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.

Speaker

Dr Ajay Gandhi

Ajay Gandhi is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His research interests include urban, political, and economic anthropology. He was a Research Fellow and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen between 2011 and 2017 and received his PhD in Anthropology from Yale University. He is a contributor to Scroll, has published on material forms, urban violence, and social concepts, and is co-editor of Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Contested Jurisdiction and Embedded Exchange(Cambridge, 2020).

Chair

Dr Kriti Kapila

Kriti Kapila is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Law at King’s College London, where she is based at the King’s India Institute and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Her research spans law and anthropology, the anthropology of the state, ethnographic theory, and contemporary India, with a longstanding interest in questions of recognition and indigeneity. She is the author of Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India (HAU Books, 2022).