"Publics vs customers: mass assembly as political speech in Mumbai"

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This talk explores a somewhat curious use of the word “public” in the political life of Mumbai, where the word is used to describe cash-compensated crowds assembling for political gatherings - protest marches, road blocks, campaign rallies. Popular and scholarly discourse tends to dismiss paid crowds as inauthentic, even fraudulent forms of political assembly – reducible to instrumentalist and transactionalist logics. This paper explores a different form of political relationality that may be at work here by attending to the way the word “public” circulates in a very different context in Mumbai, where it is used to describe audiences of lavani dance when the dance is performed in the context of a theatrical stage show. When performed in any other context or venue – in a Sangeet Bari theatre for instance – the audience is described not as a public but rather as customers. The paper unpacks the meaning of public in relation to its opposite – customer – in the context of lavani audiences in order to make sense of theatrical dimensions of cash-mediated mass political assembly in Mumbai. Understanding public as the opposite of customer insists that we take theatrical forms of mass assembly quite seriously as a form of political speech and representation.