations 18–21; neglect of 27n1; politics in South Asia 1; in real-life situations 14; in social protests 4; society and politics 3; in South Asian politics 1, 5–9, 27n8 emotion work 4, 41, 145–8 enthusiasm 103 European historical genealogies 48–51 failed speech act 57 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed 116 Faiz’s romantic anthem 116–18 Fassin, Didier 173 fear 1, 2, 8, 15, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28n13, 37, 39, 44n1, 62, 69–71, 73, 76, 77, 83, 87, 99, 139–40, 146, 157, 159, 160, 163, 168, 170, 173, 175, 178–81, 196, 198, 255, 272, 275, 276 feeling rules 4 Flam, Helena 12, 14, 17 Freitag, Sandria B. 7, 95 frustration 70–1, 89n13, 139–40 fuite en avant 76, 83, 85, 87 Gammerl, Benno 78, 79 Gandhi 51 Gandhi, Indira: assassination 6 ghairat 17, 136, 146–8, 282 Gilmartin, David 248 Goodwin, Jeff 4, 15, 15, 15 Gordon, Leonard 207 Gould, Deborah B. 9, 15, 79 gratitude 2, 7, 17 Guha, Ramachandra 55, 56 Guru, Gopal 7 Habermas, Young’s 58 Hansen, Thomas Blom 253 Harindranath, Ramaswami 189 Heurtin, Jean-Philippe 73 Hindu community 99 Hindutva activists 251 Hochschild, Arlie 14 Holmes, Mary 23, 53, 188 Holquist, Michael 246 hope 3, 19, 20, 21, 25, 71, 74, 77, 108, 120, 142, 145, 157, 160, 163, 206, 209, 213, 216, 217, 265, 266 Hoskote, Ranjit 254 human emotional expressions 17

288

INDEX

humiliation 70–1 humour 224; in popular Islamic preaching 236–7 hurt 246–7 Husain, M. F. 22, 249–52

Levitas, Ruth 214 Liang, Lawrence 248 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 74 Lyman, Peter 54, 55, 188

identity politics 22 Imam, Jahanara 268 India: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 24; caste-based discrimination in 7; censorship in 22; contemporary 2; Dalit protests in 26; Dalits in 47; emotions and mobilisations in 26; Hindu-Muslim violence in 8; postcolonial states of 24 Indian Economic and Social History Review (Pernau) 7 Indian National Army (INA) 207, 210 Indian Penal Code (IPC) 24, 247, 248 individual sensibilities 140–1 institutional-emotional context 17 International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) 264 Iser, Wolfgang 231 ‘ishq 115–16 Islamabad-based feminist advocacy groups 2 ‘izzat 76, 146, 147, 283

Maheshwari, Malvika 244 Malik, Lalarukh 139 Marasco, Robyn 266, 277 Marshall, T. H. 168 Marxian tradition 64 Masjid, Babri 256 Mauss, Iris B. 11, 72 Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) 151 Mazzarella, William 244, 256 McAdam, Doug 39 Mehrotra, Palash Krishna 244 Mehta, Pratap Bhanu 245 Metcalf, Barbara D. 248 Michelutti, Lucia 7 mind-body relationship 11 Mitchell, Lisa 7, 16, 23 Mittermaier, Amira 273 mobilisation 2, 4, 225–31; concept of 48; vs. emotions 18; moment of 124–5; and moral shock 143; sociology of 27n3 mobilised emotions/mobilising emotions 18, 19 moods 10 moral battery 4 moral emotions 10 moral shock 4, 143 Muhammad, Prophet 247 multimedial semantic nets 13 Muslim intellectuals 20 Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) 8

Jalal, Ayesha 72 Jalib, Habib 116, 118–19 jan sunwai 152–5 Jaoul, Nicolas 47 Jasper, James M. 4, 15, 160 Jauss, Hans Robert 231 jihadist militancy 2 jihadist militants 74 ‘jihādī tanzīm’ (jihadist organisations) 69 Jinnah’s declaration 129n1 josh 16, 17, 102, 283 Kakar, Sudhir 8 Kalyan, Pawan 196–200 Kanpur, 1913 101–4 Kapur, Geeta 256 Khalistan movement in India 74 Khan, Naveeda 122 King, Debra 17 Lashkar-e Taiba 20 Latté, Stéphane 72 Le Breton, David 41 legal-institutional context 18 Levinas, Emmanuel 58

Nair, Janaki 248 Nambiar, Sandhya Devesan 8, 24 nāsih 125–9 National Advisory Council (NAC) 154 National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) 153, 154 negative emotions 2, 22 New Delhi gang-rape 1 nostalgia 3, 20, 25, 206, 214, 217 pain 139–40 Pakistan: army 80; elections in 6; jihadist militancy in 15, 69, 70;

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INDEX

Muslim League in 24; postcolonial states of 24 Pakistan movement 6 Pandey, Gyanendra 95 Parthasarathi, Prasannan 52 participatory protests 2 people’s movement 172 Pernau, Margrit 6, 15, 189 poetic conventions 121 poetic discourse 114–15 political innovations 51–3 political mobilisations 3, 4, 8, 16, 18, 27n4, 37, 39, 47, 72, 96, 104, 114, 129, 189, 224, 234 political society 49 politics: redefinition of 2 Polletta, Francesca 4, 15 positive emotions 2, 22 power relationships 22 Prasad, Madhava 189 Rajamani, Imke 13, 189 Rama Rao, N. T. 189 Ramdev, Rina 8, 24 Rancière, Jacques 246 Ranulf, Svend 54 Rao, Anupama 248 Rao, Podile Appa 56n1 rasa theory 122–4 recorded emotions 83–5 Reddy, William 42, 82, 164 reflex emotions 10 religious affect 267 religious anthropology 7 religious emotions 7 republic of hurt sentiments 244 resentment/resentiment 2, 3, 20, 23, 25, 28n13, 62, 71, 78, 85, 157, 164, 168–78, 182 rhetoric of emotions 13 Right to Education Act (RTE) 152–4 Ring, Laura A. 54 riots 98–101 Robinson, Francis 6 Robinson, Michael D. 11 Saeed, Fouzia 136 Santner, Eric L. 266 Scheff, Thomas J. 84 Scherer, Klaus R. 10, 13 Scott, James 14 secular/atheist 275

sensitising devices 4, 8, 18–20, 41–4, 72, 145, 152, 161, 166n16, 209, 213, 215–16, 223 sexual harassment 135 Shahbag movement 2, 3 Siddique, Mohammed 220 Singh, Manmohan 1 Sinha, Mrinalini 7 Sinha, Shanta 7 Sircar, Oishik 162 social action 22 social constructivism 14 social movements 4, 5, 8 social protests 4 Solomon, Robert 28n14 speech-act theories 63 Spelman, Elizabeth 53 state disciplinary tactics 22 street politics 6 strong emotion 53–61 Suhrawardy Udyan 267 Sundar, Nandini 24, 249 Swarāj 104–8 sympathy 144–5 Tambiah, Stanley 6 Tawa Lama-Rewal, Stéphanie, 21, 23 Taylor, Charles 58 Telangana bill 202n2 Telugu films 188 temperament 85–7 Traïni, Christophe 2, 4, 9, 14, 18, 19, 27n3, 27n4, 41, 42, 72, 85, 86, 136, 141, 142, 145, 152, 161, 209, 220n34, 223 umma (pan-Muslim community) 69 uttered emotions 82–3 Vaidik Santan Dal (VSD) 205 Verdery, Katherine 273 Verkaaik, Oskar 8, 236 vulnerability 160, 179, 245, 247, 248, 252, 254, 256 wa‘z mahfils 222 Weber, Max 54 Werbner, Pnina 214 Western politics and societies 5 Williams, Melissa S. 164 Wood, Charles 52 Wood, Elisabeth Jean 74, 78

290