The Language of Crowds: Public Assembly and Embodied Force in India
- Date & time
- –
- Speaker
- Dr Ajay GandhiAssistant Professor at Leiden University
- Location
- Bush House, Strand Campus, London
- Organisation
- King's College London
Topics
About this talk
This seminar draws on Ajay Gandhi's book manuscript, Residual City: Producing the Popular and Populism in India, to examine the volatile relationship between political authority and popular consent in India. Focusing on public assembly and city crowds, the talk asks how crowds relate to the political constitution of "the people" in a postcolonial democracy. Rather than approaching crowds from an external perspective—as expressions of self-interest, fear, or majoritarian ideology—the presentation develops a bottom-up, ethnographic account of how crowds are formed, understood, and mobilised in Old Delhi. It considers how popular aspirations intersect with, but are not fully contained by, identity-based or nationalist frames, and how the crowd unsettles the relationship between abstract notions of sovereignty and the concrete presence of the masses.
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