Articles by Arvind Rajagopal

Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point by Gyan Prakash, New Delhi: Penguin, 2018; pp 439, ₹ 400.

The rapid escalation of the Anna Hazare campaign, aided by embracing the media as allies, compromised its political character in numerous ways. Political participation as a critique of the status quo has to exist both inside and outside the media spectacle. Visibility can be experienced as fulfilling, but when the image becomes the destination of politics, it is a trap.

and Popular Memory nor dominated by it, but rather are prag- Unsettling Memories: Narratives of matic in character, expressing a collective India

As increasing trends point to businesses and political parties targeting persons rather than masses, forms of patriarchal authority are softened and diffused, leading to a revision of the older distinctions that prevailed between public and private. At the same time, as relations between individuals are mediated more through markets and media, they also generate new kinds of rights and new capacities for imagination along with new ideas of belonging or inclusion that in turn, lead to novel ways of exercising citizenship rights and conceiving politics. This experience of inclusion in new circuits of communication and of sharing intellectual property across classes, such as seen with television, can help to politicise those sections previously marginalised. This paper, examines the implications of this argument in terms of recent debates over the rights of the hawker, or the 'pheriwala', in Mumbai.

While political mobilisation involves the championing of narratives to unite groups and individuals in particular ways, markets too use modes of address and rhetoric that may complicate these larger narratives. In their attempts to reach the rural hinterland, businesses seek not merely to establish a brand, but also its significance for consumers. They need then to ask questions like - What kind of political performatives might consumer goods make possible What cultural identities are reinforced in the process of market extension? It is to meet this increasing competition that businesses have also resorted to 'Hindu' symbols as a way to reach new consumers.