The Visual Turn in Political Anthropology and the Mediation of Political Practice in Contemporary...

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The Visual Turn in PoliticalAnthropology and the Mediation ofPolitical Practice in Contemporary IndiaLisa Mitchellaa University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaPublished online: 19 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Lisa Mitchell (2014) The Visual Turn in Political Anthropology and the Mediationof Political Practice in Contemporary India, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 37:3,515-540, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2014.937372

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The Visual Turn in Political Anthropology and the

Mediation of Political Practice in Contemporary India

LISA MITCHELL, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Attention to the visual within the political anthropology of India has focused almost exclusivelyon spectacle and the excessively visible. This paper examines the question of visibility byinterrogating the conditions that enable collective agendas to be seen as political, andadvocates closer attention to the role of the state in these processes of recognition. In doing so,it emphasises shifts in the visual aspects of communicative networks and uses specific examplesof mass protest and blockage agitation to trace longer histories of practice, expanding thedomains of both the visual and the political available as objects of scholarly attention.

Keywords: India; political protest; democracy; visual culture; railways; road blocks

Lucky

You are born rich

To say in your language

‘Born with silver spoon in mouth’

Your agitation (andolana) sounds creative (srjanatmakanga)

Our agony (awedana) looks violent (himsatmakanga)

You are meritorious

You can break glass of buses

In a shape

As symmetric as Sun rays

You can deflate the tires

With artistic �elan

While indulgent police look on

With their jaws rested on rifle butts

. . .

We are

Rickshaw pullers

Porters and cart wheelers

Petty shopkeepers

And low-grade clerks

We are

Desolate mothers

Research for this article was funded by fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the

National Endowment for the Humanities.

� 2014 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2014Vol. 37, No. 3, 515�540, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2014.937372

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2014.937372

Who can give no milk

To the child who bites with hunger

We stand in hospital queues

To sell blood to buy food

Except for the smell of poverty and hunger

How can it acquire

The patriotic flavour

Of your blood donation?

� From Varavara Rao, ‘D�ej�a Vu’, 19861

Whose political actions look threatening, and to whom? And whose actions are regarded as

worthy of recognition, respect or celebration? Why are some groups’ activities widely visible

as political actions, while the same actions engaged in by others, if visible at all, are visible

only through a lens of criminality? In turning to the visual, political anthropologists and others

interested in understanding politics in South Asia have benefitted from an active

interdisciplinarity, with performance studies, art and art history, museum studies, and media,

film and communication studies informing our consideration of politics’ visual dimensions.

Yet, most political scholarship that attends to the visual in the context of South Asia has

continued to be preoccupied primarily with what is easily visible—even excessively visible,

such as the extreme forms of visibility we might call spectacle. Spectacles are those

appearances that are difficult to avoid seeing. South Asian political imagery that comes to

mind when one thinks of the visual—seventy-feet-tall plywood cut-outs of Tamil Nadu chief

minister Jayalalitha in the early 1990s, statues of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati, or

the larger-than-life images of film stars turned politician—are indeed virtually impossible to

miss (Figures 1 and 2).

Approaching the construction of a social theory of visuality from the perspective of

museum studies, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill offers a set of questions quite useful to political

anthropologists. She asks us to consider ‘what is made visible, who sees what, [and] how

seeing, knowing and power are interrelated’.2 In this paper, I move beyond the visible to

attend not only to that which is seen, but also to the unseen or un-seeable. I do so by

interrogating a set of spaces and practices that are themselves not typically viewed as part of

the history and everyday functioning of India’s political democracy. These include India’s

extensive rail system and, more recently, its road network, as well as the stations, junctions

and intersections that integrate these systems into local settings and communities. Although

these spaces have been widely utilised as political tools, they are typically treated simply as

networks and spaces of transportation, rather than as themselves forms of communicative

media or sites of an active public sphere in the Habermasian sense. In this, their presence as a

form of media is itself almost invisible. Histories of such networks tend to focus on the

technological aspects of their construction, or the means through which such infrastructures

1Varavara Rao, ‘D�ej�a Vu’ (1986), in Muktakantham: Jailu Kavitalu, 1986�1989 (Free Voice: Jail Poems,

1986�1989) (Hyderabad: Samudram Mudranalu, 1990), translated from Telugu by Rao. He wrote this

poem in 1986 in the context of widespread upper-caste protests against the Mandal Commission’s

expansion of affirmative action policies, especially regarding government jobs and places in educational

institutions.2 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000),

p. 14.

516 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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FIGURE 1. Jayalalitha cut-outs in S. Anand, ‘V for Victory’, Outlook (11 May 2006).Source: Courtesy of Outlookmagazine, India. Reproduced with kind permission of Narendra Bisht.

FIGURE 2. Sonia Gandhi cut-out in Vir Sanghvi, ‘The Quiet Italian’, photo by T. Narayan,

Outlook (16 Oct. 2006).Source: Courtesy of Outlookmagazine, India. Reproduced with kind permission of Narendra Bisht.

The Visual Turn in Political Anthropology and the Mediation of Political Practice 517

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are financed. Only recently have scholars begun to pay ethnographic attention to their social

and even political functions.3 In this paper, I use attention to the political and communicative

uses of India’s transportation networks to interrogate the conditions that enable collective

agendas to be seen and recognised as political in contemporary India. In doing so, I emphasise

the visual aspects of such networks as communicative media and examine longer histories of

practice that have enabled their availability for political action, in the process expanding the

domains of both the visual and the political that have been made available as objects of

scholarly attention.

In asking how and why certain individuals and groups, agendas and practices are made

visible while others are not, what media and channels this type of visibility traverses, and who

determines how and when seeing takes place, this paper demonstrates that the turn toward the

visual is not simply a product of the fads and fashions of scholarship, but rather reflects the

nature and role of visuality within political processes in India. More specifically, the paper

offers tools for understanding new distinctions in the processes and channels of mediation

through which Indian politics function by tracing the histories of two related and widespread

forms of political practice that utilise the public spaces of transportation networks. Dharna

agitations, or sit-down strikes, and the closely-related form of roko agitation—rail or road

blockages—are both prominent forms of public political protest in contemporary India.

Neither has received sustained analysis, either as a political form or as a creative use of

communicative media, yet both offer windows into a longer history of democracy’s public

sphere in India and into more recent shifts in how a democracy’s multiple public spheres

function.4

I use the two examples of dharna and roko agitations to complicate distinctions between

immediate and mediated cultural and socio-political forms, and to expand our understandings

of how media function in a democratic polity. I argue that although visibility has always

played a role in these sorts of practices, the central importance of physical blockage, nuisance

or disruption has declined, replaced by the growing importance of visual mass media. This

does not mean that blockage and physical disruption have disappeared entirely and, in fact, the

citation of their effectiveness in the past and the spectre of their potential disruptiveness is still

key, but the relative importance of blockage and disruption in relation to televisual and print

news coverage has shifted with the expansion of the mass media in India since the 1990s. I

3 Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Indian Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Ritika Prasad, ‘Tracking Modernity: The Experience of

Railways in Colonial India, 1853�1947’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of California at Los

Angeles, 2009; Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, ‘Wheels of Change? The Impact of Railways on Colonial North

Indian Society, 1855�1920’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, London,

2012; Durba Chattaraj, ‘Roadscapes: Everyday Life along the Rural�Urban Continuum in 21st Century India’,

unpublished PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 2010; Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, ‘Is There a Culture of the

Indian Street?’, in Seminar, Vol. 636 (Aug. 2012), pp. 21�7; Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane

(eds), Urban Navigations: Politics, Space and the City in South Asia (New Delhi/London: Routledge, 2011). For

additional citations, see John Hurd and Ian J. Kerr, India’s Railway History: A Research Handbook (Leiden:

Brill, 2012).4 The work of Genevieve Lakier on public space and political protest in the context of the democracy movement

in Nepal is a notable and very welcome exception. See Genevieve Lakier, ‘The Highway and the Chakka Jam:

National Development and the Limits of State Sovereignty in Nepal’, invited paper at conference ‘Of Mediums

and Motored Ways: The Social Lives of Transit Networks’, University of Washington, 23 May 2005; Genevieve

Lakier, ‘Illiberal Democracy and the Problem of Law: Street Protest and Democratization in Multiparty Nepal’,

in Mahendra Lawoti (ed.), Contentious Politics and Democratization in Nepal (New Delhi: Sage, 2007),

pp. 251�72; and Genevieve Lakier, ‘The Public of the Bandh: Protest, Performance and National Identity in

Nepal’, invited lecture, South Asia Colloquium Occasional Series ‘Publics Beyond Print’, Department of South

Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 28 Feb. 2008.


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argue, furthermore, that changes in the meanings and usages of these practices since the 1990s

are difficult to recognise without first understanding the longer histories of such practices. In

both examples, the key features of physical bodily presence and obstruction of movement,

which have historically helped to popularise these practices and make them effective, have

more recently been outweighed by the staging of blockages and strikes as media events,

organised for the benefit of visual media coverage. This has implications for both the lengths

of such protest actions and decisions about the locations in which they are enacted, as

exemplified by two noticeable recent shifts illustrated below. These shifts include the decrease

in the average duration of a rail or road roko agitation and the movement of dharna agitations

from prominent public spaces adjacent to public political sites like the legislative assembly or

state secretariat, or in front of the offices and private residences of prominent political leaders,

to new designated ‘protest spaces’ situated in less prominent (and less disruptive) locations. At

the same time, most observers agree that even though the duration and location of such

practices may be changing, the absolute numbers of such agitations are actually increasing.

Yet, even in their staging as media events, it is the citation of their earlier power and

effectiveness and their well-accepted presence within a larger repertoire of political activism

and media that enables their active continued use today as visually powerful performances. At

the same time, not all invocations of dharna and roko agitations are the same. This paper

offers the concept of ‘political arrival’ as a way of accounting for why the actions of some

groups are visible as political actions, while similar actions performed by others are dismissed

as uncivil or illiberal acts, hooliganism or outright criminality.

Placing dharna and roko agitations within a much longer history of representational

politics illustrates the need to move beyond the widespread binaries used for analysing politics

in India and re-situates the focus of our academic gaze away from supposed static distinctions

between specific types of practices (legal/illegal, liberal/illiberal, democratic/coercive, civil/

uncivil) or characteristics of specific types of groups (elite/subaltern, civil society/political

society, citizens/denizens, groups of individuals/collectives).5 I argue that we should instead

re-orient our attention to variations in the practices of the state and its representatives. More

specifically, I encourage attention to the very different responses of the state towards the same

actions engaged in by different groups and use this attention to trace the ways in which efforts

by the state to control and contain political actions have altered practices like dharna and other

forms of political disruption of everyday life. Although the increased restrictions on such

actions, which have grown in India since the early 1990s, might appear to simply be responses

to increased anxiety over India’s global image and the desire to garner increased foreign

investment, I contend that it also stems from anxiety over the expansion of political

5 See Lisa Mitchell, ‘“To Stop Train Pull Chain”: Writing Histories of Contemporary Political Practice’, in

Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 48, no. 4 (2011), pp. 469�95. A productive debate exists

around the categories, ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’, which Partha Chatterjee, drawing on Antonio

Gramsci, has introduced into discussions of Indian politics. For a useful entry point into these debates, see

Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Partha Chatterjee, ‘Democracy and Economic Transformation in

India’, in Economic & Political Weekly (19 April 2008), pp. 53�62, with responses by Mihir Shah, Mary John

and Satish Deshpande, and Amita Bhaviskar and Nandini Sundar, and Chatterjee’s reply, in Economic &

Political Weekly (15 Nov. 2008), pp. 78�93. For a discussion of citizens and denizens in the context of India’s

northeast, where road blockades have become a widespread form of political communication, see Sanjib

Baruah, ‘Citizens and Denizens: Ethnicity, Homeland, and the Crisis of Displacement in Northeast India’, in

Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 16, no. 1 (2003), pp. 44�66. For a discussion of liberal vs. illiberal forms of

democracy, see Lakier, ‘Illiberal Democracy and the Problem of Law’, pp. 251�72. Lakier cautiously employs

Fareed Zakaria’s concept of ‘illiberal democracy’. See Fareed Zakaria, ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’, in

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, no. 6 (Nov.�Dec. 1997), pp. 22�43.


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participation into new social classes and cultural domains and, therefore, represents an effort to

maintain political power via alternative means by attempting to limit the entrance of new

groups into the political domain.

By recognising occupation and blockage of space as efforts to politically reconfigure

socio-cultural norms, I want to make three arguments. First, among those who have already

established their own legitimate claims to visibility within political debates (i.e. among the

descendants of an earlier cultural elite), there has been a tendency to read the political uses of

public space in India (and elsewhere) by those whose claims have not yet been recognised as

challenges to state sovereignty or efforts to establish parallel sovereignties.6 Still others view

such practices as lying outside of civil society or the domain of true democratic politics, or

view them as evidence of the decline or incomplete implementation of democracy in India.7 In

a departure from the many readings of such activities as challenges to state sovereignty, or

external to true democratic processes, readings which frequently regard such acts as inherently

coercive or uncivil, I argue that we need to recognise these actions as efforts to actively hail

the state and to be seen by its representatives—in other words, as the expression of a desire for

inclusion and recognition by the state. In seeking recognition, such actions both acknowledge

and further reify the state’s power rather than challenging it, and rely on the logic of inclusion

rather than coercion.

My second argument is that these efforts to hail the state are not uniformly recognised. The

same actions, carried out by different groups, often receive quite dramatically different

responses from the state and are regarded (both by the state as well as by much scholarship) in

very different terms, making even more important our attention to visuality and questions

about who is able to be seen and whose agendas remain invisible. Such differential responses

6Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, suggests that disruptive modes of political protest that were read during the

colonial period as challenges to the sovereignty and domination of the British colonial state during the Quit

India movement should continue to be read as challenges to state sovereignty in post-colonial India. His

examples of two specific public protests (including an eight-hour blockage of a railway line) lead him to

conclude that as a class, these practices can be understood as ‘rituals of humiliating the officialdom’, and that

their primary objective is for those without power to force senior officials (as elite members of society) to

concede, if only for a moment, some of their power to the people by making them eat ‘humble pie’. See Dipesh

Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India’, in Public

Culture, Vol. 19, no. 1 (2007), pp. 52�3. Yet, rather than challenging state sovereignty, the examples he offers

are, in effect, further reifying the state’s authority in their explicit recognition of the state’s ability to intervene,

adjudicate and hear complaints, and suggest that the goal of such actions is not to humiliate state officials, but,

rather, to gain an audience with them.7 Javeed Alam illustrates the Indian middle class’s anxieties regarding the expansion of political participation to

historically-marginalised groups when he writes: ‘There is a major difference in the manner in which

democratic awareness emerges among the exploited and oppressed, in comparison with the elite. It is evident

that the masses do not learn about democracy by making use of or working the institutions. They are not, in fact,

adept at handling institutions. The practices involved and the negotiations required for the successful use of

democratic institutions are unfamiliar to them. Their verbal skills are inadequate for the rules of the

parliamentary game’. See Javeed Alam, Who Wants Democracy? (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), p. 36.

He goes on to conclude that because ‘people of these vulnerable communities are ill-equipped to act in public as

individuals, with their lack of confidence and inadequate verbal skills’, they therefore ‘enter together in large

numbers to make up for the lack of verbal skills’ (p. 123). This, he argues, has caused the dialogical space for

rational�critical debate to increasingly become more and more compressed, with Indian politics becoming

increasingly ‘unruly’ and ‘noisy’ (p. 122). As I will show, however, practices like dharna and roko agitations cut

across caste, class and communal identities, making it impossible to restrict our analysis of these practices to

any particular population or demographic sphere. The ethnographic examples offered below illustrate the ways

in which both elite/middle-class educated groups and more historically-marginalised groups, as well as both the

governed and those who govern, are frequently complicit in the staging of these practices in ways that require

more careful analysis.


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are often justified through references to the various binaries that continue to be reinforced by

academia. This variable response on the part of the state, then, leads to my third and most

important argument, which is that the degree of state accommodation, and therefore visibility

that is offered to particular groups and in response to particular actions, can be used as a tool

for reading the degree of what I term ‘political arrival’. By this term, I am referring to the

formal or informal recognition and acceptance of the legitimacy of a group, an action or a

movement as political—in essence, its visibility or ability to be seen. The concept of ‘political

arrival’ also offers a window onto how state responsiveness reflects broader societal

ideologies and consensus. Recognition, when it occurs, reflects attitudes both at the state and

at the societal level and, in the context of India, often takes the form of widespread popular

support and discretionary accommodation of a group’s movements or actions on the part of

specific state representatives. This may involve formally allowing a political demonstration,

procession or disruption of traffic to occur, the provision of specific forms of state or societal

support or protection to such actions or the suspension of legal provisions that would

otherwise be in effect, either by passively looking the other way or by actively intervening to

permit or enable an action to occur. In effect, then, ‘political arrival’ reflects the recognition of

a political effort to hail the state and garner the attention of its representatives, giving

legitimacy to the action in the very recognition of its call. Significantly, such recognition does

not necessarily involve a concession on the part of the state to the specific demands being

raised by a group or movement. Often, it is enough to formally acknowledge that the speakers

have been seen; in other words, it is often recognition itself that is most important—being

offered recognition and the right to visibility in a wider public arena. The examples that

follow make this clear.

The research upon which this paper builds includes interviews with more than three dozen

railway officials and senior members of the Railway Protection Force and the Government

Railway Police from India’s Southern, South Central, Northern and North Eastern Railways,

as well as leaders and activists from a range of political parties and social organisations in

Secunderabad, Hyderabad, Warangal, Chennai, Nellore, Delhi and Lucknow. The majority of

these interviews were conducted in 2008 and 2009, with additional interviews conducted in

the summers of 2012 and 2013. Interviews with senior railway, municipal and police officials

were largely conducted in English, while interviews with political activists and leaders were

conducted in both English and Telugu in southern India and English and Hindi in north India.

It also incorporates archival research in the National Archives of India and examples from

political poetry, short stories and news media.

The Visual and the Political in South Asia

Scholarship on South Asia has a long history of attending to the ways in which politics

function visually. Indeed, the centrality of visuality more generally in South Asia has been

quite widely recognised. There is a long history of analysis, for example, of the visual

dimensions of Hindu religious practices within scholarship on the subcontinent.8 Such

8On the visual dimensions of Hindu religious practice, see Lawrence Babb, ‘Glancing: Visual Interaction in

Hinduism’, in Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 37 (1981), pp. 387�401; and Diana Eck, Dar�san:

Seeing the Divine Image in India (Chambersburg: Anima Books, 1982). More recently, Melanie Dean has used

ethnography to examine practices related to seeing and being seen, and the power of visual prophylaxes in

Tamil Nadu. See Melanie Dean, ‘From Darshan to Drishti: “Evil Eye” and the Politics of Visibility in

Contemporary South India’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Department of South Asia Studies, University of

Pennsylvania, 2011.


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attention has also extended to the role of visuality in the representation of political power in

South Asian pre- and early-modern kingship and courtly contexts.9 Existing studies have not

only introduced methodological innovations in their promotion of the reading of visual

materials for evidence of how political representation has functioned in past eras, they have

also explored the role of visual markers in the construction of political power, including visual

representations of hierarchy and status, pageantry, political performance, visual tokens of

royal favour and public displays of power such as processions.10 All of these point to the fact

that South Asian scholars have a well-developed set of tools for extending our attention to

visual domains far beyond contemporary visual forms of media like photography, cinema and

television—the objects of analysis which have typically played the most central role in the

history of visual anthropology.

Some of the more explicit influences of visual anthropology on the study of contemporary

Indian politics are apparent in the attention given to the important relationship between

cinema and politics in India. In the early 1990s, for example, M.S.S. Pandian offered an

exploration of the powerful ways in which Tamil cinema star M.G. Ramachandran used his

screen image to create a successful political career.11 Anthropologist Sara Dickey’s

ethnographic fieldwork among cinema fan clubs has demonstrated the ways in which such

images helped to sustain a political base.12 In his analysis of the political effectiveness of the

9 The work of Nicholas B. Dirks critiqued earlier scholarship that had regarded culture and politics as separate

domains, and treated ritual and political forms in pre-modern India as ‘fundamentally the same’ (p. 383). He

argues that it was the intervention of the colonial state that relegated many of the visual and symbolic

dimensions of kingship to farcical and empty imitations of earlier forms of political rule, while divesting earlier

rulers of their political power. See Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown (Ann Arbor, MI: University of

Michigan Press, 1993). See also Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth-Century India: The Benares

Region’, in Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1987), pp. 483�99. Others who have explored visual dimensions of pre-modern courtly

culture include Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003); and Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004).10 See Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and

State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Richard Davis, Lives of Indian

Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Richard Davis (ed.), Images, Miracles, and Authority

in Asian Religious Traditions (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Richard Davis (ed.), Picturing the Nation:

Iconographies of Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006); Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Design and

Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003); Indira

Viswanathan Peterson, ‘Portraiture at the Thanjavur Maratha Court’, in Rosie Llewellyn-Jones (ed.), Portraits

in Princely India, 1700�1947 (Mumbai: Marg, 2008), pp. 44�57; Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for

Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 131�52; and

Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North

India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). On processions and political power, see Joanne

Punzo Waghorne, ‘Chariots of the God/s: Riding the Line between Hindu and Christian’, in History of

Religions, Vol. 39, ‘Christianity in India’ (1999), pp. 95�116; Leslie C. Orr, ‘Processions in the Medieval South

Indian Temple: Sociology, Sovereignty and Soteriology’, in Jean-Luc Chevillard and Eva Wilden (eds), South-

Indian Horizons: Felicitation Volume for Francois Gros on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday (Pondicherry:

Institut Francais de Pondich�ery/�Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient, 2004), pp. 437�70; Diane Mines, Fierce

Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 2005); Nicolas Jaoul, ‘Dalit Processions: Street Politics and Democratization in India’, in Julia

C. Strauss and Donal Cruise O’Brien (eds), Staging Politics: Power and Performance in Asia and Africa

(London: I.B. Taurus & Co., 2007), pp. 173�94; and Michael Linderman, ‘Charity’s Venue: Representing

Indian Kingship in the Monumental Pilgrim Rest Houses of the Maratha Rajas of Tanjavur, 1761�1832’,

unpublished PhD Dissertation, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2009.11M.S.S. Pandian, The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1992).12 Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).


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Shiv Sena in Mumbai, Thomas Blom Hansen has also argued that we need to be attentive to

the visual in his characterisation of ‘politics as permanent performance’.13 Broadly defining

political performativity as comprised of ‘images and spectacles, forms of speech, dress and

public behaviour that promotes the identity of a movement or party, defines its members, and

promotes its cause or worldview’, his attention to the links between public style, performance

and political power move well beyond attention to media images to recognise everyday public

acts and the use of urban public space as important factors in constructing what he calls a

‘politics of presence’.14 Central to his argument is his foregrounding of visibility as a key

element of analysis essential for understanding the creation of political ‘moods’: ‘Anyone who

has studied local politics and formation of local leadership in India (and beyond)’, he writes,

‘will know that visibility means everything’.15 Although ultimately his focus on the Shiv Sena

causes him to collapse a number of features of public political practice that might more

usefully be kept distinct (a move that he is certainly not alone in making),16 his attention to the

visual dimensions of political practice is nevertheless instructive.

More recently, S.V. Srinivas’ exploration of the history of the establishment of cinema

halls and their re-configurations of urban space has offered tools for better understanding

cinema’s affective impacts on mass mobilisations in the Telugu-speaking regions of south

India.17 William Mazzarella’s attention to the censorship of cinema in the world’s largest

democracy explores the visual dimensions of the construction of mass affect and their

complex relationship with political sovereignty under conditions of mass mediation.18 And

Lisa Bj€orkman’s ethnographic critique of existing scholarship’s analysis of the circulation of

cash incentives for political participation and related efforts to purchase votes has pushed

attention towards the visibility of performance even further by emphasising that participants in

political protests and rallies are frequently ‘not only the medium of [a] mass political

spectacle, but also its audience’.19 In other words, because the outcomes of political events

13 Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Politics as Permanent Performance: The Production of Political Authority in the

Locality’, in John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt and Vernon Hewitt (eds), The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 19�36; and Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Conclusion: Politics as

Permanent Performance’, in Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 227�34.14Hansen, ‘Politics as Permanent Performance’, pp. 23, 21.15 Ibid., p. 22. A workshop at Columbia University on ‘Visuality of Indian Democracy’, organised by Christophe

Jaffrelot and Sudipta Kaviraj in Nov. 2013, is another recent example of this interest. See http://alliance.

columbia.edu/visuality-indian-democracy, accessed 25 Nov. 2013. The extension of visual anthropology into

other disciplines is also apparent in a conference held on 4�5 April 2014 at the Centre for Research in the Arts,

Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, on ‘Visual Anthropology and

Contemporary South Asian History’ [http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25024, accessed 20 Jan. 2014].16Not all dharna, roko and other public-space agitations are violent, nor do all qualify as either disruptive or

‘nuisance’ politics, as the examples cited in this paper demonstrate, yet academic scholarship frequently

collapses a wide range of both violent and non-violent public-space political actions into a single category and

defines them a priori as existing outside of civil society. For a critique of this tendency to efface important

distinctions by categorising actions like dharna and roko agitations outside of and in opposition to civil society’s

forms of political practice, see Mitchell, ‘“To Stop Train Pull Chain”’, pp. 469�95.17 S.V. Srinivas, Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Indian Cinema after N.T. Rama Rao (Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 2009); and S.V. Srinivas, Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema (Ranikhet:

Permanent Black, 2013).18William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2012).19 Lisa Bj€orkman, ‘Hired Hordes: Cash, Crowd and Street Theatre as Politics in Mumbai’, unpublished

manuscript, 2013, p. 5. See also Lisa Bj€orkman, ‘“You Can’t Buy a Vote”: Cash and Community in a Mumbai

Election’, MMG Working Paper 13-01 (G€ottingen: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic

Diversity, 2013).


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http://alliance.columbia.edu/visuality-indian-democracy

http://alliance.columbia.edu/visuality-indian-democracy

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25024

can never be known for certain in advance, the crowds who make up the participants and

performers of a protest, rally or other political spectacle are also simultaneously members of

the audience who are waiting to see what happens, reinforcing the centrality of the visual.

All of these scholars have offered valuable tools and frameworks for broadening our

understandings of the visual in South Asia. Yet, little attention has been paid to processes that

have prevented seeing in South Asia, or that have shaped practices of seeing to make invisible

or illegitimate particular actors and the actions in which they engage. In the remainder of this

paper, I examine the history of sit-down strikes and blockage agitations in order to trace

significant changes in forms of mediation that operate within Indian politics. Mediation can

refer to something or someone who acts as a go-between or intermediary. It can also refer to a

‘medium of transmission’ itself, forcing the recognition of a distinction between something

experienced directly or in person, and ‘the interposition of stages or processes between

stimulus and result, or intention and realization’.20 This essay documents a shift in the

mediums through which politics function, which has intensified the importance of visual

media as a form of political mediation. The dramatic explosion of media in India since the

early 1990s, combined with the liberalisation of the economy, has led to new perceptions of

the image India projects. As the attraction of foreign direct investment has become more

central to discussions of India’s economic development, urban political leaders and policy-

makers there have increasingly sought to achieve the image of a ‘world class city’, placing a

new emphasis on how others see India and its cities and towns.21 This, in turn, has altered the

spaces in which political communication is permitted and, therefore, the nature of the

practices through which such communication takes place. At the same time, the demographics

of political participation in India have vastly expanded in recent decades, bringing new

anxieties on the part of the descendants of an earlier political and administrative class, the

educated elite. We can see this clearly by tracing the history of the practice of dharna and its

related practice of rail and road blockages.

From Dharna as Door-Sitting to Dharna Chowk: Genealogies of Political Practice

John Shore, also known as Lord Teignmouth, was governor-general of India from 1793 to

1797. He played a significant role in Cornwallis’ Permanent Settlement of Bengal and held his

first assignment in India working for the Secret Political Department. He was also a close

personal friend of William Jones, the successor to Jones as president of the Asiatic Society of

Bengal and the translator of a number of Persian-language works written by Hindus. In the

fourth volume of Asiatic Researches, published in 1799, Shore offers us a description of the

Indian practice of ‘sitting dharna’, or ‘watching constantly at the door’:

The inviolability of a Brahmen is a fixed principle of the Hindus; and to deprive him of

life, either by direct violence, or by causing his death in any mode, is a crime which

admits of no expiation. To this principle may be traced the practice called Dherna,

which was formerly familiar at Benares, and which may be translated CAPTION or

ARREST. It is used by the Brahmens in that city, to gain a point which cannot be

accomplished by any other means; and the process is as follows:

20 See ‘mediation, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press [http://www.oed.com/view/Entry, accessed 25 Jan.

2014].21Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (eds), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Oxford:

Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). See especially the essays by Ananya Roy and D. Asher Ghertner.


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The Brahmen who adopts this expedient for the purpose mentioned proceeds to the

door or house of the person against whom it is directed, or wherever he may most

conveniently intercept him: he there sets down in Dherna, with poison, or a poignard,

or some other instrument of suicide, in his hand, and threatening to use it if his

adversary should attempt to molest or pass him, he thus completely arrests him. In this

situation the Brahmen fasts; and by the rigor of the etiquette, which is rarely infringed,

the unfortunate object of his arrest ought also to fast; and thus they both remain until

the institutor of the Dherna obtains satisfaction. In this, as he seldom makes the

attempt without resolution to persevere, he rarely fails; for if the party thus arrested

were to suffer the Brahmen sitting in Dherna to perish by hunger, the sin would for

ever lie upon his head.22

For Shore, the key to dharna’s effectiveness is the intensity of resolve of the party who enacts

the practice to remain unto death, and the fear on the part of ‘the object of arrest’ of being held

responsible for another’s death, particularly that of a Brahman.

Although he offers no citation, Shore’s source of information on dharna was almost certainly

Jonathan Duncan, the British resident at Banaras from 1787 to 1794. In a series of reports

submitted to the governor-general between 1792 and 1794, Duncan describes the practice of

dharna as ‘one of the superstitious prejudices, which have so long and so generally been

cherished here. . . .’23 Radhika Singha uses Duncan’s accounts to characterise dharna as a form

of defending a claim that happened when someone ‘“cast himself” at the threshold of a person

against whom he had a grievance to be redressed, or a debt or claim to be satisfied. He would

refuse to get up or eat, and would obstruct the movement of the household till the offending

party negotiated terms’.24 She points out that practices such as dharna, which were used to

contest issues or seek redress, were characterised by British administrators as ‘products of a

barbaric state of civilisation’ and were, therefore, targeted for reform as part of a larger process

of constructing the colonial legal subject and re-ordering civil and criminal legal authority, a

process that involved first wrenching them ‘out of the codes of meaning and the structures of

authority in which they were embedded’.25 Because these existing structures of authority posed

a challenge to colonial authority, efforts were made to redefine such practices as criminal acts.

As applied to a set of practices in Indian history, the earliest citations of the term dharna

associate it with those efforts, often individual, that involved the prevention of movement and

the effort to compel the target of the action to take a particular decision or action on a desired

course. The Yale professor, Washburn Hopkins, notes in 1900 that dharna, ‘literally “holding

up” a defaulting debtor by preparing to commit suicide at his door’, has come by then to mean

‘not only “door-sitting” but also any form of obstruction, for example, obstructing a water-

course’. He goes on to observe that ‘[f]asting is not, therefore, a necessary concomitant of

22 John Shore, president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (succeeding William Jones after his death), ‘On Some

Extraordinary Facts, Customs, and Practices of the Hindus’ (XXII), in Asiatic Researches; or Transactions of

the Society Instituted in Bengal, for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and

Literatures of Asia, Volume the Fourth, London, 1799, pp. 332�3. See also how it is altered and generalised in

Henry Sumner Maine, ‘Lecture X: The Primitive Forms of Legal Remedies’, Lectures on the Early History of

Institutions (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1875), pp. 299�300.23 Resident of Banaras to Governor-General in Council, 11 Oct. 1792, Duncan Records, Regional State Archive,

Allahabad, Basta 11, No. 63, cited in Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime & Justice in Early Colonial

India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 86�9.24 Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime & Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1998), p. 88.25 Ibid., p. 89.


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dharna’.26 In elaborating, he classifies such forms of obstruction with other modes of exacting

payment, including seizing a debtor’s wife, son or cattle as well as other means of ‘moral

suasion’—a category that also includes advice, remonstrance and ‘following about’

(anugama), and implies that it is the element of obstruction that is of primary importance

within the practice of dharna.27

Yet, Rochisha Narayan’s exploration of the colonial archive suggests that from quite early

in its history, the public performance aspect of dharna was equally central to its significance as

a form of practice, rivalling the role of physical blockage. A crucial but often overlooked

detail of a much-cited case of a dharna carried out by a Brahman widow over her right to the

inheritance of her father-in-law’s property is that the widow’s dharna was conducted, not in

front of her brother-in-law’s house, but rather in a temple, demonstrating the importance of

visibility and of being able to seek public support for her position in a domestic familial

dispute.28 The widow’s thirteen-day dharna was effective in compelling her brother-in-law to

negotiate with her, suggesting that dharna was often the resort of those in structurally less

powerful positions against those structurally more powerful.

Rochisha Narayan’s research on colonial law in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

Banaras has also shown that poor Brahmans, including on occasion Brahman widows, were

sometimes employed by others to sit in dharna, often in groups.29 This suggests that although

the prospect of causing the death of a Brahman might pose a greater dilemma than causing the

death of a non-Brahman, the actual practice of dharna was one that a much broader segment of

the population, including bankers, merchants, landed elites and other non-Brahmans, saw as a

method of obtaining recourse. Washburn Hopkins, too, points out that although earlier

European commentators had interpreted the practice of door-sitting to be limited to Brahmans,

nothing explicit is said of this in the textual sources cited, including Manu, Brhaspati and

Apastamba.30 And Sandria Freitag has suggested that far from being an exclusively

Brahmanical practice, sitting dharna was primarily a merchant form of practice.31

Examples from the colonial archive also suggest that it was a practice that was both

individually and collectively employed. One author in 1835 described the famous 1810�11

Banaras house tax strike as a dharna:

Government having imposed a house-tax of considerable amount, the natives, startled

by the innovation, were immediately in a ferment. . . . [T]he whole population of the

city and its neighbourhood determined to sit in dharna, until their grievances should

be redressed. . . . [B]efore Government were in the least apprized [sic] of the plan,

above three hundred thousand persons, as it was said, deserted their houses, shut up

their shops, suspended the labour of their farms, forebore to light fires, dress victuals,

many of them even to eat, and sat down, with folded arms and drooping heads, like so

many sheep, on the plain which surrounds Benares.32

26Washburn Hopkins, ‘On the Hindu Custom of Dying to Redress a Grievance’, in Journal of the American

Oriental Society, Vol. 21 (1900), pp. 146�7, fn. 1.27 Ibid., p. 146.28 Rochisha Narayan, ‘Caste, Family and Politics in Northern India during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2011, p. 197.29 Rochisha Narayan, ‘Dharnas, Bribes and Spells: The Messy “Business of the Adalat” and Social Relationships

in Late Eighteenth-Century Banaras’, paper presented at the South Asia Colloquium, University of

Pennsylvania, 21 Nov. 2013.30Hopkins, ‘On the Hindu Custom of Dying to Redress a Grievance’, p. 147.31 Freitag, Collective Action and Community, pp. 44, 123.32 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (ed.), The Hindoos, Vol. 2 (London: Charles Knight, 1835),

pp. 10�1.


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There are other scattered references to dharna or the threat of self-harm or suicide being used

by individuals as a method of escaping taxation or resisting the imposition of new colonial

government expectations.33

These examples of resistance to the state and its imposition of new legal structures raise

the important question of the relationship between dharna and the state. Radhika Singha

suggests that the colonial state found such practices threatening precisely because they were

evidence of pre-existing ‘codes of meaning’ and ‘structures of authority’ over which the

British had no control, and it is these pre-existing codes and structures that can help us better

situate the history of visuality in Indian politics.34 Henry Maine, in his Lectures on the Early

History of Institutions, published in 1875 as a sequel to Ancient Law, uses John Shore’s

descriptions as part of his larger evolutionary argument which characterises dharna (forms of

which he recognises in both Irish and Indian contexts) as an illustration of an early

evolutionary stage of redressing a grievance and obtaining justice—a stage just beyond

‘sudden plunder or slaughter’.35 Although Maine uses Shore’s descriptions in a larger

argument that places such practices within an evolutionary narrative of institutions that sees

the most developed form of legal redress as being those forms in which the state is directly

involved in resolving grievances, it is clear that what many of these writers have identified are

a wide range of arbitration practices through which justice could be sought at the local level

without necessarily needing to involve the state or its agents. Indeed, these were practices that

lay outside the domain of, and were not addressed to, the state.

Most of the available examples of dharna drawn from the eighteenth century involve

private parties with grievances over business or economic arrangements, or family members in

conflict with one another. Yet, from the early nineteenth century onwards, we can see the

growing centrality of the state as the target of dharna, simultaneous with the East India

Company administration’s (unsuccessful) efforts to restrict it from being used as a form of

redressing grievance. Shore tells us that the practice of ‘sitting dharna’ was banned by the

Court of Justice at Banaras in 1793, a prohibition that was eventually incorporated into s.508

of the Indian Penal Code of 1860.36 Despite these efforts to prohibit dharna, Shore notes that

‘the interference of that Court and even of the Resident has occasionally proved insufficient to

check it’.37

The majority of dharna agitations in India today explicitly target the state or its

representatives, with district collectors, chief ministers and members of parliament obvious

targets for complaints as varied as textbook shortages, inclusion in reservation quotas,

increases in university tuition, falling paddy prices or rising petrol costs (Figure 3). Possibly

the most famous exemplar of such practices is M.K. Gandhi, yet placing them within their

extended genealogies also demonstrates the much longer and richer set of practices upon

which he himself was drawing, and shows that although he was brilliantly adept at utilising

and popularising such practices, he did not invent them.

As a practice, dharna was historically most often taken up by those in a structurally less

powerful position against someone in a structurally more powerful position. By drawing wider

attention to what might have begun as an interpersonal or interfamilial dispute, practitioners

33 Singha, A Despotism of Law, p. 87.34 Ibid., p. 89.35Henry James Sumner Maine, Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (New York: H. Holt & Company,

1875), p. 302.36 Shore actually mentions 1783 as the date, though citations elsewhere of 1793 suggest that this was a

typographical error on his (or his publisher’s) part.37 Shore, ‘On Some Extraordinary Facts, Customs, and Practices of the Hindus’, p. 333.


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sought to bring the weight of collective moral norms to bear upon their opponents. This could

only be accomplished by taking the dispute into the public domain and broadcasting it to

gauge the likelihood of wider support and, if successful, using this wider support to force

submission or negotiation on better terms. In effect, dharna was a way of making injustice

(or perceived injustice) more visible to a wider social community and of re-defining what

constitutes public and private domains. Resort to dharna was most likely to occur when

practitioners felt they would have widespread moral support for their side of a dispute.

Visibility was usually local and success depended upon the immediate community in which

the dispute was aired. Under British colonial rule, expanding state control of practices like

dharna was intertwined with efforts to codify and standardise legal frameworks in order to

make the project of political and economic administration easier. The widespread moral

support for certain positions, however, often made such laws difficult to enforce effectively.

Although the state tried to respond forcefully to the Banaras sit-down strike of 1810�11, it

eventually gave up and rescinded the unpopular house tax. Similarly, today, even when a

practice such as dharna has been technically defined as illegal, widespread popular support

ensures that such actions will not be prosecuted and will sometimes even garner official

sanction and protection. It is for this reason that reading the state’s responses to such practices

is an extremely effective tool for making visible broader societal norms and expectations.

More recently, in a number of cities in India, we can see evidence of the state’s increasing

efforts to restrict and control the practice of dharna, marking an almost complete

transformation of the ways in which dharnas mobilise their effectiveness. Evolving from a

practice that fundamentally involved blocking, restraining or preventing the movement of the

FIGURE 3. ‘In Agitation Mode: Students Staging a Dharna in Front of the Collector’s Office in

Khammam. . .Demanding Adequate Supply of Textbooks’, photo by G.N. Rao, The Hindu

(3 July 2010).Source: Courtesy of The Hindu Archives.� Kasturi and Sons Ltd.


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object of one’s efforts, what we find today in many Indian cities—Hyderabad and Delhi among

them—is the creation of designated spaces for the practice of dharna. In 1994, a new Dharna

Chowk (protest space) was established in Hyderabad just off Lower Tank Bund Road,

opposite one of the entrances to Indira Park (Figure 4).

Occupying Dharna Chowk not only blocks nothing and faces no one, it is also located on a

small back road—a thoroughfare to nowhere and a road upon which almost no one ever goes.

Figure 5, taken in the middle of the day, shows how completely empty the roads are and

suggests a parody of what dharna had earlier been. Previously, one of the most popular sites

for holding a dharna was a corner of Lumbini Park, directly opposite the entrance to the State

Secretariat. During Chandrababu Naidu’s term as chief minister, as part of the push to make

Hyderabad more attractive to foreign investors, permission for dharna agitations opposite the

Secretariat became increasingly difficult to obtain and organisations were instructed to move

their actions to the newly-designated Dharna Chowk.

Similarly, in Delhi, one of the most popular locations for political protests since

Independence has been India Gate, located in the heart of New Delhi, adjacent to the

president’s house and parliament. Yet, in Delhi, too, use of this popular space for political

protests has been severely restricted in recent decades, with groups asked to relocate their

proposed actions to the road behind Jantar Mantar, a quiet street with little traffic (see

FIGURE 4. Dharna Chowk, Hyderabad.Source: Photo by author, 21 Aug. 2012.


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Figure 6). In the creation of designated protest spaces off the beaten track, dharna shifts from a

practice characterised by the focused concentration of a single person or group to prevent the

movement of the object of protest, to the symbolic performance of protest in a fixed and

designated space that blocks no one and prevents nothing.

Mediated Political Action: Rasta Roko and Rail Roko Agitations in India

With the advent and growth of rail networks in the second half of the nineteenth century and

highways in the twentieth century, new forms of political action emerged that utilised these

new spaces. Early forms of action that targeted the railways included sabotage and train-

wrecking, forms that relied on the invisibility of the protagonists and that were typically

carried out in the dead of night.38 But by the 1930s and 1940s, the popularity of sit-down

strikes in the anti-colonial nationalist movement had begun to extend to the targeting of

railway lines more openly, enabling the impact of a sit-down strike to be telegraphed across

great distances and from margin to centre by preventing the movement of long-distance trains.

Today, in the world’s largest democracy, the phenomenon of the ‘roko’ agitation—the

blockage (usually with human bodies) of a road (rasta roko) or railway line (rail roko) in

order to prevent vehicles or trains from passing—has become a ubiquitous form of political

practice, occurring almost daily in some parts of the country (Figure 7). Along with pulling

railway alarm chains as a form of political practice, ticketless travel to political rallies,

FIGURE 5. Empty road in front of Dharna Chowk, Hyderabad.Source: Photo by author, 21 Aug. 2012.

38Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Early Railwaymen in India: “Dacoity” and “Train-Wrecking” (c. 1680�1900)’, in

Barun De et al. (eds), Essays in Honour of S.C. Sarkar (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1976), pp. 523�50.


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processions, strikes, and the use of railway platforms for political meetings and whistle-stop

tours, roko agitations have historically been effective through their control of communicative

channels, using transportation systems (railways and roads) as technologised communication

networks capable of dramatically amplifying political messages by telegraphing them across

the length and breadth of the country. More recently, changes in India’s mass media and shifts

in the nature and control of political activism have altered the ways in which roko agitations

function, enhancing their performative dimensions and diminishing the role of actual

blockage.

The imperative verb form roko comes from the transitive Hindi verb rokna, ‘to stop; to

detain; to prevent’.39 The use of roko as a noun and adjectival modifier describing a particular

type of agitation or demonstration (e.g. a rail roko agitation) began to be increasingly

common in both Indian English and regional languages by the 1980s.40 Like dharna actions,

rail and rasta roko agitations in India today function both through their control of

communicative channels and, increasingly, with the expansion of the mass media, through

their visual performative qualities. They send political messages by preventing and regulating

the smooth flow of traffic and by publicly performing dissatisfaction with an existing state of

affairs or political position such as a proposed road construction project or advancing a

specific demand (e.g. inclusion within India’s reservation quota or the formation of a new

state). Treating the public spaces of roads and railways as a message medium, and their use in

the context of rasta and rail roko agitations as a form of mediated political communication,

enables us to better theorise the history and practice of democracy in India, and understand

important mechanisms of mediation of, and influence upon, public opinion.

FIGURE 6. Photos posted at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, commemorating earlier protests there.Source: Photograph by author, 19 July 2013.

39Mahendra Caturvedi, A Practical Hindi�English Dictionary (Delhi: National Publishing House, 1970),

p. 656.40 This is common both in English-language media coverage, as well as in some regional languages. For

example, ‘The farmers then staged a rasta-roko at the village seeking immediate replenishment of their stocks’,

Asian Age (15 June 2004), p. 8, col. 4; and entry for ‘rasta roko, n.’, OED Online [http://www.oed.com/view/

Entry/274856, accessed 20 Jan. 2014].


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http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/274856

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/274856

Evidence suggests that the incidence of roko agitations for the display of political power

and for the contestation and negotiation of status within and between communities is on the

rise. A senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer formerly in charge of handling disturbances

in Lucknow, the capital of the most populous state in India, remarked in March 2009 that the

number of road blockage disturbances in that city alone during the period she was posted there

could easily reach a dozen in a single day. ‘Employees’ unions are particularly strong and

active’, she said, ‘and also farmers [who protest] over prices or availability of inputs—and

also political parties. They block roads in front of the Legislative Assembly, in front of the

chief minister’s house, in front of other ministers’ houses—so many places’.41 V.N. Mathur,

Member (Traffic) of the Indian Railway Ministry (who frequently fields railway-related

questions raised in the Indian parliament), similarly notes their recent increase, regarding it as

‘a very serious problem for the railways’. In September 2008, he stated: ‘In the past one year,

incidents have been on a rise, affecting both passenger and freight services’.42

Mr. Kohli, a senior railway official in Secunderabad, explained that the goal of a roko

agitation ‘is to embarrass or criticise the political party in power, and also to influence public

opinion’. He went on to say that at Secunderabad station, ‘they usually last 10�15 minutes, in

the morning, and usually are completely dispersed by 12 noon’.43 Although in rare cases when

FIGURE 7. Joint Action Committee for Unified Andhra Pradesh stages rail roko agitation at

Vijayawada railway station in protest against Centre’s decision on Telangana, photo by Ch.

Vijaya Bhaskar, in ‘Movement of Trains Blocked in District’, The Hindu (17 Dec. 2009).Source: Courtesy of The Hindu Archives.� Kasturi and Sons Ltd.

41 Interview, Lucknow, 27 Mar. 2009.42Amba Batra Bakshi, ‘Rail Roko. . .Roko’, Outlook (8 Sept. 2008) [http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx

?238342, accessed 10 Oct. 2009].43 Interview, Secunderabad, 2 Jan. 2009. All names have been changed to protect the confidentiality of the

informants.


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actions have become violent, the Government Railway Police have arrested strike leaders, for

the most part, there seemed to be general agreement among all of the many railway and police

officials I interviewed that ‘as long as a group got in and out quickly and didn’t delay the train

by more than 10 or 15 minutes’, the railways largely turned a blind eye. ‘We also come to an

understanding with the opinion makers’, he said, suggesting that although technically not

legal, rail roko agitations have come to be seen as a largely legitimate form of political

activity in contemporary India. Another senior official, Mr. Kapur, told me that as long as they

did not take too much time, railway officials would ‘allow the leaders [to] climb up on the

loco[motive], put up their banner, and pose for media cameras’, letting the media capture the

moment and their demands before disbanding.44 Mr. Chatterjee, another senior railway official

with responsibility for security in one of the major Indian Railways divisions, said that,

typically, the record would show that a preventative arrest was made, but, in actual practice,

the leaders would be set free. Although he claimed that greater efforts were now being made

to book leaders of rail rokos ‘in each and every case’, he also said that only three cases had

actually secured a conviction since 2005, all of which are currently in the High Court on

appeal.45

In Secunderabad, pre-planned rail rokos of this sort regularly occur ‘once or twice in a

month’ and usually target the most popular trains bound for Delhi, the seat of the central

government.46 Given that the railways are centrally administrated, rail rokos tend to be used

for central government demands, rather than for local or state issues. Since bus companies in

India are typically state-run, road rokos are preferred for state-level or local issues, as other

political activists I spoke with also confirmed. In Secunderabad, the train that is subject to the

most rail rokos is the Andhra Pradesh Express, which departs from Secunderabad station for

Delhi daily at 6:50 am. Mr. Kohli went on to say that ‘the participants are usually mostly from

the lower strata’ and their ‘leaders, mostly mid-level leaders, [are] usually from political

parties’.47 Indeed, my observation of a number of these pre-planned rokos is that they have

come to take on an almost ritualised formula, with the various parties involved—including

official representatives of the state in the form of railway officials or the police—carrying out

very predictable roles. YouTube footage of a number of recent rail rokos shows numerous

police personnel idly watching the proceedings as protesters climb up on locomotives, unfurl

their banners and lie down on the tracks in front of the engine, shouting slogans all the while

(Figure 8). The growth of the mass media in the wake of India’s 1991 liberalisation of its

economy has turned roko agitations into publicity photo opportunities rather than primarily

efforts at inconveniencing the public or controlling channels of communication, indicating a

significant historical shift in the nature of this practice.

Although the use of rail lines for political communication has a history in India nearly as

long as the existence of the railways, with the increase in road travel, roads, too, have become

mediums for political messages (Figure 9). There is a great deal of regional and even local

variation in the implementation and practice of rasta roko agitations, with specific key

intersections, particularly in administrative capitals, more likely to be targeted than others. In

Hyderabad, for example, the president of the Progressive Organisation of Women described to

me the practice of gaali tiyadam, or the method of removing air from bus tyres in order to

bring about a rapid rasta roko. She described the typical routine:

44 Interview, Lucknow, Mar. 2009.45 Interview, Mar. 2009.46 Interview, Secunderabad, 2 Jan. 2009.47 Interview, Secunderabad, 2 Jan. 2009.


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We choose some corners. We stop a bus by standing opposite (in front of) it. One or

two [of us] would get in the bus. We’d have pamphlets or address the passengers to

educate them. While this is happening someone would put the pin to the tyre to take

out the air. We do 3�4 buses and then they’d try to divert the buses. We’ve done this

for so many issues—after the Basheerbagh police firings, against the electricity tariff

hike during Chandrababu Naidu’s time, so many other times, too.48

Usually, no damage was done to the bus or its tyres.

A district secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Andhra Pradesh similarly

offered a framework for decisions over when to employ particular kinds of political strategies:

If it’s a burning issue, and we want to react quickly, then we go for rasta roko, like in

the case of the price hike of petrol and diesel or other essential commodities. For

something that’s a longer process, we take a phase-wise plan. A total bandh

(a complete strike shutting down everything) is the most effective, but we use it only

when it is necessary [as the last phase]. Otherwise people will become upset with us.

Rasta rokos are most effective during peak time, between 10:30 and 11:00, when

employees are going to work.49

In the last few years in Telangana, there has also been a rise in what are called maha rasta

rokos (mega road blocks), blocking not just a single intersection, but an entire length of

FIGURE 8. Rail roko agitation in Belgaum, Karnataka, organised by the Karnataka Rakshana

Vedike (Karnataka Protection Forum) to oppose the prime minister’s direction to the

Karnataka government to release Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu, photo by D.B. Patil, in

‘Karnataka Files Review Petition before CRA’, The Hindu (22 Sept. 2012).Source: Courtesy of The Hindu Archives.� Kasturi and Sons Ltd.

48 Interview, Hyderabad, 23 April 2009.49 Interview, Warangal, 22 April 2009.


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national highway, as much as 115 to 250 kilometres.50 Local groups set up tents, cook food,

sleep and position bullock carts and tractors all along the road to prevent traffic from moving.

These maha rasta rokos have been employed to demand better power supply to farmers, to

promote land redistribution as part of the Communist Party-led bhuporatam in which unused

government lands are claimed and redistributed to the poor and, in one case, to demand the

establishment of a new campus of the Indian Institute of Technology at Basar in Adilabad

district (now in the newly formed state of Telangana). A more recent variation on this theme

has been the Palle Palle Pattala Paiki (Villages on the Rail Tracks)—a day-long rail roko in

which people cook, sit, sleep, socialise and carry out their everyday activities on the railway

tracks. Figure 10 illustrates such an action in the context of demands made for the formation

of Telangana in 2011.51

Roko agitations are staged both by formal political organisations and coalitions with

extensive experience in political activism, as well as by local or neighbourhood groups with

little or no formal political experience or prior association as a formal group. Examples also

offer evidence that members of both middle classes as well as more marginalised socio-

economic groups participate in pre-planned roko agitations. Further evidence that individuals

from a wide range of socio-economic and caste backgrounds participate can also be seen in

FIGURE 9. Rasta roko agitation on national highway near Visakhapatnam, organised by the

Telugu Desam Party in protest at the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, photo by A. Manikanta

Kumar, in ‘Officers Join Relay Fast in Support of Samaikyandhra’, The Hindu (28 Aug. 2013).Source: Courtesy of The Hindu Archives.� Kasturi and Sons Ltd.

50 ‘“Maha Rasta Roko” Peaceful’, The Hindu (30 Dec. 2006) [http://www.hindu.com/2006/12/30/stories/

2006123014130300.htm, accessed 10 Oct. 2009].51 ‘Unique “Rail Roko” Today’, The Hindu (1 Mar. 2011) [http://www.hindu.com/2011/03/01/stories/

2011030153140400.htm, accessed 12 April 2011].


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earlier examples from the 1980s and 1990s. An assessment of a major rasta roko agitation

staged in the western Indian state of Maharashtra in November 1981 shows that it was led by

an organisation made up primarily of the sons of ‘big farmers who dominate the villages and

have become mainly a capitalist farmer class, working their lands through wage labourers and

selling a major portion of their crops on the market’.52 In the early 1990s, faced with the

prospect of the expansion of India’s system of affirmative action in ways that would limit the

employment and educational opportunities of the country’s elite, roko agitations and other

forms of political protest were led by what one commentator has described as ‘the privileged

upper caste pampered students and their parents who, having had it good all these years, fear

that their empire is now being threatened’.53

These examples undermine existing arguments that suggest that it is only members of

‘political society’—slum dwellers, squatters, illiterate and uneducated labourers and members

FIGURE 10. Telangana activists demanding a separate state lunch on railway tracks at

Hasanparthy railway station as part of their rail roko, Warangal district, photo by M. Murali,

in ‘Passengers of Long-Distance Trains Affected’, The Hindu (2 Mar. 2011).Source: Courtesy of The Hindu Archives.� Kasturi and Sons Ltd.

52Gail Omvedt, ‘Rasta Rokos, Kulaks and the Left’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XVI, no. 48 (1981),

pp. 1937�41.53 ‘Mandal Commission: Bigoted Protests’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XXV, no. 40 (1990), p. 2224.


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of lower-caste groups—who engage in such forms of political activity. There is, however,

evidence to suggest that although the political actions may be quite similar in form,

representatives of the state react differently depending upon how they perceive the

participants who are engaging in a particular action. The last section addresses the variable

responses of the state to the same types of political actions engaged in by different groups.

Reading the State

The efforts to actively hail the state’s attention and be recognised by its representatives,

illustrated by the examples of dharna and roko agitations cited above, suggest that rather than

challenging the state’s sovereignty, such activities frequently function to further reify the

state’s power. Yet such bids for recognition are not uniformly accepted, calling our attention

to visuality in yet another respect. As argued above, one shift in the role of visuality has been

the relative decline in the importance of actual physical blockages in conjunction with a rise in

the role of media coverage of political actions since the early 1990s. This has enabled groups

to hold more symbolic blockage agitations, often—as in the case of numerous rail roko

agitations reported by railway authorities at the Secunderabad station—lasting no more than

fifteen or twenty minutes and causing little if any actual delay to train departures. It also helps

explain why there has been relatively little resistance to the creation of designated protest

spaces like Dharna Chowk in Hyderabad or Jantar Mantar in Delhi, since broader media

coverage has often become even more important than the real-time local visibility of an action

within a city. In fact, so accepted have such designated protest spaces become that demands

have been made for their creation in some cities that do not currently have such a space. This

suggests that rather than being perceived as a restriction on protest, such spaces have been

seen as enabling political action and freedom of speech. In 2011, in the city of Tirupati,

employees of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTDs), the largest religious institution in

India, expressed their support for the ‘establishment of a “Nirasanala Vedika” or a “Dharna

Chowk”’ to enable them to ‘get their voices heard’.54 At the same time, however, it is clear

that in some circumstances, protest actions still move beyond these designated spaces. The

conditions under which such political exceptions are permitted, and when they are quickly

(and sometimes violently) prevented, lead to my discussion of a second shift.

The second noticeable shift has been the visible entrance of new groups into shared public

spheres and their increased efforts to create and maintain visibility as political actors, an

occurrence with which not everyone has been completely comfortable. For many of the

descendants of the earlier governing class that was dominated by English-educated elites,

many of them caste Hindus, the rise of vernacular political movements such as the Kannada

Shakti Kendra in Bangalore, or the active mobilisation in shared public spaces of SC

(Scheduled Caste) or OBC (Other Backward Class) groups has been disconcerting and has

sometimes met with resistance. On 26 March 1999, for example, the Madiga Reservation

Porata Samithi, a Dalit group in Andhra Pradesh, submitted an application to the Hyderabad

commissioner of police requesting permission to take out a procession on Ambedkar’s

birthday, 14 April, from Baghlingampally to the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar statue, Tank Bund. They

advised that the procession would be carried out ‘with most discipline and very peacefully’

and they asked to be ‘permitted Mic[rophone] facilities to pass message[s] and drinking water

54 “‘Dharna Chowk” in Tirupati Sought’, The Hindu (16 April 2011) [http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-

national/tp-andhrapradesh/dharna-chowk-in-tirupati-sought/article1700730.ece, accessed 29 Mar. 2013].


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http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-andhrapradesh/dharna-chowk-in-tirupati-sought/article1700730.ece

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-andhrapradesh/dharna-chowk-in-tirupati-sought/article1700730.ece

points’.55 The response from the commissioner of police, dated 10 April 1999, stated: ‘Your

request. . .has been duly considered and rejected from the point of view of public order’.56 The

Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi responded by submitting a writ petition to the Andhra

Pradesh High Court, arguing ‘that the right to assemble peacefully is [a] Constitutionally

protected right under Article 19(1)(b) of the Constitution of India and also the right to freedom

of speech and expression as well as the right to freely move throughout the territory of India

are Constitutionally guaranteed rights’. Significantly, the lawyer for the Madigas went on to

argue that the fact that other processions had been taken out by other groups should be used as

a basis for permitting their procession. He wrote in the petition:

To a pointed question whether any such procession consisting of about 3 lakhs of

people, was ever permitted or took place in the City of Hyderabad, the learned

Advocate-General fairly answered saying that earlier on several occasions, such

processions did take place and permissions were accorded and such processions were

organised by various political parties and some social and religious organisations like

Ganesh Utsavam Committee of Hyderabad etc. As a matter of fact such processions

took place earlier and the State permitted such processions.57

In the end, the High Court judge ruled that ‘the Commissioner of Police is not justified in

issuing the impugned order’ and directed the commissioner to allow the procession. Such a

protracted debate simply to enable entrance into the visible public sphere is in marked contrast

to the reactions that other organisations, like the Ganesh Utsavan Committee, have received.

In neighbouring Tamil Nadu, similar incidents have occurred. S. Viswanathan cites an

example from 1998: ‘On 6 August in Chennai, what was perhaps the largest ever mobilisation

effort by dalit organisations in Tamil Nadu was severely curtailed by state action. . . . The

severe restrictions placed on the dalit rally were in marked contrast to the attitude of

the authorities towards the several caste-based processions and rallies that have taken place in

the last few years in Tamil Nadu’.58 Literature, too, abounds with examples of the different

state reactions to the same actions carried out by various groups. In the Telugu short story,

Bhumi (Land), first published in 1978, author Allam Rajaiah describes efforts to organise an

agricultural labourers’ association (raitukuli sangham).59 The labourers have explicitly

modelled their association after the many civil society associations already in place for doras,

landlords or business owners. The story identifies by name their various associations (dora

sanghalu): Association for Contractors; Tile Companies’ Association; Rice Millers’

Association; Toddy Tappers’ Association; Association for Transporters; Association for

Village Officers; even the Lions Club. But in response to the formation of an Association of

Agricultural Labourers, the landlords go on a rampage, beating up those who have joined the

new association and taking four labourers into their own custody and imprisoning them in one

of their compounds. When the villagers gather and approach the village landlord’s compound

to inquire after the four who have been taken into custody, the landlord opens fire on the

crowd. The police arrive, causing the villagers initially to feel relieved, thinking that the

55 J. Chelameswar, Andhra High Court, Madiga Reservation Porata. . .vs The Commissioner of Police, 13 April

1999, AIR 1999 AP 289, 1999 (3) ALT 146, para. 3.56 Ibid., para. 4.57 Ibid.58 S. Viswanathan, Dalits in Dravidian Land: Frontline Reports on Anti-Dalit Violence in Tamil Nadu

(1995�2004) (Pondicherry: Navayana, 2005), p. 95 (first published in Frontline, 28 Aug. 1998). I am grateful to

Nate Roberts for drawing my attention to this example.59Allam Rajaiah, Bhoomi: Kathalu (Karimnagar: Karimnagar Book Trust, 1982).


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police have come to bring about justice, but they quickly realise that they have instead come to

defend the landlord, reframing the gathered mass as a violent mob seeking to attack the dora.

The narrator of the incident, an old man from the village, comments: ‘All guns are of the same

caste (kulam), the same community (jati). I think perhaps the gun was born only to use on

people like us!’ What appears as legitimate political organisation to some, or as the adoption

of existing organisational strategies, appears threatening and criminal to others.

Conclusion: Visibility, Invisibility and Political Arrival

As we have seen, the same actions, carried out by different groups, frequently receive quite

dramatically different responses from the state. Existing scholarship has attributed this varying

state reaction to purported differences in the groups themselves (civil vs. political society, elite

vs. subaltern, gentlemen vs. hooligans, groups of individuals vs. collectives) or in the categories

of practices in which each group is engaging (legal/illegal, civil/uncivil, political/criminal,

liberal/illiberal). In the verses with which this paper opened, Varavara Rao describes tolerant

police looking on with their chins resting on the butts of their rifles as upper-caste students

destroy state-owned buses and deflate their tyres, passively allowing them to occupy the streets

with their processions in protest against the expansion of India’s affirmative action system of

reservations in government jobs and educational institutions. This is in sharp contrast to the

lathi-charges, tear gas and speedy arrests used against protests by groups who do not receive

widespread popular acceptance or recognition, or who are not recognised as ‘having arrived’,

such as the efforts of poor labourers to form associations, or the examples of Dalit protests in

Hyderabad and Tamil Nadu cited above. However, rather than seeing their identities or actions

in sharp contrast, we instead need a set of tools that enables us to identify the waxing and

waning visibility of various groups, parties, movements and their specific agendas.

In conclusion, I want to argue that we can use the degree of state accommodation that is

offered to particular political groups and in response to particular political actions as a guide

for reading the level of what I am calling ‘political arrival’, or, put another way, as the level of

state and societal recognition of the legitimacy of the visibility of particular groups and

interests within the public sphere. A well-educated professional shared with me his own

history of participation in political activism: ‘In the 1970s and 1980s, about seven to eight

thousand [of us] would travel from Aurangabad to Nagpur [every year]’.60 When I asked

whether there was a particular issue that they were protesting about or advocating, he replied:

‘No issue. No reason. Just to show our strength as Dalits. To show we’d arrived. We did it

twice every year—14 April (Ambedkar’s birthday) and 6 December (anniversary of

Ambedkar’s death)’. Each year, the number who joined in the event increased, all of them

travelling ticketless on the state-owned railways to demonstrate their strength as a collective

political force. In response to my question as to whether they all had travelled without tickets,

he replied: ‘Of course. That was the whole point. And after a while the railways responded by

adding an extra train for us!’ Central government officials, in the form of Indian Railways

administrators, responded to these annual pilgrimages, not by arresting those who were

travelling—technically illegally—without tickets, but, rather, by adding additional bogies and

trains to accommodate their ticketless travel. Senior railway officials in both Andhra Pradesh

and Uttar Pradesh confirm that, today, such accommodation of ticketless travel to political

rallies has become routine, with political organisations and parties notifying the railways in

advance of a rally or event.61

60 Interview, Delhi, 16 April 2009.61 Interview, Lucknow, Mar. 2009.


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We can speculate that the new forms of limits placed on political activities—restricting

roko agitations to fifteen or twenty minutes and dharnas to officially-designated spaces on

quiet back streets—may well be yet another strategy for minimising the visibility of particular

groups and their agendas and restricting the impact of the expansion of democracy into new

domains and classes of Indian citizens. Yet, even in the face of such restrictions, there

continue to be movements, factions and groups who successfully violate these restrictions,

actively blocking roads or railway lines for days or even weeks at a time without reprisal, or

sitting in dharna in areas outside those designated for such activity, while others are quickly

arrested or removed. It is clear that looking closely at the particular forms of state

accommodation that are offered or withheld in response to a particular action is an important

tool for reading the degree of ‘political arrival’ of a group or agenda. By attending more

closely to those who are denied permission to strike or are quickly shut down, and seeking to

understand the reasons for such decisions offered by the state, and to those who are granted

permission or informally allowed to proceed and tracing their relationships to politicians and

government officials, we can begin to make visible both those who have been difficult to see

as political actors and the invisible networks of state and society intersections. Such an

approach also enables us to move beyond the many static binaries that have been proposed for

understanding and analysing Indian politics and forces us to broaden our recognition of

multiple public spheres and unconventional media. In the process, it decreases the invisibility

of those who are attempting to enter these spheres in order to be recognised and seen and

increases the visibility of such spaces within our analytic frameworks.


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The Visual Turn in Political Anthropology and the Mediation of Political Practice in Contemporary...

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